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Comment by ulrikhansen54 | Hacker News Reader

Their traffic is rumoured to be down 25-30% after ChatGPT was released, so good to see that they are doing something to keep the community alive in the new era of GenAI.

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Yep. they're in deeeep panic mode due to AI.

They're currently sending, massive unsolicited e-mail campaign to all (sic!) stackoverflow users. Message they're sending below. Please find 6 places where they try to address AI directly and indirectly :)

Stack Overflow is investing heavily in enhancing the developer experience across our products, using AI and other technology, to get people to solutions faster.

As part of that initiative, we’ve launched Stack Overflow Labs.

Here is where we’ll share our experiments, demos, insights, and news - across all Stack Overflow products. We plan to continually add to this site as we experiment and release new solutions. You can sign up to get previews and early access to features that will be available on stackoverflow.com.

Our guiding principles for Stack Overflow Labs

Find new ways to give technologists more time to create amazing things. Accuracy is fundamental. That comes from attributed, peer-reviewed sources that provide transparency. The coding field should be accessible to all, including beginners to advanced users. Humans should always be included in the application of any new technology.

Very interesting -- had not seen that. Indeed, I think they could do with a bit of a makeover. Their ad platform is also terrible, way worse than Twitter's, so it is both good and bad that they're feeling a bit of a pinch I suppose.

more than that the platform is the more aggressive in the worst way possible, or your ask so specific about weird behavior that nobody responds or they say this already bean asking even if not(because some mods don't read what they ban), they block conversation with hundreds of votes, they practically insult the post writer for “not knowing”, i'm happy if they start changing the nefarious moderation scheme, im 100 % more likely of making the same question in reddit than in stackoverflow people are kind, because moderation encourage that, that would totally increase the use of their platform lots more than this.

Indeed, asking the wrong question is like being fed to the wolves..

I don't know about ChatGPT, but for me Phind [1] really lowered my SO usage

[1] https://www.phind.com/

I've tried Phind a few times, but my gripe with it, so far, is it gives me outdated examples that don't work because the API has changed. Is there some magic keywords I should be including to prevent that?

Not sure about that, it's been mostly good for me in the case I needed it

Maybe my use case of dotnet core development is going to be different than for python devs.

Make sure that you're logged in, and have turned on the GPT-4 toggle?

I assume that by GPT-4, you're talking about the "Use Best Model" toggle right?

It's ... interesting.

I asked

how do i remove diacritics from unicode characters https://www.phind.com/search?cache=bd2b33eb-9454-4d38-975e-1... and it answered with multiple Python code snippets with the second solution getting close to the real solution but is slow and incorrect.

Now if I ask the question I actually want

how do i remove diacritics from unicode characters with php https://www.phind.com/search?cache=c29fe466-16cc-4795-94bf-0... then you can see it misunderstanding the question: the first answer is the desirable output (I suspect it only works for latin letters tho) except for the iconv problems mentioned but the second is completely incorrect. The third answer is close but no cigar as it only works with Latin characters.

The answer I wanted to see is using the ICU library to run the rules NFD; [:Nonspacing Mark:] Remove; NFC. as mentioned on https://unicode-org.github.io/icu/userguide/transforms/gener... and https://www.unicode.org/iuc/iuc22/a339.html and a million other places but I wanted to link only official Unicode documentation.

I'm not getting great results. It seems to love to latch on to a keyword in the question and run with it (maybe the GPT-4 version does better). I asked a question about async in Rust, it gave me a comparison between threads and async and then kept going in that direction instead of answering what I asked. I mentioned a specific crate as something I wanted an alternative to, and it told me a description of the crate. Rephrasing the question a few times eventually got a correct answer, but it's not much better than going straight to ChatGPT.

It's far from perfect, but in my experience, it's much better than both ChatGPT and Bard. I've also used it to ask non-technical questions, and it often generates a good response, so not really just "for developers".

25% of that traffic was asking questions answered by a glorified markov chain. I dont think stackoverflow lost any valuable users or interaction unless they're looking for newbies with syntax errors to flood the place.

> newbies with syntax errors to flood the place

I think they are looking for that. As long as they read the ads, they don't care how good at programming they are. It's a "web property", not a programming contest ;)

SimilarWeb shows that their traffic drop is real, roughly 20% in the last two months:

The founders sold at a perfect time, getting that bag just before traffic dropped due to generative AI.

Could also be due to VSC copilot

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