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Comment by rkncland | Hacker News Reader

Of course people reduce their free contributions to Stackoverflow. Stackoverflow is selling then out with the OpenAI API agreement and countless "AI" hype blog posts.

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I don't think it's the main reason. People don't care whether someone is selling stuff they create on a platform. Big social media has been doing it for many years now e.g. Facebook and yet it's still there. You come to SO for answers, why would you care that someone is teaching some LLM on them later?

> You come to SO for answers, why would you care that someone is teaching some LLM on them later?

This doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. The people who would be concerned are the ones who are providing answers. They are not coming to SO solely to get answers.

I think this is more about a drop in questions, than a drop in answers.

I mean part of the reason to not ask about stuff on SO, there are several types of questions that one might like to ask - such as:

I don't know the first thing about this thing, help me get to where I know the first thing. This is not allowed any more.

I want to know the pros and cons of various things compared. this is not allowed.

I have quality questions regarding an approach that I know how to do, but I want to know better ways. This is generally not allowed but you might slip through if you ask it just right.

I pretty much know really well what I'm doing but having some difficulty finding the right documentation on some little thing,help me - this is allowe

Something does not work as per the documentation, help me, this is allowed

I think I have done everything right but it is not working, this is allowed and is generally a typo or something that you have put in the wrong order because you're tired.

At any rate, the ones that are not allowed are the only questions that are worth asking.

The last two that is allowed I generally find gets answered in the asking - I'm pretty good in the field I'm asking in, the rigor of making something match SO question requirements leads me to the answer.

If I ask one of the interesting disallowed questions and get shit on then I will probably go through a period of screw it, I will just look extra hard for the documentation before I bother with that site again.

I can see how frustrating it might be, but the overall idea of SO is "no duplicates". They don't want to have 1000 questions which are exactly the same but with slightly different phrasing. It can be problematic for total newcomers, but at the same time it makes it more useful for professionals: instead of having 1000 questions how to X with 1 reply, you have one canonical question with 20 replies sorted by upvotes and you can quickly see which one is likely the best.

FWIW, I found LLMs to be actually really good at those basic questions where I'm at expert at language X and I ask how to do similar thing in Y, using Y's terms (which might be named differently in X).

I believe this actually would work well:

- extra basic things, or things that depend on opinion etc: ask LLMs and let they infer and steer you

- advanced / off the beaten path questions that LLMs hallucinate on: ask on SO

The problem SO tends to run into is when you have a question that seems like it answers another question on the surface (ie. because the question title is bad) and then a very different question is closed with the dupe reason pointing to that question because the close titles are similar.

Since there's no way to appeal duplicate close votes on SO until you have a pretty large amount of rep, this kinda creates a problem where there's a "silent mass" of duplicate questions that aren't really duplicates.

A basic example is this question: https://stackoverflow.com/q/27957454 , which is about disabling PRs on GitHub on the surface. The body text however reveals that the poster is instead asking how they can set up branch permissions and get certain accounts to bypass them.

I can already assure you that just by basic searching, this question will pop up first when you look up disabling PRs, and the accepted answer answers the question body (which means that it's almost certain a different question has been closed as a duplicate of this one), rather than the question title. You could give a more informative answer (which kinda happened here), but this is technically off-topic to the question being closed.

That's where SO gets it's bad rep for inaccurate duplicate closing from.

The other problem is that you'll get a duplicate but the duplicate question's answers are all outdated.

>I can see how frustrating it might be

It's certainly not frustrating for me, I ask a question maybe once a year on SO, most of their content is, in my chosen disciplines, not technically interesting, it is no better than looking up code snippets in documentation (which most of the time is what it really, really is)

I suppose it's frustrating for SO that people no longer find it worthwhile to ask questions there.

>advanced / off the beaten path

show me an advanced and off the beaten path question that SO has answered well, that is just not worth the effort to try to get an answer - if you have an advanced and off the beaten path question that you can't answer then you ask it on SO just "in case" but really you will find the answer somewhere else or not at all in my experience.

The first one especially is not interesting except to the person asking the question, who wants to be spoon-fed answers instead of making any effort of his own to acquire foundational knowledge. Often these are students asking for someone to solve their homework problems.

Pro/Con questions are too likely to involve opinion and degenerate into flamewars. Some could be answered factually, but mostly are not. Others have no clear answers.

thank you for bringing the default SO reasons why these are not the case, but first off

>Often these are students asking for someone to solve their homework problems.

I don't think I've been in any class since elementary school in which I did not have foundational knowledge, I'm talking "I just realized there must be a technical discipline that handles this issue and I can't google my way to it level of questions."

If I'm a student, I have a textbook and the ability to read. I'm not asking textbook readable or relevant literature readable in the thing I am studying questions because I, being in a class on the subject I would "know the first thing" to quote my earlier post, that first thing being how to get more good and relevant knowledge on the thing I am in a class in.

I'm talking about things you don't even know what questions to ask to get that foundational knowledge which is among the most interesting questions to ask - the problem with SO is it only wants me to ask questions in a field in which I am already fairly expert but I have just hit a temporary stumbling block for some reason.

I remember when I was working on a big government security project and there was a Java guy who was an expert in a field that I knew nothing about and he would laugh and say you can't go to SO and ask about how do I ... long bit of technical jargon outside my field that I sort of understood hung together, maybe eigenvectors came up (this was in 2013)

Second thing, yes I know SO does not want people to ask non-factual questions, and it does not want me to ask questions in fields in which I am uninformed, so it follows it wants me to ask questions that I can probably find out myself one way or another, only SO is more convenient.

I gave some reasons why I do not find SO particularly convenient or useful given their constraints implying this is probably the same for others, you said two of my reasons were no good, but I notice you did not have any input on the underlying question of - why are people not asking as many questions on SO as they once did?

> I don't think I've been in any class since elementary school in which I did not have foundational knowledge

> If I'm a student, I have a textbook and the ability to read

You are such an outlier that I don't think you have the awareness to make any useful observations on this topic. Quite a lot of students in the US are now starting to lack the ability to read, horrifyingly (and it was never 100%), and using ChatGPT to do homework is common.

How is this a useful observation?

You went blind in one eye to see out the other.

SO is what it is, they have made the choices they made as to what questions are appropriate on their platform.

I don't know why SO questions are declining -- perhaps people find SO frustrating, as you seem to, and they give up. I myself have never posted a question on SO as I generally have found that my questions had already been asked and answered. And lately, perhaps LLMs are providing better avenues for the sorts of questions you describe. That seems very plausible to me.

> I don't know the first thing about this thing, help me get to where I know the first thing. This is not allowed any more.

This may have been allowed in like the first year while figuring out what kind of moderation worked, but it hasn't been as least since I started using it in like 2011. They just kept slipping through the cracks because so many questions are constantly being posted.

The problem is that SO is not a Q&A site although it calls itself that (which is admittedly misleading). It is a community edited knowledgebase, basically a wiki, where the content is Q&As. It just so happens that one method of contributing to the site is by writing questions for other people to write answers to.

If you ask a question (i.e., add content to the wiki) that is not in scope, then of course it will get removed.

The time period of their analysis is through May 2023, which was a full year before their OpenAI agreement. The agreement is irrelevant to the findings of the article.

This is on top of an existing long-term trend (since 2014 or so) of increasing frustration at the quality and nature of questions (failure to adhere to site guidelines, nor indeed to put effort into understanding how the site is intended to work).

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