Over the past one and a half years, Stack Overflow has lost around 50% of its traffic. This decline is similarly reflected in site usage, with approximately a 50% decrease in the number of questions and answers, as well as the number of votes these posts receive.

The charts below show the usage represented by a moving average of 49 days.

What happened?

    • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
      18·
      1 year ago

      ChatGPT has no knowledge of the answers it gives. It is simply a text completion algorithm. It is fundamentally the same as the thing above your phone keyboard that suggests words as you type, just with much more training data.

        • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
          0·
          1 year ago

          Yeah it gives you the answers you ask it to give you. It doesn’t matter if they are true or not, only if they look like the thing you’re looking for.

              • Greg Clarke@lemmy.caEnglish
                1·
                1 year ago

                not for solving technical problems

                One example is writing complex regex. A simple well written prompt can get you 90% the way there. It’s a huge time saver.

                for generating prose

                It’s great a writing boilerplate code so I can spend more of my time architecturing solutions instead of typing.

    • blueson@feddit.nu
      9·
      1 year ago

      I honestly believe people are way overvaluing the responses ChatGPT gives.

      For a lot of boilerplating scenarios or trying to resolve some pretty standard stuff, it’s good.

      I had an issue a while back with QueryDSL running towards an MSSQL instance, which I tried resolving by asking ChatGPT some pretty straightforward questions regarding the tool. Without going too much into detail, I basically got stuck in a loop where ChatGPT kept suggesting solutions that were not viable at all in QueryDSL. I pointed it out, trying to point out why what it did was wrong and it tried correcting itself suggesting the same broken solutions.

      The AI is great until whatever it has been taught previously doesn’t cover your situation. My solution was a bit of digging in google away, which helpfully made me resolve the issue. But had I been stuck with only ChatGPT I’d still be going around in loops.

      • Gamma@beehaw.org
        1·
        1 year ago

        ChatGPT is great for simple questions that have been asked and answered a million times previously. I don’t see any downside to these types of questions not being posted to SO…