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The Fall of Stack Overflow (observablehq.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I find that if it gets it wrong in the first place, its corrections are often equally wrong. I guess this indicates that I've strayed into an area where its training data is not of good quality.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah, if it's in a state where it's making up imaginary APIs whole cloth then in my experience you're asking it for help with something it just doesn't know enough about. I get the best results when I'm asking about popular stuff (such as "write me a python script to convert wav files to mp3" - it'll know the right APIs for that sort of task, generally speaking). If I'm working on something that's more obscure then sometimes it's better to ask ChatGPT for generalized versions of the actual question. For example, I was tinkering with a mod for Minetest a while back that was meant to import .obj models and convert them into a voxelized representation of the object in-game. ChatGPT doesn't know Minetest's API very well, so I was mostly asking it for Lua code to convert the .obj into a simple array of voxel coordinates and then doing the API stuff to make it Minetest-specific for myself. The vector math was the part that ChatGPT knew best so it did an okay job on its part of the task.