by sylvainkalache on 2/25/25, 8:36 PM with 1 comments
by zahlman on 2/25/25, 9:13 PM
It's caused a profound decrease in the number of new questions asked and answered on Stack Overflow - above and beyond existing trends (these numbers have, broadly speaking, been in decline since 2014). But I wouldn't at all call that a "profoundly negative impact" on the site. On the contrary: people who would otherwise be sorting through low-quality questions that completely miss the site's purpose, now have the opportunity to curate existing questions - by linking old ignored duplicates, turning scrutiny to other old ignored questions, editing the best versions of existing questions to make them even better, updating old answers (and making them clearer, fixing up tone etc.) ...
Off-handed comments like what I quoted are all over the Internet, and it makes me sad - because it reinforces common misconceptions about what Stack Overflow is intended to be and how it's intended to work. It's good for Stack Overflow - the body of work, not the company - that someone who has a ChatGPT-answerable question gets an answer from ChatGPT. (And it's bad that the Stack Exchange, Inc. management have repeatedly tried to integrate such technologies into the site in ham-handed ways, despite being repeatedly rebuffed on meta.) By not posting that question to Stack Overflow, the time (and patience, and mental fortitude) of other volunteers is saved, and existing better-quality Q&A doesn't become harder to find. Back in 2020-2021 I lost count of the times I would try to use a search engine to find the best version of a question that had been asked for the Nth time, only to find a sampling of the other N that were also terrible - along with a bunch of other low-quality questions that were completely different yet logically asked using most of the same words.