Stack Overflow has seen a substantial decline in traffic over the last year that appears to be accelerating. https://observablehq.com/@ayhanfuat/the-fall-of-stack-overflow
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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This doesn't tell us much without also including the quality of the posts. Are we sure this isn't just idiots who ask stupid question that can be found on Google over and over not doing that now that they have chatgpt
Well, for starters, the fall started six months before ChatGPT launched. And there was a brief uptick in traffic after ChatGPT's launch.
For me the real problem with Stack Overflow, as someone who was one of the earliest users of the service, is when you ask a question now you don't actually get a good answer anymore. Often your question just gets deleted by moderators. And even when I've answered someone's perfectly good question, the question (and my answer) have been deleted by mods.
All I can say is thank god ChatGPT came when it did, because we needed something to replace Stack Overflow.
Do we have a community on lemmy to ask questions like stackoverflow?
I think for specific platforms, like rust questions in the rust community.
It wouldn't be very good.
Most people want answers, not questions, and with Stack Overflow the answers are usually already there and easy to find. Plus they are maintained and kept up to date, so if something was correct six years ago but isn't anymore, that will usually be obvious before you try the solution.
Some kind of federated stack overflow alternative could be awesome, but Lemmy is not it and never will be.
Federated data tends to be ephemeral. None of the fediverse sites claim to store everything that they've ever gotten there or federated to them. As such, the federation structure tends to perform poorly as a durable store of knowledge.
The oldest posts on many Mastodon have been lost to database expiration. This too will happen on Lemmy. There is no guarantee with federation that content will be available and searchable a year or two or ten down the road.
If you then say "ahh, but I've stood up an instance that has lots of disk storage and can serve it as an authoritative source for future visitors..." then we've lost federation and are back to a centralized server.
For federated Q&A, beyond saying "it's federated" - what is the use case for federation? Why federation? How is moderation and curation done?