Ciro Santilli
OurBigBook.comCiro Santilli believes that these tools basically solve all the brain-dead problems which newbies would ask, and easy rep seekers would reply to.
Also, because Ciro Santilli only goes for long term reputation, which often means hard questions, this shot his yearly reputation rankings up without him doing anything, because all the guys who answered easy questions were decimated.
This was followed by Stack Overflow attempting to immorally and likely illegally trying to restrict free access to its previously commendable data dumps:which people were using to train LLMs.
This can be very clearly seen by several metrics on Stack Exchange Data Explorer, e.g. Ciro Santilli noticed that very clearly at: Total reputation in Stack Overflow over time how activity has been steadily falling since 2020.
Approximate total reputation change per year on Stack Overflow
. By Ciro Santilli using gnuplot. Methodology described at: Ciro Santilliś answer to the question "Total reputation in Stack Overflow over time". The 15 year old question was then closed soon after Ciro Santilli answered it, because of course that attracted some attention to the question, which of course was off-topic.
Related posts:
- www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1592s82/the_fall_of_stack_overflow/. www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1592s82/comment/jte8aju/ is amazing:Well known Stack Overflow user mipadi comments:You've fallen for the common misconception that the goal of stackoverflow is helping users solve problems.When the reality is that it's actually a video game. The only players are the admins/mods, and their goal is to use their "hammers" and attempts at pedantry/nitpicking (correctness not important) to compete with each other to get the highest "close" point scores. Pew pew pew!!! Bang bang bang!!! How many points can you score today?!?!Us users are just the NPCs, there as fodder for the real players.Ciro Santilli concurs, for professional niche sites. Non-professional ones are fine.
And the niche Stack Exchange sites tend to be even worse, although I can still get a question answered after much teeth gnashing, usually.
- www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/195ygru/stackoverflow_questions_down_66_in_2023_compared/
- observablehq.com/@ayhanfuat/the-fall-of-stack-overflow