¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Previously.

Stack overflow is almost dead¹ by Gergely Orosz:

Four months ago, we asked Are LLMs making Stack Overflow irrelevant? Data at the time suggested that the answer is likely “yes:”

[…]

Since then, things at Stack Overflow went from bad to worse. The volume of questions asked has nearly dried up, new data shows:

[…]

This tallies with my memory of feeling that site moderators had gone on a power trip by closing legitimate questions. I stopped asking questions around this time because the site felt unwelcome.

[…]

ChatGPT is faster and it’s trained on StackOverflow data, so the quality of answers is similar. Plus, ChatGPT is polite and answers all questions, in contrast to StackOverflow moderators.

A bit of politeness² goes a long way, eh?

Where do you ask novel questions these days?

Stack Exchange is still my to-go site for that, but it’s starting to feel like a ghost town. Oftentimes I end up self-answering my own question, because no one else does. Nonetheless, I’d rather post on my blog if I know the answer in advance. The reason to post on SE is when I don’t know.

It feels to me the best place to ask specific questions these days is wherever the project is developed. GitHub or GitLab issues, Discourse (BBS / forums), Discord³, Slack…and so on. There’s a lot of fragmentation. Perhaps that’s not too bad after all, but it incurs additional effort.

And where to ask general questions? Reddit³, the Fediverse™, social media, project-agnostic chat platforms / communities…

Perhaps one day we’ll just be able to tell our LLM agents to go out there in the dark corners of the Web⁴ to ask a question for us.