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by alex_young 981 days ago
Seems poorly correlated.

It seems unlikely that any significant number of developers quit using SO in favor of blindly trusting ChatGPT.

More likely - advertising revenue declined in line with the reduced ad spending across the industry, largely due to expectations of economic recession by ad buyers.
8 comments
somenameforme 981 days ago
Why do you think it seems unlikely? I've no idea if my usage of SO is typical, but I generally just ended up using it for pretty simple questions - the type that GPT is absolutely phenomenal at answering. The handful of complex, domain specific, questions I tried asking on SO still remain lingering even using their bounty system, or ended up being answered by myself.

Another nice thing is that SO is, ironically, often relatively hostile to asking questions. It seems like every post there's some group of people racing, often recklessly, to try to mark things as duplicates when they're not, asking for code samples even when the question clearly does not require it, etc. And then there's the passive aggressive stuff. It seems like 95% of the SO community is awesome, but that 5% sure is a turn-off from the site. GPT cuts through that layer of nonsense.

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alex_young 981 days ago
Most of SO’s traffic comes from organic search. While we don’t have data for SO traffic itself, we do know that search traffic is not declining.

While some users use ChatGPT to solve technical problems, it doesn’t seem likely that the search traffic they depend upon is an extreme outlier from search in general.

We do know that SO’s primary ad service is that of tech hiring, something that has cooled significantly in the last year.

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Toutouxc 981 days ago
My usual flow went from “do two or three searches with slightly modified wording, land on SO or the official docs of whatever I’m struggling with” to just “take a few minutes to explain the issue to ChatGPT, get actionable and mostly correct advice”.

For me, ChatGPT has unlocked an entire class of questions and investigations that would be almost impossible to handle with just search.

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jeswin 981 days ago
> It seems unlikely that any significant number of developers quit using SO in favor of blindly trusting ChatGPT.

Most people I know have done exactly that.

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YetAnotherNick 981 days ago
> It seems unlikely that any significant number of developers quit using SO in favor of blindly trusting ChatGPT.

I did to a large extent. If verification is easy(which in most of cases it is), I first ask the question to GPT 4 before searching SO. And tbh I have found SO top answer to be more probability of being wrong than GPT 4. In most of the code, if the code doesn't look wrong and could pass the testcases, which I use GPT 4 to generate and verify manually, it is likely fine.

Also there is a huge difference between GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 so if you have only tried GPT-3.5, you experience will differ wildly.

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ryandvm 981 days ago
> It seems unlikely that any significant number of developers quit using SO in favor of blindly trusting ChatGPT.

Man, maybe it's just me, but I have switched almost exclusively from Google searches and Stack Overflow to just asking ChatGPT. I've been doing dev for 20+ years and GPT4 is like switching from regular tools to power tools. Granted, it's only useful for things that have been done before and are well documented, but most professional software development is exactly that.

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ReptileMan 981 days ago
Well chatgpt reduced my usage of SO with around 90%.

For the simpler questions it is quite ok. As in write me x in language y where those are inputs

SO is left only for really hard or niche one.

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jjallen 981 days ago
My SO usage is massively down since ChatGPT. Probably 95%+. This is not a surprise to me at all.
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politelemon 981 days ago
I'm unable to find it now, there was a post showing that it was in decline before ChatGPT was released. It was discussed right better on HN
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