Just noticed that the number of Julia related questions on SO has sharply decresed in latest months and weeks.
I don’t like SO, I don’t find it very welcoming and I prefer much more the community here on discourse, but I wonder if this decrease in Julia questions on SO is due to (1) people choosing discourse.julialang.org for Julia related questions; (2) more generally SO is declining; (3) there is a less general, but perhaps more focused interest in Julia (this could be correlated to 1)
This graphic is from last year so not sure if the trend continued like that, though I expect it has. I couldn’t find anyone who wrote about updated site analytics data, I never had the privileges to see it for myself so I don’t even know if they’re available.
This 2 year trend of course wouldn’t explain a trend in the last weeks or months
Zulip as well, but I don’t think that is a major factor as the feeds are mostly to alert people to new questions to make sure they get answered, I wouldn’t expect them to have an influence on the rate of new questions being posted.
When I asked a question on StackOverflow comparing the Go language with Rust, Julia, and C++, even though it was a serious question, I received an overwhelming number of downvotes and had a terrible experience.
The question was deleted but I archived it here.
Since then I dislike StackOverflow and its system, and unwelcoming people in the Go community. However, I know there are kind people too. Some people taught me about Go gently out of StackOverflow. I hope that the majority of them are nice.
Hypothesis (2) would be my guess. Do you have (reliable) numbers for the past month or two? Perhaps a time-series of the question timestamps with Julia (or in general)?
No. But yes, there is a clear trend, I wrote originally past few months, but indeed it’s longer that I see this reduction in number of questions there.
Here people claim a -60 / -80% in SO asked questions… now, it would be interesting to compare with a reduction here in discourse posts, perhaps for its nature this is more resilient to the arrival of ChatGPT/LLMs than Q/A sites…
Stackoverflow has a “Site Analytics Dashboard” which is accessible with 25k points. I’m not at that level (yet), so maybe someone who is can supply some insight from that Dashboard.
Link: Site Analytics
I definitely favor AI tools over stackoverflow. The question is answered immediately and I usually know enough to work out when it gives me back something incorrect. If I get really stuck, I do a deeper dive on my own or ask here.
Wow, I had no idea how far it had fallen. The axes here are terrible, but you can see the start of each year with the holiday lull. There was a bump during the 2020 lockdown, but then a slow decrease until 2023 when things just fell off the cliff. The numbers here are posts per week:
I’m not sure on the solely, maybe I’m the exception, but I personally started to use Discourse also because I disliked SO management, maybe some people migrated to more specialized sites apart from asking LLMs some of their questions?
