To expect change in vote counts and/or ratios, you have to assume that users have sort of "vote budget" that they are going to spend one way or another. If voting is mostly independent variable and mostly depends on particular user and particular post then you should not expect voting patterns/counts to change meaningfully.
> Could it not be the case that SO is less adept at finding related/duplicate questions than ChatGPT? Given the later's facility with the language, I would expect it to be.
Given the later's facility with the language, I would expect it to be a better search engine. I would expect that ChatGPT is replacing Google as sort of tokenizer. I.e. search pipeline changes from "form natural question -> input to google -> go to SO -> if first few links do not yield answer post new question" to "form natural question -> input to chatgpt -> extract keyword tokens -> input to google -> go to SO".
There is an important bit in the article:
> > Using data on programming language popularity on GitHub, we find that the most widely used languages tend to have larger relative declines in posting activity.
Here we can form a hypothesis that reduction in post frequency comes from entry level posts with posters not knowing what to search for. Under this hypothesis ChatGPT has strongest effect on users using SO as knowledge base rather than Q&A forum. This user type distinction would affect posting frequency much more heavily than voting patterns.
> Could it not be the case that SO is less adept at finding related/duplicate questions than ChatGPT? Given the later's facility with the language, I would expect it to be.
Given the later's facility with the language, I would expect it to be a better search engine. I would expect that ChatGPT is replacing Google as sort of tokenizer. I.e. search pipeline changes from "form natural question -> input to google -> go to SO -> if first few links do not yield answer post new question" to "form natural question -> input to chatgpt -> extract keyword tokens -> input to google -> go to SO".
There is an important bit in the article:
> > Using data on programming language popularity on GitHub, we find that the most widely used languages tend to have larger relative declines in posting activity.
Here we can form a hypothesis that reduction in post frequency comes from entry level posts with posters not knowing what to search for. Under this hypothesis ChatGPT has strongest effect on users using SO as knowledge base rather than Q&A forum. This user type distinction would affect posting frequency much more heavily than voting patterns.