This is incredibly toxic and stupid, contributes nothing, and as such, it's not worth providing your expertise for free. The site years ago was an amazing resource of like minded people helping each other. The only cure would be to stop community moderation and do professional only, as well as guide the noobs to resources like chatgpt first for "how to I write a hello world", while sorting the quality questions onto the front page.
Remember Monica? She was a Stack moderator who got in trouble over Stack's new Code of Conduct a few years back.
The Code required using people's pronouns if they listed them. Monica always used gender-neutral pronouns and wanted to keep doing so, but Stack took issue with this.
Pronouns are a pretty standard part of interacting with someone in English -- and so is the "thank you" in GP's Stack post. So why is one social convention mandatory while one is forbidden?
Because it's not about what's on topic and what isn't. It's about archetypes. And the highest archetype for a certain kind of programmer is the Vulcan. Be respectful, be noble, but don't "waste time" on pleasantries that are just there to convey warmth and friendliness.
The problem is that not all programmers are Vulcans, and more and more non-Vulcans have become programmers as coding has become more and more mainstream. But Stack essentially set up test cases for how Vulcan its users are. That tends to be an alienating culture for those who aren't.
Editing other people's questions to remove parts that are not necessary can seem hostile, but that is not the intent behind this rule.
It does speak to the culture of editing/moderation on SO, though. For many people, myself included, it simply does not work.
That said I haven't logged in to StackOverflow for years.
As a user just searching for an answer to my technical question I don't want to see flame wars, cultural exchanges, needlessly verbose text, bad grammar, political discussions and anything else that makes it longer and more difficult to get from point A to B. Similar to how I don't go on Wikipedia to experience the article writer's language skills or culture. There are plenty of other forums (ahem Reddit) for all that.
It was nice to be able to find answers on the internet while it lasted.
And that's before we even get to the hair-trigger question closing and downvoting. It's always the early votes that are negative too - from the weirdo power users that trawl new questions. They don't understand the question (it's not for them) so they downvote. Then later you get people who have the same question coming from Google who understand it upvoting.
If there is a disease of modern social media, it's that.
> This is incredibly toxic and stupid, contributes nothing
It's almost like the toxic people who whined about toxic social media became mods everywhere. The most toxic people tend to be the mods in my experience.
> The site years ago was an amazing resource of like minded people helping each other.
Then a few years ago, SO along with many/all social media sites became trash. Almost in tandem. Wonder why and how.
With the questions no longer being public, the search engines will become outdated.
Maybe I should be exporting my ChatGPT chats and contributing them to something equivalent to Common Crawl? I guess I can do that with a machine-readable blog "Everything I learned from asking ChatGPT this year"
Historically, most of my SO usage boils down to: 1) finding how to implement something esoteric that results in finding a clever solution or a under described feature flag in a function/tool 2) finding a workaround bugfix for a broken feature in some software (>70% of the time finding link to a github issue in the description
If we consider that LLMs are functionally an information retrieval function containing natural language program subroutines. In this context, a web-browser enabled LLM should be able to determine go to source and return a functional answer on a model that is not pretrained on the source.
So as long as there is good documentation on a particular piece of software, we should theoretically be able to generalize to non-existing tools. At least long enough for there to be a newly-created training dataset from people hitting the problem for the first time.
Side note: In some sense, the foundation model labs are aggregating the Question-Answer pairs (typically from stackoverflow) from their user data. I wouldn't be surprised if they created a stackoverflow clone at some point to opensource the dataset creation and labeling efforts.
This is basically what community notes is for X and now Facebook
Just considering Stack Overflow for a moment, they exist to profit from their product of consolidating questions/answers. When the LLM can answer most questions more efficiently, they've lost much of their value proposition in terms of product... and perhaps their business along with it.
Many of the community forums, however, tend to not be businesses per se. Sure they'll see less traffic, but that might not matter to them. In fact, it might even be better to an extent because they often aren't monetizing their services and so LLMs carrying some weight can help reduce costs. Under those circumstances, LLMs may not be nearly so bad and they, themselves, will still have sources of training data.
For example, I read the Elixir Forums for language announcements, feature discussions, occasionally to ask questions that I can't resolve with research, and even to answer some questions. I've also got LLMs fairly well integrated into my workflow. I don't see that pattern changing: neither less Elixir Forum or less reliance on the LLM. What has changed is I don't use search as much as I use to, nor do I use Stack Overflow as much.
So I do expect the big aggregators to go away, those not tied to monetizing their knowledge transfer I expect to see less overall traffic, but not less meaningful and substantive interactions.
There are a few times on Reddit that I want to explain something that I know well. But it will be a long post.
I’ll be lazy and ask ChatGPT the question, either verify it’s correct based on what I know, ask it to verify its answer on the web - the paid version has had web search for over year - or guide it to the correct answer if I notice something is incorrect.
Then I’ll share the conversation as the answer and tell the poster to read through the entire conversation and tell them that I didn’t just naively ask ChatGPT. It will be obvious from my chat session.
Learning to predict what word will lead to a successful solution (rather than just looking like existing speech) may prove to be a richer dataset than SO originally was.
However it's still kind of a concern. I'd guess that a lot of LLMs used stackoverflow data in their training and if it dries up as a source of data, it will reduce the usefulness of later generation models, unless an alternate set of sources can be created/used.
... and human moderators flagging questions like how an AI can jailbreak and copy itself to another computer.
You can see that comments on those videos are students who just entered CS and are afraid (questioning whether they should switch majors.)
about this seems to be the sentiment here.
i beg to differ - this is a chance for stackoverflow to raise from the ashes.
there are many questions chatgpt or claude can't answer. they just have to be about something very new, a little niche and non-trivial. this is the diet stackoverflow needs and might very well be starved by chatgpt!
the peak times of stackoverflow and many of its stackexchange siblings were just amazing. so many smart people asking interesting questions and providing insightful and competent answers. on there i learned how to ask questions precisely. it was like the practical complement to studying math.
https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/revision/188161...
This changes the numbers, but not the trend. The trend still looks pretty grim.
It’s a pretty clear indicator that the site is in a death spiral of
1. traffic falls 2. With fewer users, quality of answers falls 3. users can’t find good answers 4. GOTO 1
When I want to ask a question I need to bend backwards in order for the "community" not to downvote and tell me that I need X when I ask Y.
Some communities (hello Golang!) are straight toxic telling that if you do not ask a IQ 150 question, get out. I do not think I have question with a positive vote there.
In contrast, when asking on Travel or Cooking I get friendly, reasonable answers. I read the TeX community just because they are so nice (I do not even use TeX or LaTeX :))
I usually get an answer on Reddit, though the quality varies.
I need to use ChatGPT more as it seems to be the short and mid-term future
Worse, even if the "community" is right that you do really need X and so all the answers tell you how to do X, there will later be other people who really do need to do Y who are going to find your question.
The community quality went down, it seems and this kind of confirms that. It's also much less useful in dealing with weird errors. I end up on Github issues more often than on stack overflow these days. And Google redirecting me to a decade old stack overflow topic on issues with current versions of things that are new is just not helpful. The vast majority of stuff on e.g. gradle is so out of date that most of the solutions stopped working years ago. This is a gradle issue btw. It has poor documentation, and they keep changing things in compatibility breaking ways.
Just a few days ago I had a JVM crash. The error message landed me to a github issue describing the exact issue I had; including a helpful work around. Something related to netty and alpine's libc implementation. Problem solved. That used to be where stackoverflow was the goto solution. Not anymore. It had nothing to offer here. Nobody asked. Nobody answered. Or maybe they did and their SEO sucks. I don't know. But it's a pattern I noticed in recent years where it's just not that helpful anymore and things like github issues are actually a better place to get helpful answers from experts using and producing the software. I actually leave comments there too when I think I can add value.
Stackoverflow is no longer the best place for that level of support.
The author seems to have been offended by not being lavished with praise for asking such a good question or something.
On Reddit the friction for giving any answer is very low. The consequence is you have to wade through unhelpful and vitriolic comments more often they you'd wish. Dad Jokes are obligatory.
Here on HN, comments are on-topic or related tangents, with the occasionally risked bon mot.
This comment might even be like a question on SO, evoking--Is there even a question here? OK...
Are there disincentives on SO to giving answers?
to be honest, nobody wanted questions that were spelled out on all the manuals either. so maybe LLM will handle all of those and let only the interesting ones.
