- quora pivoted from quality content to cheap clickbait
- SO has overbearing moderation. Chatgpt doesn't close your question the second you've submitted it.
And so on. In short, quality platforms are fine.
While you won't hear me bemoaning the death of Quora, I'm quite a bit more concerned about SO. After all, where is GPT 5 going to scrape the next set of answers for new libraries and frameworks..?
You and I are talking about different things. Before these great questions and answers ended up in your search result, someone asked them, and someone else provided a good answer.
I used to be one of these people. I got 50k+ SO karma, mostly by asking good questions. I no longer bother, because SO moderators don't even read your questions anymore before closing them for a random reason. Needless to say, I no longer bother trying to answer questions as well.
So, it's no wonder that SO is struggling. You can't thrive forever on a stock of aging questions.
The bottom line is that it doesn't matter as long as you have a large enough sample to learn the format, which is already there with existing data. There isn't an SO answer for everything anyone needs even about current tech, and the reason models can still answer well in novel cases is because they can generalize based on the actual source and implementations of the frameworks and libraries they were trained on.
So really, you only need to add the docs and source of any new framework during pretraining and bob's your uncle, cause the model already knows what to do with it.
From its own incorrect answers that got parroted around the web.
with open source code, it can generate docs, feed those docs in on the next training run, use that knowledge to generate que and answers. With tool use, it can then test those answers, and then feed them into the knowledge base for the training run after that.
https://stackoverflow.com/q/79461875/265521
That's just the latest one I've asked. Here are some more examples:
Case insensitive string comparison is "opinion based": https://stackoverflow.com/q/11635/265521
How to catch Ctrl-C "needs more focus" (this was closed but has since been reopened): https://stackoverflow.com/q/1641182/265521
This reasonable question had 13 downvotes by power-mods but has climbed back to positive when discovered by actual users: https://stackoverflow.com/q/41015509/265521
Another example of idiotic downvotes. This started off at -3: https://stackoverflow.com/q/79050597/265521
It's a common pattern that questions get a lot of downvotes initially from people trawling new questions who see a lot of genuinely bad questions (seriously there are loads), then see a good question that they can't understand in 1 second so they just downvote/close it too. So you quickly get downvotes and then later you get people coming from Google who are actually looking for that thing that upvote it.
I think SO actually did try to improve matters once. I can't find it now but they were going to make it impossible to go below 0 votes and allow one free "reopen", or something like that. But the power mods absolutely hated that idea and SO sort of depends on them so they chickened out. Now they're paying the price.
Also, if there is no answer yet on the web the AI may also not know it. Then these questions should still end up on SO.
I might add, that SO also could build their own chat / research UI. It would need to have some benefit over others, but I guess the community aspect of it alone would suffice...
Some of it will be from github issues, I find it a good Q&A place now for some newer / updated techs than SO
These companies are just intentionally throwing away users.
Yet I just want StackOverflow for "life" questions.
Quora today is mostly stuff like "can u get pargnet from givng oral????" or "Is it normal to find my sister attractive?"
It's like the Nazi bar problem except instead of Nazis, it's low quality troll bait.
It's like Stack Exchange doesn't want questions and answers any more, just wants to harvest Google traffic and shows ads. Actual content production is too hard.
Some Reddit subs (as well as web forums/messageboards) have the same problem. If your views don't align with the majority (or the minority, if they run the sub), you're likely to get banned or lose the ability to post.
ChatGPT would ban you for asking the wrong kind of question instead.
While I did experience the overbearing moderation that you've mentioned, as well as the typical bullying for 'asking the question wrong' and other grating encounters I also have asked very obscure questions, and received amazingly knowledgeable answers, in one case, I asked about a brand new C# compiler feature, and I had the actual top compiler guy reach out to me, and told me that what I want isn't possible right now, but should be, and I should raise a GH issue about it.
LLMs might be good at writing React code, and all the super-common stuff (probably in large part due to harvesting the SO database), but these sort of interactions are going to be gone forever.
I am not sure that quality content on a Q&A platform would help you much. You’d have to pivot significantly.
I personally hated those Seo clickbait pages for a while, because it was so hard to find the information i'm looking for.
doing all of this with ai now.
On the other hand, I really like to read a good article more than ever before
Sure, not all questions can be answered with documentation, but once you know your domain and tech stack well most of these resources fall off a cliff in terms of value. Curiously at that point it's much easier to use ChatGPT because you can babysit it with one eye while thinking ahead with the other.
Somehow people did not understand all of that or did not care. AI chatbots are only disguising search as a question. It is definitely much better from UX point of view - but with hallucinations it is worse for everyone who gets imagined responses, because there is no "hey I don't know, let's really figure this out together".
Even worse your question is slightly different and you asked it because the one they just linked as a duplicate didnt help or didnt fit fully. I get so angry when someones asking the right question but some a-hole SO mod closes it almost as if they took no care to compare context and want to meet some obscure metrics for SO.
I love SO but as you say the mods are the worst part.
See stacksort: https://xkcd.com/1185
Remember that the objective of SO is not to provide answers to users who post questions, but to provide answers to users who google questions.
Huh? If you follow the right people and only interact content that you like, Quora is still as good. Just like any other social network.
People click stuff they don't like and they end up getting the same kind of thing served for 2-3 days and then think that its 'site gone bad'. No my good man.
Its just how the social network engagement algorithms work. You gotta watch what you interact with. Even if you drop a comment to correct someone, it still counts as an engagement and you'll get more of it. So the best thing to do when you see content you don't like is to ignore it.
That doesn’t mean SEO is dead though.
Most topics require data or information in some form, which requires time to accumulate. You end up rate limited. Even at the scale of a decent sized company, you often can only produce interesting content occasionally.
A friend of mine was telling me that his company was very pleased when they were able to ask ChatGPT "what is the best SaaS for X?" where X = their niche, and their company was the first thing it recommended. It surprised me that this was a thing, although in hindsight, it's obvious.
On the flip side, I still have situations where I ask, "what's the best solution for X" and the answer is a company (or Github repo or whatever) that has been entirely hallucinated or was around ten years ago and not any more or something.
I guess a corollary question is, are there methods (i.e. the chatbot version of SEO) to get your company into chatbot recommendations?
It wasn't enough for you lot to ruin search results, now you're seeking ways to pollute AI chat bots?
Lately, they've been sending emails offering $2-500 Amazon gift cards for short sales calls. Some follow through. I'm not helping their KPIs though.
"Finding an appropriate product for your need is a challenging task that depends on factor1, factor2 and factor3, here is a structured approach.
1. Investigate the market. 2. Evaluate companies like MY GREAT COMPANY, stinky competitor, slow competitor and dangrerous competitor 3. Find the right fit: Consider whether you value greatness, stinkyiness, slowness, or security vulnerabilities, which one is a right fit for you? 4. Buy now! Call up the company and tell them you are interested in buying the product."
It's free real estate
So, blogspam?
I mean... good? The quality of search results has gotten increasingly worse over time...
It's going to be a way worse situation.
A sad state of affairs, but it was predicted decades ago that commercial interests would turn the internet into what it is today, even without AI. Layer on the dead internet theory slowly coming true, and walled gardens almost feel like the last bastion of free internet, rather than being what brought it to an end.
There's probably some nuance there, maybe the walled gardens allowed us to be comfortable letting it get this bad. Either way, what's gone is gone.
I am getting a lot of joy from local net and just making little devices at home, that is giving me the same excitement that the web did in the past!
On my personal site I started blocking bots and also set a "noindex, nofollow" rule to block web crawlers and search bots too. I noticed no change in traffic and still do about 10,000 visits a month.
(My site is basically a search engine, which complicates matters because there's effectively an infinite space of URLs. Just one of these rogue bots can scrape millions of pages from tens of thousands of IPs; and I think there are hundreds of the bots at any given moment...)
I like the Cloudflare challenge ideas suggested on this thread, though, I might try them again.
Would something like Cloudflare help with bot detection?
Part of the problem is the economics of it -- I've chosen to self-fund a high traffic site without ads, and that's on me. But it was possible to do this just a few years ago.
I’m just a sample of one, but it’s certainly interesting to see how apparently I’m just one of many
And even then, Reddit's "new" design is shit for usability, sine the actual text you were searching for is nowhere on the page. It's hidden somewhere behind one of a hundred "click to see more" interactions, some of which are nested, and some will cause a completely new new page load that erases your progress and makes you start over. (But look! Engagement metrics!)
On a lighter note, a humorous critique that mentions the same mitigation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY
I haven't used SO in weeks prior and I think ChatGPT has pretty much killed its use case for me. Even two years ago, I would spend 1-6 hours/week searching SO posts depending on what I was working on.
If I’m shopping for something deliberately enough to be digging through reviews I’m probably pretty sure it’ll solve the problem all the positive reviews say it will solve. But I want to weigh that against all the negative feedback that might be removed or downplayed in big marketplaces or commercial review sites.
Reddit is not even a great source a lot of the time, just a way better start than a ton of marketing sites. Some type of search product that enables you to filter out results from companies trying to sell something would be awesome and an easily achievable benefit of AI.
- What is platos frios
- Can you download Netflix videos to your local device
- Who composed the Top Gun theme
- Who have been the most successful American Idol winners
- If I check-in the day before a United Airlines flight, can I still buy additional checked bags when I go to the airport
- If I'm buying a Schwinn IC4 indoor spin bike, do I need a floormat for it also
- What is pisco
- In the US, what is the format for EINs?
- Is it bad to use tap water in your humidifier?
- Which NBA players are on supermax contracts
- What are some of the best steakhouses in Manhattan?
- How much and how long does it take to procure a DUNS number?
- In terms of real estate, what is historic tax credit development
Asking LLM to provide a link does NOT work, as they hallucinate links just fine, and give links that are either broken or do not contain the information LLM says it should. Using search tools through a LLM (like ChatGPT's "search" function) sort of works (at least the link will be correct - still need to check if the contents means what LLM says it does), but it's quite limited and cannot be fine-tuned (I don't use Google but rather prefer Kagi, and I tend to heavily rely on Kagi's lenses, site: queries and negative terms to scope and refine searches).
In other words: please do NOT trust LLM's answers, even if they sound plausible. Always verify.
What I've not yet figured out how to deal with is how to handle being surrounded by a society of people who go ahead and trust LLMs for their factual answers anyway. I think even if I'm careful about selecting my sources, the background noise floor is going to climb up to the point that there's no signal-to-noise ratio left.
People created websites to "answer" people's search queries about celebrity net worth, if some celebrity is gay, if they are in a relationship, etc. They obviously frequently did not know, and made a guess, or relied on tabloids as a source, who also frequently make things up.
Multiple sources is a good thing. Using just ChatGPT is like only ever using Wikipedia as a source of all information, but put through a filter that removes all sources and attribution information and cross linking and history and those notices at the top of pages saying the article has issues AND normalising the writing style so that you can't even use bad spelling and grammar as a signal of inaccuracy.
Chat GPT does correctly answer your question about airline bags, but I have no way of knowing if it made that answer up or not because so many airlines have the same policy.
Google at least gives you links to the United baggage policies. The AI overview in Google also "cites its sources", which sort of gives you the best of both worlds. (I'm sure the accuracy of Google's AI vs. ChatGPT is up for debate)
I cannot see the use for Webmd and other sites that provide information along specific verticals, anymore. People are going to WebMD and these sites out of habit and that is it, the same info can already be summarized by an LLM today. That habit is powerful and what will give these sites some time to pivot if they can
Over time as genAI becomes better, everything that doesn't have any time based function will be consumed by it.
- cite sources within a certain timeframe which can be trivially done on Google Search
- exclude sources when explicitly asked (and vice versa)
And makes it challenging to determine whether it's output has any reasonable depth or not. Even my simple request on a refresher on the usage of mutexes in C++ gave me a code snippet that exacerbated the very issue I was hoping to get a better handle on. /shrug
Google has a branding problem. They integrated Gemini into their search UI, so they just want people to continue the same landing page. However, it feels too noisy, and unnecessary. All I want is a summarization. I don't want to see a huge list of ads or slightly related links. Adds no value to me.
I tried anthropic but it fell way short and so stuck with chat gpt and meta ai. Now for Perplexity I need a compelling need to use it. Haven't seen it yet.
You want hallucinated medical information?
How is this not entirely absurd. I feel so angry that person who wrote this comment already knew that its absurd but proceeded to make this comment and prbly got upvotes.
"Yeah it was a rare new disease the doctor called it {name of disease}"
But seriously there are real medical sources that are far more valuable than freaking WebMD, Medical journals (e.g., PubMed, JAMA), Health agencies (e.g., CDC, WHO), Books and Textbooks, User-Generated Content, Firsthand Expert Input
Medical information isn't exactly a "niche". Most sites rely on community which chatbots could, but probably won't emulate anytime soon, I also really doubt the implication that someones' personal, likely nonmonitized, webpage is going to "go under" because it gets less than some arbitrary view count.
A better question is "When all the governments go under where will chatGPT get it's information"
https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1cwq...
All Chegg has going for it is a database of answers for homework assignments that typically use per-student randomized numbers—so students have to recalculate their specific answer manually by following the steps—and "verified tutors" that constantly give wrong answers to even highschool-level math questions.
Every college student I know uses ChatGPT (and now DeepSeek) for tons of assignments, usually via the free plan.
Once you experience that, it gets really tempting to cancel that $20/month chegg subscription and never look back.
I find professors pitiful fearmongering over 'the big bad ChatGPT' a little funny, such as when they insist they "have secret tools to detect AI usage" and "it can't answer the questions correctly anyway", so "you shouldn't even try it".
I don't know what differentiates them since the content is apparently similar but I suspect a lot of websites like this will diversify their distribution channels and pivot accordingly.
Man, those a big numbers. I would have bet two orders of magnitude lower.
> Also, over 5B visits a month - consider me impressed.
How does Wikipedia only do 5X the visits that Quora does? Which number is way off?
It used to be a good place for tech news (after all, they are "news.com"), but now they are mostly a review site with shallow reviews seemingly based on what they read on manufacturer and retailer product pages... and of course, with lots of affiliate links so they get their cut if you buy a product based on their review.
Wikiepdia: Good Quora: Bad Reddit: Good CNet: Bad
It makes sense, as LLM content is of mediocre quality, if you want something of good and reliable quality you go elsewhere.
- reddit got boost because of google's investment in it, and they're consciously boosting it - wikipedia clearly doesn't have increase in page views - substack as a product has been on rise, more authors leading to more views, no actual co-relation with the content on the platform
Sure... unless they want /accurate/ results.
If your service acquires real world data specific to individuals and organizations that is used to make better decisions, your company will not be eaten by AI (immediately).
Maybe the new frontier of SEO is gaming LLMs to recommend your product.