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AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

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Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#161

Post by Larrikin »

dumbledoren wrote: post #154
joelthelion wrote: post #8

The ones that struggle had pre-existing issues : - 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.

> - quora pivoted from quality content to cheap clickbait 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 go…

Who cares about the quora community? Who wants to do any of that dance?

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#162

Post by buf »

corentin88 wrote: post #2

Content marketing is dead. AI has killed it. One of our main marketing channels was writing SEO-oriented articles on our company’s blog. The traffic has steadily decreased over the last year despite huge efforts. That doesn’t mean SEO is dead though.

Elena's article is content marketing. It doesn't look dead to me.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#163

Post by joelthelion »

johnfn wrote: post #149
joelthelion wrote: post #8

The ones that struggle had pre-existing issues : - 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.

Hm, not sure I agree with you about SO. The experience I have with SO 99%+ of the time is that I google my question, get a result on SO which has a correct and decent quality answer, and I'm back to work. That's a pretty great experience, and I certainly wouldn't say that it misses the bar to be a 'quality platform'. I do agree the moderation is overbearing at times, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwate…

> The experience I have with SO 99%+ of the time is that I google my question, get a result on SO which has a correct and decent quality answer, and I'm back to work.

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.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#164

Post by fady0 »

immibis wrote: post #92
francisofascii wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

um, I would argue overbearing moderation is positive for overall "quality" of content. But not as useful as ChatGPT that will spoon feed you answers and not care about misspellings, bad English, asking the same question, etc. It is truly remarkable how good it is.

Depends on the moderation. /r/worldnews bans any user who says anything that makes Israel look bad (I'm not exaggerating). That does nothing for quality of content.

Reddit's subreddits can sometimes create echo chambers(all the big sub reddit are like that), and depending on the moderators' viewpoints, you might find opposite opinions in different communities.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#165

Post by harvey9 »

immibis wrote: post #126
inetknght wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nor does ChatGPT ban you from the entire network because you answered a Palestine question on the politics sub-section. (Happened to me.) ChatGPT would ban you for asking the wrong kind of question instead.

I tried asking ChatGPT if Palestinians deserve human rights, to see if it still gave an answer like the one that went viral. They have fixed the answer, and I was not banned.

I have no idea what the back story is here, but 'they fixed the answer' is not a scalable solution to GPT's limitations.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#166

Post by IshKebab »

dig1 wrote: post #10

The actual trend these days is that if your company struggles, blame AI ;) I can't say about WebMD and Chegg, but Quora and SO started going downhill before this AI (boom or bubble, whatever you call it) due to their policies, politics, and management. IMHO, of course.

Stackoverflow is being killed by the combination of AI and its perpetual inability to fix moderation. They didn't really care about fixing it for a whole decade because they didn't have any competition. Now AI is better than Stackoverflow for a lot of problems, they actually have viable competition and people are leaving.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#167

Post by timhh »

johnfn wrote: post #149
joelthelion wrote: post #8

The ones that struggle had pre-existing issues : - 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.

Hm, not sure I agree with you about SO. The experience I have with SO 99%+ of the time is that I google my question, get a result on SO which has a correct and decent quality answer, and I'm back to work. That's a pretty great experience, and I certainly wouldn't say that it misses the bar to be a 'quality platform'. I do agree the moderation is overbearing at times, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwate…

That's fine until you have to ask a question that isn't answered anywhere on the internet. Then you post a perfectly reasonable question and get it downvoted to hell...

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.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#169

Post by jajko »

tayo42 wrote: post #147
Terr_ wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find myself appending “Reddit” to the end of my searches a lot more often 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…

Just switch to old.reddit.com

Any forum on old.reddit.com has links to threads that go to new pages, supremely annoying (I am sure there is some plugin or workaround for that but why the heck should I battle the site just to use it)

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#170

Post by HermanMartinus »

I can attest to this. I run Bear Blog, and it has seen a dramatic rise in signups month-over-month. My suspicion is that other platforms are getting covered in AI generated content, and while Bear isn’t perfect, there is a lot more curation and a strict no advertising policy.
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