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

elenaverna.com

201–210 of 318 posts

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

#201
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need moderation to reduce low quality content.

Yes, but moderation comes in many flavors. SO’s moderation culture famously deterred newcomers from becoming part of the community and that long-term trend was worrisome even before the LLM scrapers showed up.

Just weighing in, I always appreciated SO’s moderation style

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

#202
post #149

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…

> After all, where is GPT 5 going to scrape the next set of answers for new libraries and frameworks..?

Some of it will be from github issues, I find it a good Q&A place now for some newer / updated techs than SO

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

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quora has sucked for a while now. When the second answer on every question is completely unrelated to the question asked, in some weird attempt to make you look up more content on the site, the site starts losing its usefulness.

Quora has never, in my memory, provided any value to the internet. The answers it seems to provide to google are seemingly inaccurate and also seem completely unmoderated. Furthermore you seemingly have to pay to even ask answers to get updated.

Quora was great for awhile and then it sucked. I used to post there a lot they put me in the top writer program at one point and I went to a party once.

I can pinpoint the exact moment the site started to suck. It was when they started combining questions.

Instantly and immediately they took hundreds of thousands of thoughtful answers written by real people and made them incomprehensible, because the exact wording of questions really matters. Often the answers were quite clever, or touched on a specific word used by the asker, or something. Then they'd end up moved and under some generic question on the same topic.

There were a million examples, one dumb one that comes to mind is a question that was something like "If a man is willing to sleep with me, does that mean that he thinks I am attractive" and the top answer was the two word answer "attractive enough". Kind of silly obviously but funny, and accurate, and amusing content.

Then they merged questions so it ended up something like "How can I know if a man I am dating casually likes me" or something, and now the top answer of "attractive enough" makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Many such cases. Almost immediately the entire site felt like weird AI output before AI output was really a thing. That happened around ten years ago, and the site never recovered.

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

#204

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.

Interestingly I have not seen a single quora result for months either from ChatGPT, perplexity or google

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

#205

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 has sucked for a while now. When the second answer on every question is completely unrelated to the question asked, in some weird attempt to make you look up more content on the site, the site starts losing its usefulness.

When ever I go into a Quora page it has always 99% confused me on where the answer lies

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

#206
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even my barely visited personal website is using almost 10GB bandwidth per month according to Digital Ocean. My website is 90% text with no video, so I imagine it's just bots and scrapers hitting it all day. I'm very close to password protecting the whole thing aside from the homepage.

Are you paying per GB bandwidth with DigitalOcean?

It's a flat rate. That said it feels like wasted bandwidth as I know it's not humans visiting the site. There isn't anywhere near 10GB of content on my site. 200 MB max.

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

#207
post #26

I’ve seen this shift in my own usage. I find myself appending “Reddit” to the end of my searches a lot more often, I have pinned Wikipedia to the top of my search results (in kagi) and I haven’t visited stackoverflow in months, although I see that perplexity quotes it quite often when I ask it coding questions… I’m just a sample of one, but it’s certainly interesting to see how apparently I’m just one of many

I've been working on learning PySpark this week, going through exercises to learn syntax and what-not. Avoiding ChatGPT bc I didn't want to be spoon fed anything. I couldn't figure out how to sort something in descending order. I searched SO for 5 minutes, getting out-dated answers or overly complicated solutions not needed for my very simple one-liner. Click over to ChatGPT, give it the line of code I have and say '…

That seems to be a problem specific to PySpark, it’s amazing how poor search results are for it despite it being reasonably popular.

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

#208
post #128
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even my barely visited personal website is using almost 10GB bandwidth per month according to Digital Ocean. My website is 90% text with no video, so I imagine it's just bots and scrapers hitting it all day. I'm very close to password protecting the whole thing aside from the homepage.

Same, I get next to no value from the personal website these days. Certainly not worth being exposed to the harsh realities of the web in 2025. 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, rath…

What devices are you making?

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

#209

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.

> - SO has overbearing moderation. Chatgpt doesn't close your question the second you've submitted it.

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.

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

#210
post #149

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…

Its probably been over 100 times I find someone asking the question im trying to find only to find that a moderator marked it a duplicate and links to a much older question that doesnt apply.
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