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We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

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Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#31

Post by lanyard-textile »

jrjeksjd8d wrote: post #13

Like so many things in American life these days, we've arrived at a "better solution" that extracts value from the past without producing a future. The decades of Stack Overflow answers fed into LLM training produce plausible answers for today . In 10 years what will the LLMs train on? So much of life these days is purely extractive, trying to squeeze more money out of less productive activity. It's no wonder young p…

Why, us of course.

The results of your claude code session, for example, make fine training data.

Did the user commit the final answer? What changes were made before they did?

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#32

Post by Permit »

StackOverflow was successful explicitly because of the people/question it excluded. The "toxicity" was the point. It was trying very very hard not to become Yahoo Questions. If you want to hear more about this you should watch Joel Spolsky's talk "The Cultural Anthropology of Stack Exchange": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpGA2fmAHvM

The point of StackOverflow was explicitly not to help the question-askers, but to prioritize the people who would reach the question via Google. That's why so many people have bad stories about times they went to ask questions on StackOverflow: it was supposed to be very high-friction and there was supposed to be a high standard for the questions asked there.

Now with LLMs users get the best of both worlds. They don't need to use Google to find a high-quality StackOverflow question/answer AND they can ask any question even if it's been asked 1,000 times before or is low-quality or would lead to discussion rather than a singular answer.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#33

Post by oceanplexian »

jrjeksjd8d wrote: post #13

Like so many things in American life these days, we've arrived at a "better solution" that extracts value from the past without producing a future. The decades of Stack Overflow answers fed into LLM training produce plausible answers for today . In 10 years what will the LLMs train on? So much of life these days is purely extractive, trying to squeeze more money out of less productive activity. It's no wonder young p…

I think this is seeing the past with rose tinted glasses, it’s not like SO was on the cutting edge of computer science. The world is probably better off that we don’t need another 12 ways to develop a CRUD app or learn the framework of the month from gatekeepers with a bad attitude.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#34

Post by ronbenton »

pixelesque wrote: post #17

A couple of thoughts: That graph is number of questions asked being posted: very often the question already exists (although obviously with technology and frameworks changing over time, things aren't constant, and answers can be out of date at some point), so you don't need to post the question. Also: Would LLMs be as good for answers if they hadn't been trained on scraping StackOverflow in the first place?

I very much disagree with the first point that there had somehow been a critical mass of questions achieved to explain the slowdown. With the change in tech, outdated answer, and increasing population of people writing code, I just don't buy it.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#36

Post by alistairSH »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #21
jrjeksjd8d wrote: post #13

Like so many things in American life these days, we've arrived at a "better solution" that extracts value from the past without producing a future. The decades of Stack Overflow answers fed into LLM training produce plausible answers for today . In 10 years what will the LLMs train on? So much of life these days is purely extractive, trying to squeeze more money out of less productive activity. It's no wonder young p…

> In 10 years what will the LLMs train on? Why do people think this is necessary? When you learn new things, like bicycling, you don't start with relearning how to walk.

Not sure I understand...

How will CharGPT/CoPilot/whatever learn about the next great front-end framework? The LLMs know about existing frameworks by learning on existing content (from StackOverflow and elsewhere). If StackOverflow (and elsewhere) go away, there's nothing to provide a training material.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#37

Post by ndriscoll »

xeromal wrote: post #28
spiderfarmer wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In 10 years what will the LLMs train on? Why do people think this is necessary? When you learn new things, like bicycling, you don't start with relearning how to walk.

I think they are positing that LLMs do not produce new thought. If a new framework (super magic new framework) is released, current LLMs will not be able to help.

Why wouldn't the LLM just read the source of the framework to answer questions directly? That's how I do things as a human. Given the appropriate background knowledge (which current LLMs are already extremely capable with), it should be pretty easy to understand what it's doing, and if it's not easy to understand the source, it's probably a bad framework.

I don't expect an LLM to have deep inbuilt knowledge of libraries. I expect it to be able to use a language server to find the right definitions and load them into context as needed. I expect it to have very deep inbuilt knowledge of computer science and architecture to make sense of everything it sees.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#38

Post by whstl »

ronbenton wrote: post #30
okaleniuk wrote: post #24

There should be a lesson for other communities but, unfortunately, there is none. StackOverflow used to be a fun and welcoming place in 2009. It became a toxic hellhole overtime There are no obvious flows in the original design, and there were no endemic wrongdoings in the governance either. It just rotted slowly like any other community does. And nobody in the world knows how to keep communities from becoming toxic.…

>And nobody in the world knows how to keep communities from becoming toxic. There is simply no recipe. And that's why StackOverflow doesn't serve as a lesson either. I think a well-moderated community can be non-toxic. Lobste.rs is a good if not extreme example: it's kind of a vouch system for the people you refer and there's pretty good moderation to prevent overly mean discussion.

HN itself is way better than people give credit to. The toxicity tends to be very isolated, and divisive topics disappear quickly from the front page.

I find that there's still a subset of users that make it worse than it should be, by making too much noise about "tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage", but that is already against the rules/guidelines.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#39

Post by cogman10 »

oceanplexian wrote: post #33
jrjeksjd8d wrote: post #13

Like so many things in American life these days, we've arrived at a "better solution" that extracts value from the past without producing a future. The decades of Stack Overflow answers fed into LLM training produce plausible answers for today . In 10 years what will the LLMs train on? So much of life these days is purely extractive, trying to squeeze more money out of less productive activity. It's no wonder young p…

I think this is seeing the past with rose tinted glasses, it’s not like SO was on the cutting edge of computer science. The world is probably better off that we don’t need another 12 ways to develop a CRUD app or learn the framework of the month from gatekeepers with a bad attitude.

In fact, I think this is part of what lead to the downfall of SO.

The moderation could be very aggressive with "duplicate" posts getting closed fast. The problem is sometimes the "solution" in the duplicate was either irrelevant or dated. Things like telling someone to us jQuery in 2020.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#40

Post by ronbenton »

Permit wrote: post #32

StackOverflow was successful explicitly because of the people/question it excluded . The "toxicity" was the point. It was trying very very hard not to become Yahoo Questions. If you want to hear more about this you should watch Joel Spolsky's talk "The Cultural Anthropology of Stack Exchange": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpGA2fmAHvM The point of StackOverflow was explicitly not to help the question-askers, but to…

I disagree with this. You can tell someone that a question is not appropriate for a community without being a jerk. Or you can tell them that there needs to be more information in a question without being a jerk. I do not think being mean is a prerequisite for successful curation of information.
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