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What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

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131–140 of 615 posts

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#132
I don't think it was AI, I seem to remember that google broke search or SO SEO broke to the point where it wouldn't even point at the right SO article. There used to be a lot of commotion on the forums about how broken google search became for them.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#133
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ellen Pao was the glass scapegoat CEO designed to take all the flak for what the other investors and board members wanted to do. BTW Reddit is now verifying your ID with Persona before you can open anything it thinks is NSFW.

Only the new Reddit, old.reddit.com still works for that too. Though I'm not sure how long that'll last. I would be surprised if old.reddit.com is still functional in a couple of years. When it gets removed, or when it bit rots to the point that it's no longer really feasible to use it, I'm off that site. New Reddit doesn't work for me.

They're slowly boiling the frog, I've been expecting old. to work for maybe 1-2 more years then it'll also be going away.

Probably in the same way as they're actively removing r/all, at first it just didn't show up in the sidebar on mobile, but you could go to r/all manually by clicking links in the client. Then those stopped working, but r/All (uppercase A) worked. Then that went away. By now I think it's impossible to see r/all at all in the mobile client or the modern website, you can only access it via old.reddit.com.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#134

Any social organization needs to carefully consider their inclusion-exclusion curve with intentionality. I think a lot of people might balk at the word "inclusivity" today, but StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in t…

> but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in this manner.

i got stung by exactly this.

i saw some of my early questions rewritten because some idiot mod that had not touched grass in a while thought that some words were better suited for stackoverflow.

and don't get me wrong: i'm not talking about profanity, n-word or racial slurs, derogatory terms or other controversial words. it was quite literally stylistic and tone changing.

dumb example: i like to end my posts with something like

   thanks in advance,
   -- 
   znpy
which in my opinion is just common courtesy in a conversation between me and whoever will be kind to answer my questions. it's harmless and not controversial. and yet, some mods edited that out and left some irrelevant wording on that. my guess is they were farming points on the site.

I'm so glad stackoverflow died and I don't miss it at all.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#135
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really a bell curve. There was obviously a downwards trend from 2016 onwards, but 2023 definitely precipitated the fall to zero. Without AI they might have lasted at least a couple more years, or the activity might have stabilized to a new floor greater than zero.

https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb Goodness of Fit 0.911, Kurtosis -0.849, Skewness: 0.073 It's very much a bell curve

Those graphs look nothing alike, except for "going up and then vaguely going down."

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#136
Peaked in 2014. That coincides with my experience. Something went wrong:

* Moderation went bad. I stopped moderating/flagging after it was deemed unhelpful?! I know it's hard to moderate a platform like that, but giving me a slap in the face when I volunteer my valuable time is not the way to do it.

* Questions closed because they weren't "programming questions", but obviously about tools devs use every day. Again and again, they were the TOP google results. You'd click on it and found a old question closed because it was considered off topic. As a business, you seriously need to ask yourself some hard questions when you fend off users like that.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#137
post #83
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add it to the list: - the downfall of junior devs - bad hiring market - layoffs in practically every sector theres a ton of things where AI took credit for a trend that had already started before it started being even halfway capable.

People love simplistic narratives, i usually don't mind but this is just ridiculous. AI hate is gently overtaking AI hype as the most stupid thing around

AI hype is still a million miles ahead and a million times dumber, especially thanks to online astroturfing.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#138
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ellen Pao was the glass scapegoat CEO designed to take all the flak for what the other investors and board members wanted to do. BTW Reddit is now verifying your ID with Persona before you can open anything it thinks is NSFW.

Only the new Reddit, old.reddit.com still works for that too. Though I'm not sure how long that'll last. I would be surprised if old.reddit.com is still functional in a couple of years. When it gets removed, or when it bit rots to the point that it's no longer really feasible to use it, I'm off that site. New Reddit doesn't work for me.

No, they've just enabled it for old.reddit.com as well.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#139

Any social organization needs to carefully consider their inclusion-exclusion curve with intentionality. I think a lot of people might balk at the word "inclusivity" today, but StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in t…

I am a long-time user of stackoverflow with 16k points, and even I got all my questions of the last five years downvoted into oblivion.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#140

Any social organization needs to carefully consider their inclusion-exclusion curve with intentionality. I think a lot of people might balk at the word "inclusivity" today, but StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in t…

as a new user i asked one question, once, in the wrong forum by mistake... it wasn't pretty. i never went back, although there were some kinder people there trying to salvage the situation :). i just figured it was for people with far more professionalism and knowledge than i'd ever have.
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