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What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

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Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#191

Post by suzzer99 »

nottorp wrote: post #184
lynndotpy wrote: post #24

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…

> making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants I used to look for questions to answer on my morning coffee. Then two things happened: 1. Rep chasers that rushed to answer anything with a copy/pasta from manuals (or at best semi related tutorials) showed up so there was no point or time in typing a complex answer. 2. Those long time users started downmodding "teach t…

At least 50% of the time on SO, the best answer is 3rd or worse, and I'm always thinking, "Why is this not the top answer?"

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#193

Post by tayo42 »

Dragas wrote: post #189
brap wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can totally see myself asking questions on SO even these days, but there’s a good chance they’ll lock my post so why bother. Something about the SO incentive system created the most hostile platform imaginable.

During the last decade that I've been asking/answering questions I only ever had 1 question locked as offtopic, and it was when they introduced question types. The several questions which I did report as invalid/offtopic/etc. were just error messages thrown by compiler without any substance of what you are supposed to look at to even determine how to help the author. I'm genuinely confused whether people just parrote…

It felt common enough to me.i never really asked on the site but have run into it happening alot through Google searches. It's usually annoying because someone had a similar question and the duplicate wasn't quite the same

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#194

Post by Jolter »

amelius wrote: post #112
nolok wrote: post #9

SO did that all to themselves when they decided they didn't want a community to form and that only question and answers mattered. The moment something else allowed to have a better way to get your answers, there was no reason to go there, because there was no community. I still don't understand why anyone would go with that whole "no conversation please"

Are you saying that the decline of SO can be explained by that and not AI? I don't buy it.

See the decline of the graph even before the spring of ’22?

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#195

Post by chuckadams »

lynndotpy wrote: post #24

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…

> StackOverflow management alienated those users, too, by shoving AI down their throats in every facet of the site.

Actually, I thought they outright forbade AI answers? I don't know where else AI might have come in -- having an AI look for related answers instead of making users use the primitive search (for which almost everyone always used google instead) might have been a good idea. Probably wouldn't have been enough though once google started answering the questions before showing SO links.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#196

Post by invader »

Step 1: Here emerges a platform where everyone can ask, answer, or discuss questions on software development.

Step 2: The platform becomes the ultimate knowledge base with community-curated answers on virtually any question related to software development.

Step 3: Another company scraps the community-driven database to train its model.

Step 4: The model is so efficient that people start asking questions of the model, killing in the process any traffic to the platform that helped to create it in the first place.

Step 5: Profit. People who spent years asking, answering, and curating programming knowledge for free are now paying for that knowledge repacked in the model weights. The original knowledge base is essentially dead.

Question: What programming knowledge base will be used to train future models?

Are we at the Skynet moment where people will be totally cut out of the loop from now on?

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#197

Post by tokioyoyo »

embedding-shape wrote: post #34
nolok wrote: post #9

SO did that all to themselves when they decided they didn't want a community to form and that only question and answers mattered. The moment something else allowed to have a better way to get your answers, there was no reason to go there, because there was no community. I still don't understand why anyone would go with that whole "no conversation please"

SO had great humans contributing to their platform, even as AI began to serve as the new SO for a lot of people. Instead of going in the same direction of everyone else adding AI all over the place and trying to eliminate the humans, they could have gone the opposite direction and played to their somewhat unique strength of having a bunch of actual humans and providing a place that actually fostered human and authent…

An average joe like me didn’t go to SO for human interaction. I was there for an answer, and it’s just faster/better to query an LLM now. And what it looks like, majority of people are like me. No human interaction would resolve this demand problem.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#198

Post by puchatek »

suzzer99 wrote: post #191
nottorp wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants I used to look for questions to answer on my morning coffee. Then two things happened: 1. Rep chasers that rushed to answer anything with a copy/pasta from manuals (or at best semi related tutorials) showed up so there was no point or time in typing a complex answer. 2. Those long time users started downmodding "teach t…

At least 50% of the time on SO, the best answer is 3rd or worse, and I'm always thinking, "Why is this not the top answer?"

I might even find an upside in that if it wasn't for the fact that this stolen crowd sourced knowledge will be used to make some billionaires even richer.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#199

Post by fenomas »

lynndotpy wrote: post #24

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 still think SO was done in by the weird way they handled similar questions. They encouraged veteran users to flag new questions as dupes, even if the "original" question was years old and unanswered. Who does that even help?

Imagine if the system had let veteran users link a new question to an existing answer rather than a question, and if the asker finds it solves their problem they can accept it. At least that way new joiners would have a chance of getting their question answered.

Looking back it feels like SO was one of the first really gamified sites, and the people running it got weirdly focused on the point-economy aspect. They ran the site almost like "points" were a finite resource, and not to be handed out unless the user really deserved it.

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