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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

#201

Post by qingcharles »

b112 wrote: post #148
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…

You know, there's a lot of really good data on Stack Overflow, regardless of all the issues. I hope somebody saves it all.

For better or for worse, the contents of Stack Overflow are literally the reason LLM coding has taken over the world.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#202

Post by zzril »

kittoes wrote: post #186
JustRouzbeh wrote: post #177

It’s pretty sad though. Like many developers, I used Stack Overflow a lot when I was starting out, and it helped me solve countless early programming problems A lot of what we have today was built with help from that community

The community did themselves no favors. I personally don't have any issues whatsoever dealing with it, but the overwhelming majority of my coworkers over the past decade haven't ever asked a single question. They saw how others were treated or heard about horror stories from some of the few souls who made the attempt and went "Why bother?"

I have never actively asked a question on SO either. But for every programming question I ever had (literally!), I always either found the solution to it, or the reason why my question was stupid. (Which usually boils down to me not understanding sthg about the technology I'm working with.)

Digging my way through old SO posts has tought me so much... but now, it's AI time and I find myself pasting my questions into a prompt most of the time, rather of thinking about what the correct keywords to google would be. Which, in a way, is faster, but at the same time I now feel like I'm not learning anything new anymore...

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#203

Post by unreal37 »

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…

I just went to the Stack Overflow homepage, showing newest questions first, and the latest question just asked 13 minutes ago is already closed.

And the majority of the questions on page 1 have negative votes.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#204

Post by chuckadams »

faangguyindia wrote: post #73
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"

Reddit is on the same track. What I've noticed is that moderators have become increasingly hostile. Reddit's AI moderation, which is designed to remove AI slop, has removed multiple top contributors I used to follow on programming, electronics, bodybuilding, welding, machining, and 3Dprinting subs. And the worst part is that Reddit site admins have no idea about this. I know a guy who reckons he can get any account b…

Reddit has many different subs that suffer from its problems in different degrees, so there's still islands of relative calm and sanity, usually in low-traffic subs. To some extent this was also true of different sites in the overall StackExchange network, but SO itself always dominated the network, it was designed and run as a monoculture, and that culture was, well ... gestures vaguely in SO's direction

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#205

Post by unreal37 »

fenomas wrote: post #199
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 wa…

I will say, moderation is a valuable thing on websites that intend to be useful for people. Wikipedia being another example. Ynews also has moderation.

Sites like Quora don't have good moderation (nor social media sites) and they become less useful for "how do I do X" questions.

LLMs do the moderation of the underlying source and just give you the answer.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#206

Post by no-name-here »

znpy wrote: post #134
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…

> 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, deroga…

1. Even if the pleasantries/signature were edited out of your question, is that so bad?

2. But yeah, I think of SO as not really being set up like a bulletin board - I think of it as closer to a wiki of questions and their answers.

3. Maybe other people editing out pleasantries/signature is actually a good thing as others will then see your question as higher quality?

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#207

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

eknkc wrote: post #183
znpy wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, deroga…

I once had a fairly popular answer to a general question that included the word “mankind.” Someone changed it to “humankind,” another person changed that to “humans,” and eventually someone removed it altogether for no apparent reason. Then even more pointless edits followed. It became far too much hassle for absolutely no benefit.

There was a gold badge given out if you got 100 edits approved. And another if you got 100 edits reversed.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#208

Post by faangguyindia »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #153
budsniffer952 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It's so weird how slightly different usage can create vastly different experiences and impressions of a site. I wouldn't really describe Reddit as "politically biased to the left", but I never go to the front page, just a few select subs. I don't see any political bias in subs about Hollow Knight or weed. I DO see bias in my country's political site, but it swings all over the place depending on who's in power at the…

often people make a sub, it gets popular because of specific content. then the original mod gets banned, now their sub is orphan and reddit team assigns it to someone else.

many times you'll notice the new mod became active as a contributor on specific sub only 2-3 days before the OG mod gets banned and sub declared orphan.

Coincidence?

How can reddit even hand over a sub to someone who has nothing to do with a community? Simply because they install and control who controls the sub.

Mods get "comment/post removal" power, so they use it to shape the community towards specific "narrative", there is no audit trail for any mod specific actions unless you are a mod you perhaps can't see what all a mod is doing on a sub.

Also, they can simply make an automod/bot rule which simply removes your comment by creating a rule with your username after that you'll not know your comment is gone but others will not see it!

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#209

Post by masfuerte »

nolok wrote: post #152
morningsam wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That basic idea is what made SO attractive in the first place, compared to forums where you had to scroll through pages and pages of in-jokes and tangents and animated-GIF signatures just to try and see if there is an answer. Where they went wrong, in my opinion, is in the implementation details. It's mostly death by a thousand cuts: Requiring reputation to gain the ability to post comments, then having one's answers…

The entire gamification was great in the beginning but ended up working against them rather than for. It should have evolved into something else.

Yes. There were far too many people with nothing to contribute doing useless (or actively harmful) busywork to earn points.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#210

Post by brador »

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…

The math subreddit is awful. Accusing everyone of asking homework questions if they weren’t formatted in perfect math notation.

Then there’s the godot subreddit. Asked 2 questions? That’s a ban.

Imagine a child learning math or game dev coming up against that.

I’d quit. Curiosity extinguished.

The godot github has one of those characters now too. Really anti new user. I worry, I worry.

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