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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

#231

Post by faangguyindia »

chuckadams wrote: post #204
faangguyindia wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s very easy to destroy a specific sub (if it’s not too big and doesn’t have half a dozen mods).

it's like those ddos rings, but works on social networks.

You can create a sub and a Discord group, then ask people in the Discord group to launch a mass report against your competing sub and its moderators. You can use scanners to find questionable stuff that you can report, and more often than not, this will get the mod banned. If the sub doesn’t have multiple mods (with unique IPs, as Reddit tracks fingerprints), the sub is now in the hands of Reddit’s mod team.

Back then it was not this easy, but now with AI and residential IPs you can create lots of fake users and reports etc... and take almost any avg redditor down.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#233

Post by porksoda »

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…

Never had one closed, only ever bothered posting twice. One obscure tumbleweed issue that slowly turned into something I was quite proud of... And one that was so unpleasant a little experience I never came back. Nothing serious just god why.

What was my point... Oh right. I don't assume anyone's making this stuff up. The pla

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#235

Post by evilduck »

Sammi wrote: post #217
unreal37 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How good are the questions?

Does it matter? A site and community that refuses to allow or accommodate anyone to grow and learn as a new user will quickly run out of users. The gatekeeping on SO is a blockade, not a teaching mechanism.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#236

Post by AndrewKemendo »

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…

>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

This is significantly under selling it.

Stack overflow was like most of the forums in the late 90s in the early 2000s: hostile to anybody who wasn’t “l33t” hence the beginning of all the bullshit “l33tcode” mess.

I started writing software in 1996 as a 12 year-old and the sheer hostility that you would get from forums or even just reaching out to individual developers was absolutely unbelievable

I remember distinctly, I specifically reached out to Seth Robinson, as a 13-year-old kid who liked the dink smallwood game and was interested in building video game level editors.

His response to me was something like: “My rate for consulting is $800 a week.”

At no point in my 30+ years of being in software has software ever felt inclusive

I mean consider the hacker news is widely considered to be one of the most hostile communities on the Internet to new people, and had that reputation since day one

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#237

Post by mark-r »

There's no need (or reason) to blame AI. Between the culture of discouraging new questions as seen in the comments on this thread, and the fact that Google can easily find existing answers, the value of asking new questions has clearly gone way down.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#238

Post by no-name-here »

znpy wrote: post #229
no-name-here wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Even if the pleasantries/signature were edited out of your question, is that so bad? Yes. Erasing the personal touch out of someone’s writings is erasing them. Ironically, erasing that kind of stuff is likely very good good for training large language models.

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

> Erasing the personal touch out of someone’s writings is erasing them.

Yeah, as I mentioned in the grandparent comment, I think the site was better thought of as a wiki of questions/answers than a forum. Including things like pleasantries/signatures on a wiki-adjacent site probably is not the right use for that kind of site. (Personally, I was incredibly frustrated by SO but for a very different reason - edits to questions or answers, etc. that fixed typos, pointing out that an answer's linked app had been down for years, etc. were often rejected.)

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