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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

#311

Post by sph »

I used to read Coding Horror, I have been a programmer for longer than I had high speed Internet, yet somehow I never felt the urge to create a StackOverflow account. I have literally never browsed the site, always landed from Google and left when I found my answer.

There was an era of the Internet where moderators were seen as the solution to all the problems of Internet communities. Then we discovered that those people that enjoy playing petty bureaucrat for virtual karma will end up alienating normal users, especially in places that wants to maintain a certain standard of quality and not aim to the lowest denominator like Reddit, for example.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#312

Post by cogman10 »

xeromal wrote: post #295
rdiddly wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect I'm similar to many users, in that I came to Stack Overflow near the peak, and used it as basically a specialized search engine, without ever asking or answering a question. (I assume this is possible only if you use a widespread stack.) When something better came along, I just moved on. I hadn't directly experienced a sense of community, so I experienced (for example) bureaucratically-closed questions more…

As someone who came into the industry in college, the problem with SO was simply that it was too hard to ask a question. They were up your ass about minutia that really didn't matter. Good riddance and can't wait to visit the site and see an EOL static page.

One of the more annoying things about SO was they'd pretty frequently misclassify new questions.

Sometimes a new question was in fact a duplicate and should be closed as such. But in the quest to close duplicates I pretty frequently had to argue with the reviewer that "No, this isn't a duplicate just because these two questions related to the same library".

SO practically rewarded this sort of over-policing which I think is a big part of why everyone stopped using it.

And people stopping using it meant that when a question did actually make it through the gauntlet, it was likely to go unanswered because everyone who knew anything had left the platform.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#313

Post by pygy_ »

DrewADesign wrote: post #215
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…

Their rules, (I believe unintentionally) give iron-fisted fiefdom rulers a toolbox of justifications to control and alienate under the guise of protecting the quality of the site data. I honestly don’t even think most of the control freak mods could objectively judge the propriety of their actions because it was all encouraged by the rules. (And I do not think this was universal among the mods, but it was certainly e…

I remember having to fight a mod for him to restore a reply penned by Mike Pall, to a LuaJIT question.

Mike Pall is the author of LuaJIT.

The reply had been either deleted or edited to the point of being wrong (memory is foggy), because Mike Pall wasn't an expert at SO, and had somehow not used the site exactly as intended. The mod was very dismissive and patronizing.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#314

Post by sfn42 »

evilduck wrote: post #235
Sammi wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How else do you help people learn if not by giving feedback? As an avid helper in a programming related discord channel I need you to understand that a lot of the people who come to these places for help are incredibly stupid. It's not uncommon to have to converse with a person for 15+ minutes just to get them to give you enough information to understand what their problem is. Like they will just paste an error message or a big incomplete block of code and say "help". What are you trying to do? What isn't working? How is it not working?

They don't understand that we need information to help them. They will get offended when you ask them to elaborate. They won't understand the answer no matter how much you simplify it. They just want their problem solved with the least possible amount of effort on their part.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#315

Post by Noumenon72 »

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…

This is an example of a functional cultural trait -- question and answer style should not be larded up with irrelevant pleasantries and redundant signatures that waste time for everyone reading the question thereafter. They took the time to fix it for you and you should have assimilated.

This is different from closing your question and depriving you of an answer or making you feel dumb. It's just teaching you how to communicate professionally.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#316

Post by BrandoElFollito »

SO is the second thing I liked that was broken via "we cannot have nice things". The first one was UseNet.

I was on SO for 14 years, with an accumulated rep of a few hundred thousands. At the beginning the crisp philosophy of the site was great: a question, and answers. Sometimes comments. I believe it set the tone to questions today, without the hello everyone at the beginning and kind regards at the end. The aesthetics of the site were good too.

And then, somewhere around 2018 I think, things started to go south. Meta became a lair of psychopaths with an ego they could not loft. Asking a question over there meant immediate downvotes.

Then came the elitist groups, such as in the Golang section. I asked nice questions that were immediately downvoted at nauseam. This was not the case in other groups where you could find actual help.

Some other SE sites went that way too (cybersecurity, some linuxes) and I gave up completely.

There are however wonderful, more or less niche sites that are still there (LaTeX, cooking, ... ← please do not break them), they thrive because they are small-ish and the egos do not fly too high.

Otherwise I moved to asking questions on Reddit, which is a ht or miss.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#317

Post by cogman10 »

totalizator wrote: post #309
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…

My SO account is 10 years old. The comment if kind of liberating for me as I never got past that inclusion barrier and I never got the chance to upvote the posts that helped me most. May the old answers keep compiling in the weights, since nobody's reading the originals anymore.

I did, and it wasn't much better on the other side.

And funnily enough, the questions that I answered that most contributed to getting me through the gauntlet years later were closed at duplicates (they weren't).

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#318

Post by zuzululu »

people deride stackoverflow but has anybody been in those chat rooms? i've never encountered such hostile and arrogant mod and crowd. its the same frustration majority of the population have with people who take things literally and dissect every little thing you say to the point of being weird.

i dont feel guilty for creating a few hundredsaccounts on there to essentially get coding work done for free in the early days. I would have a script where I ask a question in the laziest way possible, post my code, and wait till some sucker fixed it for me. On a good day I could get roughly 16~21 questions answered. If they blocked me I would just use another account. I would also upvote my own questions if i wanted to get them answered quickly. eventually all of the accounts got banned but I've been able to ship a SaaS in php with barely knowing the language.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#319

Post by xeromal »

cogman10 wrote: post #312
xeromal wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who came into the industry in college, the problem with SO was simply that it was too hard to ask a question. They were up your ass about minutia that really didn't matter. Good riddance and can't wait to visit the site and see an EOL static page.

One of the more annoying things about SO was they'd pretty frequently misclassify new questions. Sometimes a new question was in fact a duplicate and should be closed as such. But in the quest to close duplicates I pretty frequently had to argue with the reviewer that "No, this isn't a duplicate just because these two questions related to the same library". SO practically rewarded this sort of over-policing which I t…

Yeah, I had several questions popped for being an "opinion" question whatever that means. lol.

Do you remember how power users would edit your question just for the gamification of it. Drove me nuts

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