Does the peak starting in mid-2020 correspond to mass speculative / adversarial / bandwagon hiring by tech companies during the pandemic?
What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
381–390 of 615 posts
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#382Earlier 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…
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…
I put my name on my professional communications.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#383They didn’t stand a chance. Even in the era where they made a great community etc etc AI would have destroyed them. Other people are just a poor source of information now that we have dramatically good search across all human knowledge.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
People were willing to put up with SO in the before times, nobody was excited to ask a question, it was a dreadful experience. It was their UX that doomed them immediately. Reddit and HN are still here after all.
Reddit is full of bots instead of actual humans. Arguably, so is HN.
SO doesn’t even have bots.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
How good are the questions?
Why do questions need to be good? Often times, you don't know what you don't know.
The answer according to way too many SO mods is that a question should primarily be to contribute to the SO knowledge base. Asking simply to get an answer is selfish.
I wish SO had not been killed by chatbots, because I was looking forward to seeing it die by the gamified hands of its mob of mods.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#386I never had an LLM tell me my question was already answered and imply I was stupid for not finding it. SO dug its own grave and jumped in.
I see people talking about the negative experiences, and I'm sure they are real, but I also had some very positive experiences.
I remember being amazed that some internet stranger took the time to understand my question and provide some great solution where I was stuck. It gave me a little encouragement and social connection as I plugged away on a project alone.
I miss that feel good human connection when an LLM can quickly get me an answer.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#387I recall some moves where SO announced they would be revising ToS to disclose their intent to repackage and use the site’s content for sale and/or model training.
Contributors responded by going to delete their own respective contributions en masse. Upon doing so, were banned by the platform mid-process which then led to people going back to revise their contributions to be false rather than deleted.
I guess that’s “LLM related”
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think if you won't even admit that AI greatly accelerated these trends, you're in some kind of denial. There's no reason to believe that we would see a rapid coordinated decline in all of these things at the same time without AI, and strong reason to believe that we would see it with AI. So we have a model that makes testable predictions, and data strongly consistent with those testable predictions, in the form of…
>I think if you won't even admit that AI greatly accelerated these trends, you're in some kind of denial I think if you actually look at the data for these trends rather than asking AI what it thinks you might experience some cognitive dissonance. >There's no reason to believe that we would see a rapid coordinated decline in all of these things at the same time without AI It's called hiked interest rates. The economy…
Hiked interest rates cause a decline in Stackoverflow activity?
My answer doesn't change. Against the background of other phenomena already causing various trends, we see acceleration of those trends consistent with a testable hypothesis about the effects of AI adoption in industry. In most fields of science that's good evidence in favor of the model.
And no I didn't ask AI about it, this is my own opinion and my own perspective.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Social media has been a fascinating experiment in human behaviour. We’ve long had discussion forums built around technical topics, from the early days of Usenet, through the likes of Slashdot and Digg, the arrival of Stack Overflow, and today the popularity of Reddit and some smaller sites like HN. Each has developed its own culture. Each has dealt with the need to prioritise the most valuable contributions and reduc…
Re: quis custodiet ipsos custodes...
Slashdot has a meta-moderation setup where random users (with at least a minimum tenure and rating on the site) would get to vote on the quality of the moderation for randomly selected posts. I still think that this has a lot of potential for improving moderation, even if it's just used as a way of ferriting out problematic moderation.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
- Open issue on GitHub issues: Maintainer closes issue citing "Bug reports only" - Open question on SO: Moderators close because it's too specific to a library - Ask on IRC: Get piled on for not using the right vocabulary and your IP isn't masked - Ask the LLM: Get hallucinated answer based on old API docs - Ask technical lead: Get burned for asking basic question and put on PIP - Ask my mom: She doesn't know enough…
SO allows questions that are specific to a library.
I like that out of all of them, that was the most false to you.