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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

#421

Post by matheusmoreira »

brap wrote: post #161
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 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.

Once had a question closed for asking about something explicitly permitted in the site's own rules. Had to quote the rules back at them.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#424

Post by NooneAtAll3 »

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…

my experience with reddit has been much more about its politization rather than anything about quality

"my side is right, the other is wrong" - has been too common of an occurrence, both in comments but also in posts and such frontpages as /r/all

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#425

Post by lovich »

mancerayder wrote: post #394
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…

One of the biggest flaws of the site was the ability to close questions as 'Duplicate' or similar. Multiple times I would google a problem, the SO question was exactly as asked the first result, half-answers or 'Closed as Duplicate', then you click on the supposed "duplicate" and the nuance was totally missed. The other was the 'ability to read the room.' Even late-stage SO had the 'mods' not understand that they wer…

I really enjoyed asking questions where I linked a similar answered question, went through the details that caused my problem to be mechanically different or rendered the other answer as not possible, and then having a moderator close it as a duplicate and link the answer half my post had been dedicated to explaining the difference.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#426

Post by iwontberude »

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…

So I guess Wikipedia will eventually face the same fate

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#427

Post by sackfield »

One thing I wonder, if you look at the comments here it is clear the moderation and the general hostility of the site was a big reason why a lot of people left or didn't engage with it. Yet, I can't recall SO doing anything about this, and its confusing to me why. Was it:

a) They don't acknowledge this was a problem.

b) They are unwilling to tackle this problem.

c) They are unable to tackle this problem.

I'd love to know what the people who run the site (from a business perspective) think about this. It might offer some insight into its cousins that are going down the same path (reddit / wikipedia).

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#428

Post by Viliam1234 »

pygy_ wrote: post #323
dfabulich wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The graph proves the cause of their decline was AI, and not aggressive question moderation. Ask yourself: in what year did it become difficult to ask questions on Stack Overflow? 2014? 2016? 2018? 2020? Aggressive question-closing was part of their design from the very beginning. Their high barriers to question-asking was the cause of their rise , as their primary user was never question writers: it was Google, and a…

> The same thing is happening to Wikipedia, BTW, which is also aggressively moderated [citation needed] Well here it is, and you're wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics The article creation and edits curves are stable. The former growing at a slightly declining pace, which is expected since the amount of knowledge is finite. The latter is literally flat. The monthly page views are in decline on m…

> The article creation [...] growing at a slightly declining pace, which is expected since the amount of knowledge is finite.

Not just because of that, but they also made the process of creating new articles very hostile.

Decades ago, when Wikipedia started, it was possible to create a short article, and as long as no one objected against it, it stayed there, and people could later expand it. That's what "wiki" was supposed to mean.

Today, you need to create an article in a separate "Draft" namespace, then a random Wikipedia editor will judge it, and if it is not perfect (e.g. does not have enough references), it cannot be published. And if you don't fix it by a certain date, it gets automatically deleted. (Rather than leaving it there for someone else to hopefully improve.)

I tried to make an article for an author whose books my kids liked. His books were translated to many languages, he won a few awards, and now some company has bought movie rights for the books. Alas, I have failed to establish notability sufficiently in my short article, so it was rejected. The editor didn't even have to argue that the author is not notable (which would be silly, a google search clearly shows otherwise), only that my article failed to establish it. So the official policy now kinda says that it is better to have no article rather than an imperfect one.

Well, I am not getting paid for producing perfect articles for Wikipedia, which means there is no way for me to contribute anymore. Too bad, I have created a few articles long ago.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#429

Post by encyclopedism »

TomMasz wrote: post #89

I 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.

LLM's are the primary cause of SO decline. Largely due to LLM's having scraped SO (and everything else available on the WWW). It's the reason there is a decline in traffic across the web i.e. Wikipedia. LLM's surface the required search query or info directly.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#430

Post by throwaway2037 »

dfabulich wrote: post #294
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 graph proves the cause of their decline was AI, and not aggressive question moderation. Ask yourself: in what year did it become difficult to ask questions on Stack Overflow? 2014? 2016? 2018? 2020? Aggressive question-closing was part of their design from the very beginning. Their high barriers to question-asking was the cause of their rise , as their primary user was never question writers: it was Google, and a…

    > The same thing is happening to Wikipedia
Can you explain? I am read-only there and it seems better than ever. Even in the era of LLMs, Wiki is still an awesome source.
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