441–450 of 615 posts
On the rare occasion that I DO want to go there, they greet me with an impossible gate that takes 15+ seconds to pass on Brave and gets invalidated quickly.
If anyone from SE is reading this: you already failed to protect your data from the LLM crawlers, SE is no longer that much interesting to them. The only visitors you're gating today are not bots, they're humans.
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…
It was a good resource but absolutely toxic to newcomers.
Good Riddance to SO.
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> 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 s…
There was something good and glorious about that, but that era is gone. Wikipedia and Stack Overflow are done, finished, cooked - what comes next?
If I want LLMs to belittle and passive-aggressively mock me while providing borderline help, I can prompt them to do that. But I could never turn that off on stackoverflow.
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No, of course not coincidence. It's just that people didn't have an alternative until 2021-ish. Users hated SO for many years prior, but had nowhere to go other than small niche communities. When LLMs came into play, it was just the obvious choice. In an alternate universe, where LLMs didn't exist, I bet you SO would be equally dead by this decade. Someone better, with healthier values and a more welcoming community,…
If stack overflow was universally loved, AI would still kill it. People here seem to be so emotionally invested in hating stack overflow that they seem to think AI was like ~10% of the reason it died, when it was 95%.
And yes, it's possible AI would have killed it anyway, despite its best efforts. But in this version of parallel universes, AI was only a catalyst. Its fate was sealed well before 2020.
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> Ask yourself: in what year did it become difficult to ask questions on Stack Overflow? 2014? 2016? 2018? 2020? The year that Google made "open source contribution" a checkbox on your annual review. That's when almost ALL these types of sites went to dogshit. And then everybody followed Google which then weaponized it even more. Once Google made Fake Internet Points(tm) worth actual money via your annual review , al…
You’re actually on to something here, and it’s a phenomenon beyond Google that has engendered tons of blogspam and AIslop and manual LinkedIn slop. Many professional certifications require bearers to earn CEUs. One way these may be earned is by blogging or doing demonstrations. So if you see a bunch of entry-level techbros doing really boring blog entries or posting to LinkedIn, you should know that they intend to ea…
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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.
I was going through some answers on a stackoverflow thread, and noticed that every single one had been edited by the same guy, just.. adding his own personal opinions and 'corrections' to them, and in the process making them universally worse and less correct The idea that answers should be editable, and the gamification of stackoverflow, was an absolutely terrible combination
Lordy, that use to piss me off most fiercely. I don’t want someone else’s words attributed to me.
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It’s moderation policies, or maybe just moderators themselves that killed it, this was apparent before AI, but there was no alternative… until suddenly there was.
This. I left SO before AI because moderators were terrible.
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The one advantage of actually trying to use SO was that the fear of asking a question usually made me do so much research that I'd solve my issue in the process of fully describing it. That did also make the community lose out on the answer though.
You can write a self-answered question.