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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

#471

Post by kstrauser »

zahlman wrote: post #464
kstrauser wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I reverted nearly every single edit to my answers other than obvious typos. If I’d have meant something other than what I said, I’d have said it. You want to see your own words on the page? Write an answer of your own. Lordy, that use to piss me off most fiercely. I don’t want someone else’s words attributed to me.

It is taken very seriously in Stack Overflow editing policy that edits are not supposed to go against the author's apparent intent. But it does involve removing a lot of things that you might want the answer to say, but don't meet the guidelines for what answers are supposed to contain. When you join the site, you agree to Terms and Conditions that, among other things, grant a Creative Commons license to the communit…

That's ridiculous and you're wrong. I grant them a CC license to my content to fold, spindle and mutilate it for their own purposes, but not to leave my name attached to the folded, spindled, mutilated version.

My answer has my name on it. It's right there saying "kstrauser said these words". If I didn't say them, I don't want the site lying and saying that I did. I don't mind if someone fixes an obvious typo, or updates a URL that had bitrotted. That's fine. They're what I obvious intended to say. But I've had people add extra sentences or paragraphs, and oh hell no.

That was never a core principle of the site, at least not when I joined it before you. If it'd been an expressed core principle that people could edit my words, attributed to me, so that my user account ends up saying things I never said, I never would have signed up and not many other people would have, either.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#472

Post by zahlman »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #321
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…

If it wasn't so controlled it'd might as well have just been reddit. I agree there's a balance, and maybe they edged over the line, but I was consistently happy to have the following be the outcomes 1. Answers were reasonably close to correct, usable, informative (teaching) 2. Your site score came to mean something -- I once had a hiring CTO say "Oh you have some popular answers on the techs we use" 3. Progressive un…

> Your site score came to mean something -- I once had a hiring CTO say "Oh you have some popular answers on the techs we use"

This was a bad idea, and worked terribly.

I have over 1800 answers on the site, many of them detailed, well-considered, long answers to difficult problems. But my highest rated answer by far was to someone asking two completely different questions at once (both of which have far better individual versions) in a way that was barely comprehensible even after multiple attempts by the community to rewrite in something approximating proper English.

For reference, the original version, verbatim:

> if I have list of numbers as [1,2,3,4,5...........etc ] and I want to calculate as that (2+1)/2 and for the second (2+3)/2 third (3+4)/2 ...... etc

> how can do as that ? like sum the first point with the second and divide it by 2 .. then sum the second with third point then divide it by 2 .... etc ?

> also how can i sum a list of number ? a = [1,2,3,4,5,......ect ]

> is it:

> b = sum(a) print b

> in i get one number !? it doesn't work with me help me plz

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#473

Post by zahlman »

dannyw wrote: post #459
maerF0x0 wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it wasn't so controlled it'd might as well have just been reddit. I agree there's a balance, and maybe they edged over the line, but I was consistently happy to have the following be the outcomes 1. Answers were reasonably close to correct, usable, informative (teaching) 2. Your site score came to mean something -- I once had a hiring CTO say "Oh you have some popular answers on the techs we use" 3. Progressive un…

In my opinion, the main thing was toxic moderation and the general lack of effort in creating a welcoming or constructive environment. Moderation and community accessibility can exist. I think your points have described the early SO, but moderation has definitely gone downhill as the years went on. I’m not new to communities with their own culture, expectations, and rules. I do edit Wikipedia from time to time, and w…

> I do edit Wikipedia from time to time, and while you can always find drama everywhere, newbies are welcomed not thrown rule books.

I've lost count of the times that other editors insisted that I log into my account and stop posting anonymously, for committing the sin of actually understanding policy (after spending inordinate amounts of time reading back-room pages that most people wouldn't even know how to find). And I've seen countless others yelled at for not understanding it.

But imagine if 99% of people who came to Wikipedia sincerely believed that it was completely appropriate to go to the page for dogs, and edit the main-space page to ask whether Rover needs to see a vet. That's how it felt for me on the inside of Stack Overflow. I went out of my way to place the rulebook neatly in their hands and hardly anyone cared.

But the actual "culture, expectations and rules" of SO are not "if you want to know something, you can come and post as if you were using a traditional discussion forum and are not expected to consider anything or anyone outside of that".

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#474

Post by zahlman »

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.

> As someone who came into the industry in college, the problem with SO was simply that it was too hard to ask a question.

That's because you were intended to use the site like GP describes, and not by asking simply because you want to know something.

> They were up your ass about minutia that really didn't matter.

What you consider "minutia" were critically important, because the entire point was to optimize for GP's experience.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#475

Post by LAC-Tech »

otterdude wrote: post #305

Where will AI's get the training data to answer questions now?

Right, there's a lot of schadenfreude about SA not being so popular and serves them right for being mean when I asked them a question... but it was also no doubt a gold mine of AI training data. Stands to reason this may be an agentic AI golding age, as future models just eating their own data.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#476

Post by zahlman »

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…

> 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".

Please show examples. People arguing that XYZ is not a duplicate made up a large fraction of volume on the meta site, and in the overwhelming majority of cases it was very clear that the question was indeed a duplicate per site policy. It absolutely was not something people would do "just because these two questions related to the same library". (If it were really like that, tags would never get more than one question each.)

The goal is not that you can copy and paste code from the answer and have it work as-is. Minimally, we don't know your variable names, constants etc. and any number of other trivial details like that which perhaps shape the problem you are facing but are completely irrelevant to the question.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#477

Post by zahlman »

xeromal wrote: post #319
cogman10 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Meanwhile, I saw so many people come to the meta site apparently completely unable to understand that a question leading off with "what do you think is the best..." (almost literally, in many cases!) is asking for a subjective opinion, that I had to make an artificial meta-canonical for it (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/434806).

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#478

Post by zahlman »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #420
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…

Stack Exchange has degenerated to the point of overt deletionism . It wasn't enough to just close the questions, they actually felt the need to delete the content people put effort into writing as well. There's nothing quite like trying to find a closed question that nonetheless had useful answers and comments with links, only to find that the entire thing had been deleted . They even do this in those beta sites whic…

> overt deletionism. It wasn't enough to just close the questions, they actually felt the need to delete the content people put effort into writing as well.

The site has more than three times as many publicly-visible questions as Wikipedia has articles. And that's with the scope restricted to just programming.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#479

Post by mark-r »

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…

The founders of SO had a theory, that irrelevant noise was what drove a site into insignificance over time. Even if it was just polite chit-chat. They took pains to automate out as much as they could, and put in place a culture that actively discouraged and removed it when possible. That culture remains even though the founders are long gone.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#480

Post by hungryhobbit »

zahlman wrote: post #458
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 Only in terms of asking new questions, because this was never intended to be the primary use of the site. The entire point of the model is that one person asking a good question could save many others the effort of asking — and answering. But everyone who made an account had permission right off the bat to propose edits to questions and answers, for exam…

I disagree. Stack Overflow was made to succeed, not fail ... originally.

Then the founders left, and meta basically chronicles the echo chamber of mistakes made. It's not the intent: that was to help coders code. Meta was dominated by people who lost the intent, and wanted to build a library.

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