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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

#481

Post by notatoad »

morningsam wrote: post #87
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"

That basic idea is what made SO attractive in the first place, compared to forums where you had to scroll through pages and pages of in-jokes and tangents and animated-GIF signatures just to try and see if there is an answer. Where they went wrong, in my opinion, is in the implementation details. It's mostly death by a thousand cuts: Requiring reputation to gain the ability to post comments, then having one's answers…

From my perspective it wasn’t death by a thousand cuts, it all comes back to just one cut: an over-reliance on volunteer moderators. If they paid staff to run their communities, they could have issued a simple “don’t be a dick or we’ll fire you” rule. But because they relied on volunteers, they had to cater to those volunteers to keep them. And the volunteers drove the site into ruin to make it a better experience for moderators.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#482

Post by hungryhobbit »

iwontberude wrote: post #426
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

Wikipedia is supposed to be a reference. SO was supposed to help programmers program.

The former continues to succeed, with hiccups, because they remember their goal. The latter is dead, and it failed because it tried to be the former, forgetting their goal.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#483

Post by hungryhobbit »

mark-r wrote: post #479
znpy wrote: post #134

Earlier 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…

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.

The founders left, and it went downhill as a result.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#484

Post by amanaplanacanal »

zahlman wrote: post #466
jay_kyburz wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gamification was a key reason the site became popular, but as the site grew, the rules and game mechanics did not evolve. An edit that made a response worse should have knocked the mod down so that they were unable to mod any more. The quality of the edit should have been determined by the original author. "Did this edit make your question better?" Moderators should have been ranked and scored based on their abil…

> An edit that made a response worse should have knocked the mod down so that they were unable to mod any more. Literally everyone on the site is permitted to propose an edit, and everyone with at least 2000 reputation can make unilateral edits. The proposals are approved by a 2 out of 3 majority of random unilateral-edit-privileged users. None of this is considered "moderation" and is not done by "mods". Of millions…

So they have essentially killed the site. Congratulations I guess?

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#485

Post by cogman10 »

zahlman wrote: post #476
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…

> 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 c…

Christ, this is actually the SO problem in a nutshell.

I'm not going to go dig through SO to refind the examples of improperly "closed as duplicate" questions I stumbled on years ago while looking up a problem.

It's just not that important to me for a dead site. I get it, that means "just trust me bro" is in play. Feel free to completely ignore my comment in that case. You win.

SO was filled with this sort of "technically this is a duplicate and you are just a nasty rule breaker" style comments with litigation that ultimately goes nowhere. I'm not on SO.

Others experienced and are reporting here and elsewhere experiencing the harsh moderation of SO. Trying to make that subjective feeling technically wrong does nothing to rehabilitate SO's reputation.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#486

Post by theendisney »

democracy wrote: post #397
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…

They chose being controlled and not being Reddit - I can imagine lots of ways to do both - still they chose the toxic way and now they are dead, goal achieved.

Early o. On some irc channels, forums and usenet groups the greatest trolls, clowns and crazy users were also the most knowlegable and the most helpful. They had to earn the right to misbehave. The secret sause was that anything goes but if something on topic comes along that is the only topic.

Also a wonderful formula was to promote your own website in a signature on blogs and forums. If your comment isnt worth having it is just deleted. You had to work for it and the reward was good. If your sig is a giant banner more effort is expected.

Also oddly interesting was moderation depending on how much money you sunk into the product.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#488

Post by zmmmmm »

NetOpWibby wrote: post #461
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 say this every time the topic of SO/AI comes up. LLMs took off for me when I realized I didn't have to be an expert to ask questions and get a non-patronizing response. There was a time when I asked something along the lines of, "How do you get your own protocol like http://?" and was told to take my question to another StackExchange site. This happened several more times (along with dismissive responses and votes…

this for me was one of the truly liberating parts of LLMs for me: simply being able to ask a question and get a straight answer without having to run the gauntlet of why I shouldn't be doing what I am trying to do in the first place. The friction of trying to explain why I still wanted to do it that way deterred me from asking so many questions.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#489

Post by amanaplanacanal »

inigyou wrote: post #369
znpy wrote: post #134

Earlier 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…

Ending a question with "thanks" is explicitly forbidden because it is noise.

This sounds similar to the people who think that using normal pleasantries in conversation wastes everybody's time.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#490

Post by ivankra »

qingcharles wrote: post #201
b112 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, there's a lot of really good data on Stack Overflow, regardless of all the issues. I hope somebody saves it all.

For better or for worse, the contents of Stack Overflow are literally the reason LLM coding has taken over the world.

No, that's been mainly due to RLVR.
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