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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

#541

Post by pwdisswordfishq »

pipes wrote: post #517
DrewADesign wrote: post #215

Earlier 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…

My 16 year old question was recently closed because it didn't follow the rules. It just seemed really petty. Edit: just checked it has been deleted so no longer visible to non moderators.

Was the title "What's wrong with this JavaScript code?"?

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#542

Post by pwdisswordfishq »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #428
pygy_ wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> if it is not perfect (e.g. does not have enough references)

Having references for claims is not "perfect"; it's basics. Which is especially becoming more relevant in the age of ever more rampant misinformation.

Take a look at the list of hoaxes below and wonder what would you have done to prevent them. With Wikipedia being open to editing by anybody, I don't think you could come up with anything better than the system currently in place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wi...

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#543

Post by pwdisswordfishq »

jl6 wrote: post #351
Sammi wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How good are the questions?

Here’s one: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79981854/how-to-run-mode... -5 points, closed as not related to software development. It’s not a particularly great question, but clearly a bunch of people were more interested in keeping their garden tidy than in helping someone learn.

So, they should allow questions about installing random software?

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#544

Post by matheusmoreira »

zahlman wrote: post #478
matheusmoreira wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is that supposed to somehow excuse the deletionism?

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#545

Post by pipes »

pwdisswordfishq wrote: post #541
pipes wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 16 year old question was recently closed because it didn't follow the rules. It just seemed really petty. Edit: just checked it has been deleted so no longer visible to non moderators.

Was the title "What's wrong with this JavaScript code?"?

Ha! No it was not :)

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#546

Post by mh- »

zahlman wrote: post #469
cs02rm0 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I'm no Jon Skeet, but I've had an account since 2009, I answered a question early on that's had well over 1000 upvotes, which I think is 10k of reputation for that answer alone. Yet I certainly couldn't ask…

Would you be willing to show questions you attempted to ask? I'd be happy to help explain how policy works/worked there.

We know how it works. That's why we all eventually gave up on helping people there (years before I knew what an LLM was.)

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#547

Post by ilaksh »

Stack Overflow abuse and the rage it generated in me is sort of nostalgic. Kind of sad in a way that I can't quite recall the rage anymore.

By the way, at least as far as what it is showing me，SO is an AI site now. Home page Ask a question goes straight to an LLM doing RAG against Stack Overflow.

Edit: actually they tricked me into asking AI. The text box to ask AI is right next to what is actually an Ask A Question button that skips the AI.

It's training data seems limited or out of date because it had no idea what Gemma 4 E2B was. It just said that wasn't in the SO data and could I explain wtf I was talking about please. I guess not Gemma 3 either. And no web search. So it's useless for me today.

Interestingly, the Stack Overflow AI answer is provided by OpenAI, and these may be the most useless responses I have seen any time recently.

Whaddyaknow. Got me a little twinge of the good ole' rage tingles after all!

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#548

Post by Yizahi »

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…

There can be a collaborative work site and there can be a chain of posts type of site (e.g. forum or reddit or HN here). But trying to mix these concepts without any control or organization procedures is, was and will always be considered ridiculous by a vast majority of humans in all spheres of life. If SO wished to be an iterative collab site, sure it may have done everything it did and allowed mods to pick and copy any answers and parts of answers into a new, better refined answer penned by them. But just allowing random edits of any posts by any author, just twisting what they said is absolutely idiotic and ask any internet user of any age, they will agree with me, not with SO policy.

Wikipedia is often brought into comparisons with SO either as something close or as something vastly different. But it doesn't matter atm. What I want to highlight is that SO allowed on it's site to essentially go to the Talks page of Wiki page and allow editing of all user comments to change their words in retrospect, and also allowing to go to the edit history allow edit that history too. This is what SO did, no wonder there are almost no humans who would approve this (after explicitly explained to them, SO is mostly banking of user's lack of full picture knowledge and ignorance).

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#549

Post by witrak »

zahlman wrote: post #478
matheusmoreira wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You dare to compare a Wikipedia article (even a short one) to an SE "article," which is, according to SE's own rules, narrowly and up-to-the-point concentrated on an equally narrow formulated question?

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#550

Post by Yizahi »

sackfield wrote: post #427

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…

In my opinion:

a) they choose a certain very specific ideal as a target, but utterly failed to convey that to a majority of site visitors;

b) their picked target and path visually and functionally matched by like 90% with a thing already existing for decades previously and very familiar to a majority of internet users - with a regular forum with sections and treads;

c) they make fundamental errors even inside the scope of their own ideal and vision - like for example apparently not taking into account that software with identical name can have different versions;

d) while they copied forum structure (failure B) they also failed to envision (or did a mistake in that) how the ideal target result would look like a long time in the future;

e) they failed to acknowledge all of the above, reflect on and fix own mistakes, instead they declared those mistakes "a culture" and persisted in deepening them;

Basically they picked a forum format, known at those times to literally everybody on the internet and decided to use it to make something vastly different, while failing both at communicating that intention and also failing at actually adapting UI and tools to better suit their target.

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