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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

#581

Post by frollogaston »

bluedino wrote: post #15
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"

There used to also be fun, and somewhat interesting questions to answer or discuss. It quickly turned into simple questions and "send me the codes"

Once or twice someone on SO used their chat feature to help me out after I asked a question, back when I was a n00b. That was really kind of them. Eventually, once I actually knew my stuff, I spent some time answering good questions on there. And yeah I had to be discerning.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#582

Post by [deleted] »

NordStreamYacht wrote: post #90
faangguyindia wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Reddit turned toxic long ago, like ten years ago and they brought in Ellen Pao to fix things, and she somehow managed to make things worse.

[deleted]

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#583

Post by frollogaston »

inigyou wrote: post #373
baq wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People were willing to put up with SO in the before times, nobody was excited to ask a question, it was a dreadful experience. It was their UX that doomed them immediately. Reddit and HN are still here after all.

Reddit is full of bots instead of actual humans. Arguably, so is HN.

Reddit was full of fake users even day 1, they admitted to bootstrapping the website that way.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#584

Post by simplesocieties »

I don’t have some grand theory on SO’s downfall. All I will say is that sometimes us programmers try to optimize every single thing in life and that’s simply not how humans work.

SO tried to optimize the Q/A by eagerly rejecting repeat questions, without considering what the consequences of that were. If you’re in a classroom / lecture hall, your teacher / professor isn’t going to chide you for asking an “obvious” or “repeat” question (bad ones might). Imagine if every time you wanted to talk to a TA or professor you first needed to lookup previously asked questions in a database and then, iff your question hasn’t been asked before, you may ask the professor or TA after hours. Programmers might call this system “efficient” but most people would be pretty unhappy with it.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#585

Post by Athari »

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.

Out of 10 times I asked for this, somebody replied with a link once. Most people do understand that they have violated the rules, they just don't agree with the rules.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#586

Post by juanpicardo »

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"

In an age where we all get the same generic answer from LLMs, SO could have been the place to have meaningful conversations on tech topics. Instead they became irrelevant

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#588

Post by cogman10 »

zahlman wrote: post #551
cogman10 wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "techni…

> It's just not that important to me for a dead site. I get it, that means "just trust me bro" is in play. See, this is the part where I'm actually getting insulted by the invocation of the "bro" language. No; what's happening here is that my lived experience as a curator of the site (which was quite stressful) is being denied, and it is supposed that evidence to counter me is not necessary. This isn't about "winning…

> a community, and communities are supposed to have a right to self-determination.

Your comment can be boiled down to this. And yes, I completely agree with you that a site has the right to operate however it pleases.

But that does not mean a site has the right to be free from outside criticism. Exercising your self-determination in a way that is obviously noxious will get called out, which is the right of an outsider.

Your perspective, frankly, doesn't matter. It won't rehabilitate the reputation of SO. I'm sorry this hurts as you've obviously invested a lot of time there. This isn't a problem of "everyone just doesn't understand the site" or "everyone should understand me".

Sites die when the experience isn't something end users enjoy. That's what happened to SO. No amount of rule litigation and self determination changes the perspective of the users. SO was a Q&A site that bent towards shutting down the Q&A section of the site as much as possible because of "curation". No wonder most people asking and answering questions decided "You know what, what's the point?"

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#589

Post by shagie »

zahlman wrote: post #559
hungryhobbit wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Atwood and Spolsky were quite explicit, on multiple occasions, about what they wanted the site to be. That vision was not compatible with having a site with millions of users and millions of questions, because the masses simply aren't interested in the kind of interaction that the vision required. They may not have understood this at the time. But it's clear that the early community attempted a lot of gatekeeping, mu…

https://blog.codinghorror.com/farewell-stack-exchange/

Jeff had stepped away in 2012.

While there was some lingering activity in 2013 and 2014, it was way down from when he was part of the company. https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/1/jeff-atwood?tab=answe...

I would suggest this marked a change from an "Atwoodian" philosophy of curation to a "Sploskian" philosophy.

From https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/

    It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of *good* programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.
(emphasis in original)

to

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-lau...

    What kind of questions are appropriate? Well, thanks to the tagging system, we can be rather broad with that. As long as questions are appropriately tagged, I think it’s okay to be off topic as long as what you’re asking about is of interest to people who make software. But it does have to be a question. Stack Overflow isn’t a good place for imponderables, or public service announcements, or vague complaints, or storytelling.
With the change in direction that all questions were acceptable ( https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/04/23/strange-and-madden... see also https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/timeline and note revision 1 and the action on September 17, 2011 )... I believe it was then that the shift to reducing the curation actions that people can take.

https://stackoverflow.blog/2013/06/25/the-war-of-the-closes/ was the start of it - a year after Jeff left.

I believe that Joel was responsible for the direction of Stack Overflow from 2012 to 2019... including the "direction" of those policies of 2013 and 2014. The "every question can be fixed" and "every answer should remain if it was an attempt to answer the question" stem from his philosophy.

However, (again, I believe) that is what ultimately contaminated Google's search and you were more likely to hit a duplicate ( https://stackoverflow.com/questions/linked/218384?lq=1 ) than the correct answer because of the lack of culling of duplicates and the golden dup hammer making that the path of least resistance for closing a question if it was slightly related.

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