Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

pcloadletter.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 225 posts

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#111

Post by kstrauser »

zabzonk wrote: post #11

Speaking as someone that was a SO front-page contributor, and at one brief time the top of the pops on the C++ tag, I didn't think it was so bad. And you got a free t-shirt! What you have to understand is the avalanche of low-quality questions that came in, pushed by "academics" who should have known better, telling students things like "just ask on SO - they will write it for you", which is bad on so many levels. Bu…

How on earth did wokeness even come up there? You’d have zero notion of my political leanings if you only read the words I’d written there. How badly do you have to phrase a question or answer to have it downvoted for being not-woke? “So I’m trying to write a GET route in FastAPI, which has a great ass, by the way, amirite?, and I’m getting the error that…”

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#112

Post by ted_dunning »

ronbenton wrote: post #18
CommonGuy wrote: post #12

StackOverflow always wanted less low-quality questions, which is now the case. Whether they still receive some high-quality ones... But I'm sure the website still receives a lot of views, as it still is highly ranked in Google.

Do we know that it's fewer low-quality questions? Or is that just assumed because it's fewer total questions?

That was a tongue-in-cheek inference from the number of new questions going to near zero.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#113

Post by Eisenstein »

miningape wrote: post #77
spiderfarmer wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re talking about ChatGPT 2.0 and severely underestimate the capabilities of today’s models.

It's well known that even current LLMs do not perform well on logic games when you change the names / language used. i.e. try asking it to swap the meanings of the words red and green and ask it to describe the colors in a painting and analyse it with color theory - notice how quickly the results degrade, often attributing "green" qualities to "red" since it's now calling it "green". What this shows us is that traini…

Write "This sentence is green." in red sharpie and "This sentence is red" in green sharpie on a piece of paper. Show it to someone briefly and then hide it. Ask them what color the first sentence said it was and what color the second sentence was written in.

Another one: ask a person to say 'silk' 5 times, then ask them what cows drink.

Exploiting such quirks only tells you that you can trick people, not what their capabilities are.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#114

Post by [deleted] »

kstrauser wrote: post #75
Permit wrote: post #32

StackOverflow was successful explicitly because of the people/question it excluded . The "toxicity" was the point. It was trying very very hard not to become Yahoo Questions. If you want to hear more about this you should watch Joel Spolsky's talk "The Cultural Anthropology of Stack Exchange": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpGA2fmAHvM The point of StackOverflow was explicitly not to help the question-askers, but to…

Eh. I’m pretty highly ranked on SO, not stratospherically, but in the top 1% in a popular topic. I stopped going there waaaaayyyy before LLMs came on the scene because it stopped being fun. Perfectly good questions were closed before they could get traction. Answers were shot down because they weren’t phrased in the form of an MLA essay. It became the end result of how Wikipedia would look like if deletionist roomdwe…

[deleted]

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#115

Post by Someone1234 »

morsecodist wrote: post #89
Permit wrote: post #32

StackOverflow was successful explicitly because of the people/question it excluded . The "toxicity" was the point. It was trying very very hard not to become Yahoo Questions. If you want to hear more about this you should watch Joel Spolsky's talk "The Cultural Anthropology of Stack Exchange": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpGA2fmAHvM The point of StackOverflow was explicitly not to help the question-askers, but to…

I would never ask a question on stack overflow because half the time it seemed to be flagged a dupe or for some other reason and it brought you closer to being disallowed to ask. I actually have answered a good amount of stack overflow questions to get a higher score but the overzealous question shutdowns totally had a chilling effect.

One thing that isn't talked about enough is the impact aggressive moderation had on people answering too.

If you were in the New queue, and found a question you could answer, by the time you posted your answer the question itself may have been nuked by mods making your answer/effect not seen by many.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#116

Post by kstrauser »

Groxx wrote: post #88
kstrauser wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh. I’m pretty highly ranked on SO, not stratospherically, but in the top 1% in a popular topic. I stopped going there waaaaayyyy before LLMs came on the scene because it stopped being fun. Perfectly good questions were closed before they could get traction. Answers were shot down because they weren’t phrased in the form of an MLA essay. It became the end result of how Wikipedia would look like if deletionist roomdwe…

Fully agreed with your reason for leaving, but I'll throw in: it's absolutely terrible at showing time relevant information, seemingly on the theory that someone will dedup and edit every question and answer as it becomes history rather than helpful. That became more and more clear as the site and content aged, and afaict they have done absolutely nothing to address it. So after a few years the site had good informat…

Definitely. And interestingly, that sucked for authors of the old answers, too. I had a few highly ranked answers from around 2010 or so. Every now and then I’d get a new notification about someone telling me I was completely wrong and should be embarrassed. Look, my time traveling friend, that answer was perfectly reasonable when I wrote it 16 years ago. It’s not my fault that the ebbs and currents of SO pushed you to it today. I’d answer differently today, but I’m not going to go back and “fix” all my old suggestions to keep them up to date.

That’s the weird feedback loop from practically forcing new askers back to the old answers, which was bad for everyone involved.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#118

Post by lanyard-textile »

Eisenstein wrote: post #61
lanyard-textile wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why, us of course. The results of your claude code session, for example, make fine training data. Did the user commit the final answer? What changes were made before they did?

> The results of your claude code session, for example, make fine training data. Does Claude code copy your repository onto its server?

No -- but your follow-up interactions would, and that's something that could be cleaned and filtered upon.

Edit: I also mean to imply that maybe this could be more observable in the future. Opt-in, of course.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#119

Post by wang_li »

ronbenton wrote: post #15
pinus-cembra wrote: post #9

Isn't this a sign that LLMs are self-cannibalizing? What data will LLMs be trained on when sites like StackOverflow die?

I have always wondered this. As more and more content on the internet becomes AI generated, does it become some kind of feedback loop where the hallucinations amplify themselves? Maybe someone smart can come along and help me understand the plan for this, if there is one.

They'll turn sites like wikipedia into free labor for training LLMs.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#120

Post by bachmeier »

triceratops wrote: post #49

I think StackOverflow could have been saved from turning into a toxic hellhole if they'd had AI and LLMs in the mid 2010s. No seriously, hear me out. SO is infamous for overzealous mods closing questions left and right, calling you an idiot, and being generally unhelpful. I think these mods were/are burned out by dealing with mostly idiotic questions all day. They default to suspicion and hostility. If they'd had AI…

https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/08/21/stack-exchange-machine...

They were on it in 2012! And no, it didn't help. The site's value was in providing users with answers to their questions, but that was never on the radar of the folks running SO. I guess they just assumed the free labor of the people that built the place would continue forever.

Edit: I even told them at the time that this was not the right way to proceed. They had no reason to close questions or even review them. All they needed was a holding pen where first-time questioners posted questions, and they needed to be promoted by users viewing them as worthy of an answer.

Guess what. They deleted my comment.

Post reply on HN