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

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

#121

Post by stackskipton »

j_w wrote: post #95
stackskipton wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As Ops person who has to tell people "This is terrible idea, we are not doing it.", I've always struggled with how to tell someone nicely "No" without them seeing it as "Well, I guess my idea delivery is off, my idea is fine though." When dealing with those personalities, seems only way to get them to completely reconsider them approach is hard "F off". Which I why I understand old Linus T. Emails. They were clearly…

There are bad questions (and ideas, like you said). Stackoverflow tried to incentivize asking good, novel questions. You grow up often being told "there are no stupid questions" but that is absolutely not the case. A good question isn't just "how do I do x in y language?" But something more like "I'm trying to do x in y language. Here's what I've tried: and here is the issue I have . " This does two things: 1. It dem…

I'm reminded of this link: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Biggest thing as someone who has been in Discords that are geared towards support, you can either gear towards new people or professionals but walking the line between both is almost impossible.

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

#122

Post by kstrauser »

Someone1234 wrote: post #115
morsecodist wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh, man. That was kind of the end of the line for me, too. I’d get roped into conversations trying to defend the question, which wasn’t even mine, because I thought it was novel and interesting enough to be worth answering in the first place. And then I asked myself what I was doing getting suckered into these talks. I don’t need that kind of tarpit.

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

#123

Post by triceratops »

bachmeier wrote: post #120
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…

As I said in my comment

> and not the rudimentary text classifiers that were the state of the art at the time

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

#124

Post by cogman10 »

Someone1234 wrote: post #76
socalgal2 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like Reddit to me. Topics closed, answers out of date, ask again, closed as dupe

I would agree, Reddit is in a slow death spiral. I'd point at bad management primarily. The main thing keeping them afloat may be lack of good competition.

The reddit death spiral is AI, bots, and brigading.

I think they've accelerated it by making it easy to make all comments private and by hamstringing moderators.

Part of that directly ties back to AI as well. The API limiting has a lot to do with making it hard to scrape reddit for data.

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

#125

Post by FuckButtons »

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?

If you truly believe that the ai companies, who have used essentially all of the worlds ip without asking for permission won’t use yours because you gave them $20 a month, I have some magic beans to sell you.

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

#126

Post by bachmeier »

stackskipton wrote: post #72
ronbenton wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with this. You can tell someone that a question is not appropriate for a community without being a jerk. Or you can tell them that there needs to be more information in a question without being a jerk. I do not think being mean is a prerequisite for successful curation of information.

As Ops person who has to tell people "This is terrible idea, we are not doing it.", I've always struggled with how to tell someone nicely "No" without them seeing it as "Well, I guess my idea delivery is off, my idea is fine though." When dealing with those personalities, seems only way to get them to completely reconsider them approach is hard "F off". Which I why I understand old Linus T. Emails. They were clearly…

The key part of your post is "has to tell people". Absolutely nobody on SO was obligated to respond to anything. The toxicity was a choice, and those doing it enjoyed it.

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

#127

Post by kstrauser »

ChrisArchitect wrote: post #117

[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482345

This is a prime example of why I prefer HN’s moderation. On SO, even though you’re objectively wrong — this is a link to a completely different site and discussing it from a different angle — your active participation on the site would probably have given you the ability to close this conversation and ruin the discussion for those interested. I’m glad that HN doesn’t allow that, so we can roll our eyes at the obviously incorrect tag and get back to participating without having the rug yanked out from under us.

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

#128

Post by cogman10 »

toast0 wrote: post #50
okaleniuk wrote: post #24

There should be a lesson for other communities but, unfortunately, there is none. StackOverflow used to be a fun and welcoming place in 2009. It became a toxic hellhole overtime There are no obvious flows in the original design, and there were no endemic wrongdoings in the governance either. It just rotted slowly like any other community does. And nobody in the world knows how to keep communities from becoming toxic.…

> And nobody in the world knows how to keep communities from becoming toxic. There is simply no recipe. There's a recipe, it's just expensive. Intense moderation, exclude disruptive users, no grand plan for massive growth/inclusion. StackOverflow did have intense moderation, but it also seemed to want to be a place where anyone could ask a question and that desire for mass inclusion competes with the desire to be mod…

Wikipedia is one of the only places I know that seems to have gotten this pretty much perfect.

I think the thing that ultimately made wikipedia work is that moderation actions are done pretty publicly with a heavy focus on citing sources. The problem a lot of these OG Web 2.0 sites have is many of them have focused on keeping moderation discussion and decisions as private as possible.

That, I think, is where SO failed. Someone can mark something as a dup and that's basically the end of discussion. I think that's also where sites like Reddit really struggle. A power tripping mod can destroy a community pretty quickly and they can hide their tracks by deleting comments of criticism.

It's one thing I think HN actually gets pretty right. It's a much smaller userbase, which helps, but also the mods here are both well known and they post the reasons for their actions. There's still some opacity, but the fact that mod decisions are mostly public seems to have worked well here.

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

#129

Post by cogman10 »

alistairSH wrote: post #66
okaleniuk wrote: post #24

There should be a lesson for other communities but, unfortunately, there is none. StackOverflow used to be a fun and welcoming place in 2009. It became a toxic hellhole overtime There are no obvious flows in the original design, and there were no endemic wrongdoings in the governance either. It just rotted slowly like any other community does. And nobody in the world knows how to keep communities from becoming toxic.…

And nobody in the world knows how to keep communities from becoming toxic. Mostly true, but there are exceptions... HN is about as good as I've seen for a publicly accessible forum, but has very active moderation (both from Dang and team and a pretty good vote & flag mechanism). The other good forums I've seen are all private and/or extremely niche and really only findable via word of mouth. And have very active mode…

Wikipedia is what I'd call out as the next best moderated site out there which is also huge.

I think a large part of that is due to moderation actions being very public and open for discussion on the "talk" page.

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

#130

Post by ndriscoll »

miningape wrote: post #53
ndriscoll wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't the LLM just read the source of the framework to answer questions directly? That's how I do things as a human. Given the appropriate background knowledge (which current LLMs are already extremely capable with), it should be pretty easy to understand what it's doing, and if it's not easy to understand the source, it's probably a bad framework. I don't expect an LLM to have deep inbuilt knowledge of librar…

Because LLMs do not work like that - there's no "understanding" the source and answering questions, it simply "finds" similar results in its training data (matching it with the context) and regurgitates (some part of) it (+ other "noise"). Meaning as technology evolves and does things in novel ways, without explainers annotating it the LLM won't have anything to draw on - reducing the quality of answers. Which brings…

My recent experience with codex is that they absolutely do work that way today (this may be recent as in within the last couple months), and will autonomously decide to grep for things in your codebase to get context on changes you've asked for or questions you've asked. I've been pretty open to my manager about calling my upper management delusional with this stuff until very recently (in the sense that 6 months ago everything I tried was still a toy), but it's actually now reaching a tipping point that's drastically changing how I work.
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