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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

#131

Post by OnionBlender »

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…

The Android filesystem APIs are a perfect example of this. The old answers no longer work because Google keeps restricting what apps can do. If you're lucky, someone might post a comment or a new (non-accepted) answer.

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

#132

Post by cogman10 »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #60
whstl wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN itself is way better than people give credit to. The toxicity tends to be very isolated, and divisive topics disappear quickly from the front page. I find that there's still a subset of users that make it worse than it should be, by making too much noise about "tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage" , but that is already against the rules/guidelines.

So much is removed that it gives a false appearance of consensus and harmony.

AFAIK, not a lot in HN gets outright removed. A decent amount of stuff will get flagged (and thus becomes invisible) especially when it's anywhere near politics.

But even in those spaces, few things end up actually being flagged even when the flames are burning hot.

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

#133

Post by miningape »

Eisenstein wrote: post #113
miningape wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

The point isn't that you can trick an LLM, but that their capabilities are more strongly tied to training data than context. That's to say, when context and training disagree, training "wins". ("wins" isn't the correct wording, but hopefully you understand the point)

This poses a problem for new frameworks/languages/whatever that do things in a wholly different way since we'll be forced to rely on context that will contradict the training data that's available.

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

#134

Post by kstrauser »

OnionBlender wrote: post #131
Groxx wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The Android filesystem APIs are a perfect example of this. The old answers no longer work because Google keeps restricting what apps can do. If you're lucky, someone might post a comment or a new (non-accepted) answer.

2016: First, you make this call to get the list of files…

2026: We can get you a discount on the CASA audit you have to complete before you’re allowed to ask.

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

#135

Post by [deleted] »

Groxx wrote: post #19

Yeah, I'm fond of this graph personally: https://mastodon.social/@grahamperrin@bsd.cafe/1158357533238... StackOverflow has been in a clear, strong decline for quite a while. LLMs just hammered in the final nail. It's very clear that they caused a substantial drop, but not as impactful as the years of stagnation and rise of competition.

[deleted]

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

#136

Post by [deleted] »

kstrauser wrote: post #127
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 obvious…

[deleted]

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

#137

Post by Someone1234 »

cogman10 wrote: post #124
Someone1234 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I definitely think that has made it worse, but Reddit was on the downward spiral before LLNs/Bots/etc for years. Keep in mind that ownership changed twice in the years before ChatGPT et al appeared, and the new owners didn't really understand the site.

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

#138

Post by frumper »

simianparrot wrote: post #47
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…

And they get confident lies back 2/10 times, not enough to make them constantly question the answers, but just enough to _really_ mess with them over time. And not just that, almost no new good questions and answers are created anymore for the next iterations of LLM's to train on, so they'll be consuming more and more AI-centered SEO slop until that ratio becomes so high it becomes useless. But by then most of us who…

Stackoverflow was never about getting the best code and neither are LLMs. People ask questions to figure out how to do something. If an LLM provides an answer that doesn't work, then they will just ask it to do it another way and hope that one works. Experts will always be in high demand, but on the other side there are a lot of jobs that just want a working product, even if it's not well made.

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

#139

Post by ChrisArchitect »

kstrauser wrote: post #127
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 obvious…

There is nothing in the submitted article that isn't part of or significantly different than the large discussion already ongoing/passed. The discussion about toxic community etc. The short blog post is basically just another comment on that greater discussion. The discussion which is already over there. No need to split it up or repeat it again days later. It's a duplicate discussion.

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

#140

Post by ndriscoll »

miningape wrote: post #133
Eisenstein wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

The point isn't that you can trick an LLM, but that their capabilities are more strongly tied to training data than context. That's to say, when context and training disagree, training "wins". ("wins" isn't the correct wording, but hopefully you understand the point) This poses a problem for new frameworks/languages/whatever that do things in a wholly different way since we'll be forced to rely on context that will c…

What is an example of a framework that does things in a wholly different way? Everything I'm familiar with is a variation on well explored ideas from the 60s-70s.

If you had someone familiar with every computer science concept, every textbook, every paper, etc. up to say 2010 (or even 2000 or earlier), along with deep experience using dozens of programming languages, and you sat them down to look at a codebase, what could you put in front of them that they couldn't describe to you with words they already know?

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