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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

#151

Post by hansvm »

testdelacc1 wrote: post #149
inigyou wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ellen Pao was the glass scapegoat CEO designed to take all the flak for what the other investors and board members wanted to do. BTW Reddit is now verifying your ID with Persona before you can open anything it thinks is NSFW.

What’s strange is that they’ll try to verify with Persona even after Apple has shared an age range with them. If you trust Apple, why verify with Persona above that? If you don’t trust Apple, why bother integrating the Apple age check? The answer must be something silly like “we did it because Apple asked us to but we don’t trust what Apple tells us because we’re not sure if it’s compliant”. It’s too bad, because I t…

The more obvious answer is that they get different marketing signals from the two companies' offerings and want both.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#152

Post by nolok »

morningsam wrote: post #87
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"

That basic idea is what made SO attractive in the first place, compared to forums where you had to scroll through pages and pages of in-jokes and tangents and animated-GIF signatures just to try and see if there is an answer. Where they went wrong, in my opinion, is in the implementation details. It's mostly death by a thousand cuts: Requiring reputation to gain the ability to post comments, then having one's answers…

The entire gamification was great in the beginning but ended up working against them rather than for. It should have evolved into something else.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#153

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

budsniffer952 wrote: post #128
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…

[flagged]

It's so weird how slightly different usage can create vastly different experiences and impressions of a site. I wouldn't really describe Reddit as "politically biased to the left", but I never go to the front page, just a few select subs. I don't see any political bias in subs about Hollow Knight or weed. I DO see bias in my country's political site, but it swings all over the place depending on who's in power at the given time.

I see a similar thing on X (well, I would if I still used it) where my personal feed is very, very different from the curated 'for you' one.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#154

Post by includenotfound »

b112 wrote: post #148
lynndotpy wrote: post #24

Any social organization needs to carefully consider their inclusion-exclusion curve with intentionality. I think a lot of people might balk at the word "inclusivity" today, but 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. They slowly killed the site in t…

You know, there's a lot of really good data on Stack Overflow, regardless of all the issues. I hope somebody saves it all.

Perhaps not what you intended, but most of it is stored in various models' weights.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#155

Post by includenotfound »

TomMasz wrote: post #89

I never had an LLM tell me my question was already answered and imply I was stupid for not finding it. SO dug its own grave and jumped in.

Sometimes your question was simply visually similar to another but conceptually very different, and it'd get closed for being a duplicate anyway.

Then you have to re-ask it, now with a couple extra disclaimers spelling out that indeed you did use the search function but no, the other visually similar question isn't actually the same as yours.

Then you'd get maybe 2 comments and -2 in downvotes.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#156

Post by infecto »

faangguyindia wrote: post #73
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"

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…

It’s a meta discussion and borderline scandalous but you can see it here in HN too. There always was some of this but you get such polarizing and rude comments here on a pretty regular basis. I know I am guilty of doing the same when I encounter it myself. I suspect over time this site itself will fall to the same problems.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#157

Post by macNchz »

embedding-shape wrote: post #130
inigyou wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ellen Pao was the glass scapegoat CEO designed to take all the flak for what the other investors and board members wanted to do. BTW Reddit is now verifying your ID with Persona before you can open anything it thinks is NSFW.

> BTW Reddit is now verifying your ID with Persona before you can open anything it thinks is NSFW. I think this may depend on your country, I've never seen this (Spain), not on the new website nor old.reddit.com or anywhere else, NSFW or not.

Yes this is a blame-your-politicians situation more than anything else.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#159

Post by gwerbin »

pydry wrote: post #65
embedding-shape wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I don't understand the HN title. The "downfall" seems to have began in 2018-2020 sometime, what AI was launched and popularized at that point that would have killed SO? LLMs were basically useless until GPT3 which appeared in middle-2020 sometime, after the downfall seemingly already had begun.

Add it to the list: - the downfall of junior devs - bad hiring market - layoffs in practically every sector theres a ton of things where AI took credit for a trend that had already started before it started being even halfway capable.

I think if you won't even admit that AI greatly accelerated these trends, you're in some kind of denial. There's no reason to believe that we would see a rapid coordinated decline in all of these things at the same time without AI, and strong reason to believe that we would see it with AI. So we have a model that makes testable predictions, and data strongly consistent with those testable predictions, in the form of an acceleration of existing downward trends. What more do you want?

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#160

Post by cynicalsecurity »

StackOverflow was a pretty toxic and hostile place. I'm surprised they did nothing to fix it. And I'm not speaking of rainbows and unicorns, it was really easy to stop punishing people for asking questions - it was a web-site for asking questions after all.

Then they forbid using AI to answer questions - another huge miss. They could have leveraged AI as a great cool gig on their web-site - they didn't. Too bad.

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