Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms

Some of them are so overburdened that navigating all of the rules and expectations becomes a skill in itself. A single innocent misstep turns simple questions into lectures about how you’ve violated the rules.

One Slack I joined has created a Slackbot to enforce these rules. It became a game in itself for people to add new rules to the bot. Now it triggers on a large dictionary of problematic words such as “blind” (potentially offensive to people with vision impairments. Don’t bother discussing poker.). It gives a stern warning if anyone accidentally says “crazy” (offensive to those with mental health problems) or “you guys” (how dare you be so sexist).

They even created a rule that you have to make sure someone wants advice about a situation before offering it, because a group of people decided it was too presumptuous and potentially sexist (I don’t know how) for people to give advice when the other person may have only wanted to vent. This creates the weirdest situations where someone posts a question in channels named “Help and advice” and then lurkers wait to jump on anyone who offers advice if the question wasn’t explicitly phrased in a way that unequivocally requested advice.

It’s all so very tiresome to navigate. Some people appear to thrive in this environment where there are rules for everything. People who memorize and enforce all of the rules on others get to operate a tiny little power trip while opening an opportunity to lecture internet strangers all day.

It’s honestly refreshing to go from that to asking an LLM that you know isn’t going to turn your question into a lecture on social issues because you used a secretly problematic word or broke rule #73 on the ever growing list of community rules.

I'm pretty sure that "rule" was more aimed towards "just ask your question" rather than "greet, make smalltalk, then ask your question".

I have similar rules, though I don't communicate them as aggressively, and don't ban people for breaking them, I just don't reply to greetings coming from people I know aren't looking to talk to me to ask me how I've been. It's a lot easier if you send the question you have instead of sending "Hi, how are you?" and then wait for 3 minutes to type out your question.

Q&A was designed to handle the social explosion problem and the eternal September problems by having a larger percent of the username take an interest in the community over time and continue to maintain that ideal. Things like comments and discussions being difficult is part of the design to make it so that you don't get protracted discussions that in turn needs more moderation resources.

The fraction of the people doing the curation and moderation of the site overall has dropped. The reasons for that drop are manyfold. I believe that much of it falls squarely upon Stack Overflow corporate without considering second order effects of engaging and managing the community of people who are interested in the success of the site as they envision.

Ultimately, Stack Overflow has become too successful and the people looking to it now have a different vision for what it should be that comes into conflict with both the design of the site and the vision of the core group.

While Stack Overflow can thrive with a smaller number of people asking "good" (yes, very subjective) questions it has difficulty when it strays into questions that need discussion (which its design comes into conflict with) or too many questions for the committed core group to maintain. Smaller sites can (and do) have a larger fraction of the user base committed to the goals of the site and in turn are able to provide more individual guidance - while Stack Overflow has long gone past that point.

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Stack Overflow and its Q&A format that has been often copied works for certain sized user bases. It needs enough people to keep it interesting, but it fails to scale when too many people participate who have a different idea of what questions should be there.

There is a lack of moderation tools for the core user base to be able to manage it at scale (you will note the history of Stack Overflow has been removing and restricting moderation tools until it gets "too" bad - see also removal of 20k users helping with flag handling and the continued rescoping of close reasons).

Until someone comes up with a fundamentally different approach that is able to handle moderation at scale or sufficient barriers for new accounts (to handle the Eternal September problem), we are going to continue to see Stack Overflow clones spout and die on the vine along with a continued balkanization of knowledge in smaller areas that are able handle vision and moderation at a smaller scale.

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Every attempt at a site I've seen since (and I include things like Lemmy in this which did a "copy reddit" and then worry (or not) about moderation) have started from a "get popular, then work on the moderation problem" which is ultimately too late to really solve the problem. The tools for moderation need to be baked into the design from the start.

Not to mention there will be no data for the model to learn the new stuff anyway, since places like SO will get zero responses with the new stuff for the model to crawl