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Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

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Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#171

Post by 1letterunixname »

It follows the arc of most things including Quora and somewhat generally other popular ventures like Snap, Facebook, MySpace, AOL/AIM, and CompuServe. The initial Cambrian explosion slowly changes from cool obscurity to hype as time goes on and the shine fades.

There's also a supply and demand problem of double-ended Q&A sites: there's rarely direct incentives to give away subject matter expertise. There are indirect incentives such as reputation, but behind nicknames, this doesn't necessarily translate into industry reputation. Furthermore, there are potential human language and subject matter terminology difficulties of throwing geographically-, and industry-diverse groups of users together. The platform should attempt to ameliorate language differences and steer user-contributed content away from devolving into ego battles, bikeshedding, nitpicking, or handwaving.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#172

Post by at_a_remove »

robertlagrant wrote: post #170
at_a_remove wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess what I am getting at is that, in this specific instance, I'm not sure there is anything to do. You either send it or not. It was polite, it was clear, and so on. Tonally, it was about as good as you can expect. So what is there to filter other than send/not-send?

I didn't mean I would literally filter the email into a shorter email. I just wouldn't send an email.

So, in this HR isn't getting any feedback because they've literally heard nothing but "Yay, you're the best!" for so long that any sense that they could do something, anything different is, comparatively, scathing and harsh criticism?

This just raises so many more questions, like why bother your employee to consider the question and formulate anything if the feedback doesn't reach HR? I can imagine being someone who actually considered the question, took time to write and re-write something, another pass for clarity, a check to make sure that nothing was going to sound accusatory. Writing the email, sending it off, and hoping that the time I took away from my actual job to do this would result in even the chance of a change. But it doesn't, it goes into the round file, apparently.

I don't know, I haven't had as many jobs as some people here, but I have been through all of those regime changes and heard "we want your feedback" over and over again, yet it never seems to go anywhere. I had months on a "strategic vision" committee where we were trying to formulate a mission statement by slurping up data, questions, and forms from employees, going through various iterations of it, but what came back had nothing to do with the content we had received.

Is this always just an exercise in making HR feel good about themselves, then, without hope of any improvement?

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#173

Post by gymbeaux »

rich_sasha wrote: post #147
sarthak-ag wrote: post #97

I have never understood why people have so much contempt for SO/SE network of websites. To me this network is on par with Wikipedia in terms of contribution to mankind. This is the internet itself. Granted I have only ever asked a handful of questions there, so all I have is anecdotes to share, but the community was very welcoming, and straight to the point. Maybe it has changed now? I haven't asked any questions sin…

I mostly agree, but also, the moderation has gone from great to pedantic, and further to poor enforcement of nonsensical rules. I have had questions closed as duplicate, where the "original" asked something else. Questions about choice of framework apparently are off topic on SE stack exchange -> closed. Weirdo moderators / keen users butting in on active, sane questions with "I'm voting to close because [random nons…

I had a guy vote to close one of my 5-year-old questions that had an answer and plenty of upvotes at that point. It’s clearly helping people out but yeah let’s delete it because you want a badge (I’m not sure if you get a badge for that)

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#174

Post by robertlagrant »

at_a_remove wrote: post #172
robertlagrant wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't mean I would literally filter the email into a shorter email. I just wouldn't send an email.

So, in this HR isn't getting any feedback because they've literally heard nothing but "Yay, you're the best!" for so long that any sense that they could do something, anything different is, comparatively, scathing and harsh criticism? This just raises so many more questions, like why bother your employee to consider the question and formulate anything if the feedback doesn't reach HR? I can imagine being someone who…

> So, in this HR isn't getting any feedback

No, I said I wouldn't send it in an email. Somewhat ironically, I wrote it clearly, but you took it differently and built a large rant on that incorrect foundation.

Next time I'll filter my comments on HN through my skip manager (-:

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#175

Post by sarthak-ag »

scarface_74 wrote: post #142
sarthak-ag wrote: post #97

I have never understood why people have so much contempt for SO/SE network of websites. To me this network is on par with Wikipedia in terms of contribution to mankind. This is the internet itself. Granted I have only ever asked a handful of questions there, so all I have is anecdotes to share, but the community was very welcoming, and straight to the point. Maybe it has changed now? I haven't asked any questions sin…

That’s the beauty of using ChatGPT for programming questions. You don’t have to have confidence in the answer. You can easily verify correctness by running the code it outputs and testing it. That being said, I realize you do have to be careful about subtle bugs. My canonical example is “write a Python script that returns all of the AWS IAM roles that contain a given list of policies”. The code it usually generates w…

> You can easily verify correctness by running the code it outputs and testing it.

This is not always as easy for all types of questions. It's hard to come up with an example on the spot, but I tried a few queries I searched on SO in the last week, and found one to demonstrate. I was searching for "Where to store JWT in browser?". This is the SO answer [1] for reference. Now to prove my point, I ask the question to ChatGPT (3.5). Here's the chat [2].

On a first glance it looks like ChatGPT may have nailed it, though the information dump is HUGE. Among the 6 options it suggests, the last option "secure cookies" looks "correct". Indeed it is correct in what it says that this can prevent XSS attack. But it is not complete. Because it still does not prevent XSRF attack entirely. So I had to explicitly prompt it to think about XSRF and its response is weird. At first it incorrectly claims that XSRF attack is mitigated, but then in the response body it elaborates that we also need anti-XSRF tokens for complete protection. So I don't know what to make of it. Contrast this with the SO answer which is way more direct.

Honestly, ChatGPT's answer looks like that of a student who is trying to impress some examiner with their knowledge dump by beating around the bush rather than trying to precisely answer the actual question.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27067251/where-to-store-... [2]: https://chat.openai.com/share/c26fee93-5d3d-48e2-a820-297974...

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#176

Post by polynomial »

scarface_74 wrote: post #142
sarthak-ag wrote: post #97

I have never understood why people have so much contempt for SO/SE network of websites. To me this network is on par with Wikipedia in terms of contribution to mankind. This is the internet itself. Granted I have only ever asked a handful of questions there, so all I have is anecdotes to share, but the community was very welcoming, and straight to the point. Maybe it has changed now? I haven't asked any questions sin…

That’s the beauty of using ChatGPT for programming questions. You don’t have to have confidence in the answer. You can easily verify correctness by running the code it outputs and testing it. That being said, I realize you do have to be careful about subtle bugs. My canonical example is “write a Python script that returns all of the AWS IAM roles that contain a given list of policies”. The code it usually generates w…

In general, when ppl say ChatGPT on hn, do they mean 3.5 (free version) or 4.0 (paid version)?

Which is it you are referring to here?

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#177

Post by at_a_remove »

robertlagrant wrote: post #174
at_a_remove wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, in this HR isn't getting any feedback because they've literally heard nothing but "Yay, you're the best!" for so long that any sense that they could do something, anything different is, comparatively, scathing and harsh criticism? This just raises so many more questions, like why bother your employee to consider the question and formulate anything if the feedback doesn't reach HR? I can imagine being someone who…

> So, in this HR isn't getting any feedback No, I said I wouldn't send it in an email. Somewhat ironically, I wrote it clearly, but you took it differently and built a large rant on that incorrect foundation. Next time I'll filter my comments on HN through my skip manager (-:

Nah, that's neither large for me nor a rant. It's a few paragraphs on the ongoing disappointment I have with the lack of honest communication up against the requests for honest communication. It's the "Does this dress make me look fat?" feedback request from HR.

I sometimes wonder what innovations would be required to make HR completely outsourceable.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#178

Post by robertlagrant »

at_a_remove wrote: post #177
robertlagrant wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, in this HR isn't getting any feedback No, I said I wouldn't send it in an email. Somewhat ironically, I wrote it clearly, but you took it differently and built a large rant on that incorrect foundation. Next time I'll filter my comments on HN through my skip manager (-:

Nah, that's neither large for me nor a rant. It's a few paragraphs on the ongoing disappointment I have with the lack of honest communication up against the requests for honest communication. It's the "Does this dress make me look fat?" feedback request from HR. I sometimes wonder what innovations would be required to make HR completely outsourceable.

You can outsource HR. I don't think it would make much difference if your HR person is a permanent employee, a contractor, or a consultant working for another company. Certainly it's not obvious that a change in contractual relationship would address anything you've been complaining about.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#179

Post by the_jeremy »

dotnet00 wrote: post #122
the_jeremy wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ask a bad question on SE (leave "bad" to be defined separately), you waste time of people who try to answer it, and of people who stumble across it hoping that it relates to them and solves their problem. If you ask a bad question to ChatGPT, you waste no one's time but your own. If answering SE was a job where you got paid, I would expect a lot more hand-holding (and some amount of kindness, to keep the reven…

In those cases it's easy enough to just move on to another question rather than shut down the discussion. It's not like anyone's being forced to answer.

But as an answerer, you will empathize more with the other answerers than the askers. You don't want the other answerers to also waste their time on this question, so you close it / downvote / mark it as duplicate.
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