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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

#181

Post by kstrauser »

zahlman wrote: post #168
kstrauser wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a vetted set of mods, put in place by the site’s leadership, with the power to overturn martinet decisions.

You mean, like, the actual moderators , overseeing the actions that people keep attributing to "moderators" who objectively are nothing of the sort? It's honestly really frustrating to keep reading these takes.

Yes, that's exactly what I mean. Suppose HN allowed regular users to perform certain moderation actions. I use that and start powertripping and deleting all your posts, for instance. In that scenario, I expect dang would reach out to me pretty quickly and tell me to please stop doing that.

In that case, dang would be part of the "vetted set of mods" I mention with the power to overturn my decisions, because HN is paying him to make sure the site runs in line with its vision, even if that means disagreeing with the "ground-level" moderators.

I'm pretty sure you and I see eye to eye on this, given your other comments on the topic here.

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

#182

Post by kstrauser »

zahlman wrote: post #175
kstrauser wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On Stack Overflow, splitting the posts between two targets would be "ruining it", because there is an explicit goal of keeping that information together. But more importantly, the entire point there is not to have free-running, threaded discussion. Obviously the practices should be different here.

Agreed.

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

#183

Post by kstrauser »

ChrisArchitect wrote: post #158
kstrauser wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, and that’s what I value here: you can add your tags, and we can opt to follow or ignore them as we see fit. That’s far better than the SO model of a site participant having the ability to shut down the conversation for everyone. But also, a note: conversations are never finished . People talked about this broad topic yesterday, but I didn’t see it yesterday to be able to weigh in. I’m here today, saw this…

You're welcome to continue the 'unfinished' conversation over there. The thread isn't closed. This article isn't bringing anything new. And yet is forcing the thousands and thousands of HNers who saw the previous main discussion and news days ago to see it again? Sorry you weren't there, sorry you missed it. It's the bringing it up and repeating much of the discussion so soon that's the hinderance. Stuff moves pretty…

I think I'd prefer to have it here with people who are still engaged and actively discussing it, rather than whispering to ghosts in another thread that people have moved past.

But no one's forcing anyone to see this version of it. It's just a link they can skip past, although if enough people upvote this post to keep it on the front page, then apparently a significant chunk of the readership hasn't gotten tired of seeing it yet.

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

#184

Post by smallerfish »

zahlman wrote: post #160
smallerfish wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're claiming 20% of LLM responses are hallucinations, today?

Nowadays when I do a conventional search for information, the results on all sorts of topics are dominated by obviously LLM slop articles trying their hardest to SEO by padding out the page with tons of tangential dreck. When I can actually scroll through and glean the information I'm looking for, it's wrong in at least some subtle technical detail a significant fraction of the time, yes. And then, the other day some…

No doubt AI slop is a problem. Writing well with AIs is a skill -- there are lots of people who are uncritically just copy/pasting whatever the AI produced on first draft onto the web. But I'd argue that's a "content" problem rather than an AI problem - i.e. the imperative just to publish something to wrap ads around.

You _can_ write well with AI. You _can_ also create good products with AI. It's a tool. You need to learn how to use it.

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

#185

Post by groundzeros2015 »

zahlman wrote: post #169
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not my experience. So many comments are flagged and removed. It’s just popularity. I think it’s fine they are hidden by default. But unt we can see all removed comments we can’t understand the debate.

> I think it’s fine they are hidden by default. But unt we can see all removed comments we can’t understand the debate. Do you have showdead on?

Yes. It’s not enough and I’m confused why.

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

#186

Post by zabzonk »

kstrauser wrote: post #111
zabzonk wrote: post #11

Speaking as someone that was a SO front-page contributor, and at one brief time the top of the pops on the C++ tag, I didn't think it was so bad. And you got a free t-shirt! What you have to understand is the avalanche of low-quality questions that came in, pushed by "academics" who should have known better, telling students things like "just ask on SO - they will write it for you", which is bad on so many levels. Bu…

How on earth did wokeness even come up there? You’d have zero notion of my political leanings if you only read the words I’d written there. How badly do you have to phrase a question or answer to have it downvoted for being not-woke? “So I’m trying to write a GET route in FastAPI, which has a great ass, by the way, amirite?, and I’m getting the error that…”

> How on earth did wokeness even come up there?

Wokeness is a control mechanism. If you tread one inch off the "correct" path (as any normal person is going to do occasionally), you will get stomped. For example:

[jane] Using "delete this" is perfectly safe in C++

[neil] Jane, not at all. For example .....

[moderator] neil, i think you are disrespecting jane - 6 hour ban.

And I am not joking about this. But it was only the company employee moderators that did this, and they did it excessively. They also got rid of the few mods who knew how to mod and wouldn't toe the line.

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

#187

Post by tstrimple »

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…

I was a user of StackOverflow for quite a while. I appreciated the friction. It taught me how to ask better questions to the point where I'd be doing all the research needed to ask a good question and just solve it myself along the way. It's a skill that has made a world of difference in my career relative to my peers. Makes me want to reply to my coworkers simply with "Closed as Duplicate" or "Closed - Needs details or clarity".

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

#188

Post by zahlman »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #185
zahlman wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it’s fine they are hidden by default. But unt we can see all removed comments we can’t understand the debate. Do you have showdead on?

Yes. It’s not enough and I’m confused why.

Then how do you know that more comments are being removed?

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

#189

Post by ChrisArchitect »

kstrauser wrote: post #183
ChrisArchitect wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're welcome to continue the 'unfinished' conversation over there. The thread isn't closed. This article isn't bringing anything new. And yet is forcing the thousands and thousands of HNers who saw the previous main discussion and news days ago to see it again? Sorry you weren't there, sorry you missed it. It's the bringing it up and repeating much of the discussion so soon that's the hinderance. Stuff moves pretty…

I think I'd prefer to have it here with people who are still engaged and actively discussing it, rather than whispering to ghosts in another thread that people have moved past. But no one's forcing anyone to see this version of it. It's just a link they can skip past, although if enough people upvote this post to keep it on the front page, then apparently a significant chunk of the readership hasn't gotten tired of s…

Sorry some of you missed it. And in particular with this one, a lot more people saw the original one and discussed it. It's a huge thread. And now just repeating alot of the talking points in that thread here because again, the submitted post isn't anything new, it's hardly a substantial blog post. Part of the dupe notice is to highlight that maybe your talking point was already covered recently in another thread. You are forcing us to see it again because you're pushing it onto the front page again and into a hundred feeds as if it's fresh. But it's not. It's just a split up/repeated thread about something from 4 days ago. Anyways, OP maybe didn't realize it but you've been around long enough to know things move fast around here.

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

#190

Post by zahlman »

darkwater wrote: post #102
phoronixrly wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, what a perverted definition of success... They failed in being useful to the end users, but they damned sure made their engagement KPI look good, and also got a few ad impressions on the way.

Maybe my tone was not clear enough but I wasn't implying they did a great job for the end user, but they surely did for their revenue stream.

What you seem to overlook is that the people curating the site and setting up duplicate links don't see a penny of revenue. There is extreme misalignment between them and the actual stakeholders. Nowadays the site staff/owners are seen by the meta community basically as active saboteurs.
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