Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

pcloadletter.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 225 posts

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

#201

Post by zahlman »

smallerfish wrote: post #184
zahlman wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

The incentives to do so are seriously lacking, however. A big part of why SO had to ban LLM content so firmly is that otherwise hordes of people will literally copy someone else's question into ChatGPT, and copy its answer back into the answer submission form in the hopes of getting some reputation points. It was much worse for bounties, of course, which had largely become ignored by anyone not doing that.

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

#202

Post by spiderfarmer »

jakeydus wrote: post #109
spiderfarmer wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re talking about ChatGPT 2.0 and severely underestimate the capabilities of today’s models.

If I make up a riddle and ask an LLM to solve it, it will perform worse than a riddle that is well known and whose solution will be found in the dataset. That's just a foundational component of how they work.

Yes you can trick it.

But it’s almost trivial for an LLM to generate every question and answer combo you could every come up with based on new documentation and new source code for a new framework. It doesn’t need StackOverflow anymore. It’s already miles ahead.

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

#203

Post by sph »

socalgal2 wrote: post #71
Someone1234 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which directly resulted in the answers (and even the questions) to get quickly out of date, providing jQuery w/IE11 compatibility still being the non-dupe approved "answer" in 2025. They drove people away, on purpose, who were creating their content. Which was a successful strategy until it wasn't.

Sounds like Reddit to me. Topics closed, answers out of date, ask again, closed as dupe

The dream of decentralised moderation that came with Web 2.0.

In reality, the Venn diagram of people wishing to moderate online spaces for virtual points and petty bureaucrats that get off on making arbitrary rules is pretty much a circle.

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

#205

Post by actinium226 »

brigade wrote: post #42
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…

As someone who did predominately use stack overflow through Google search… I remember that half the time the top result was someone asking the question I had, only for it to be duped to a different question that didn’t answer the original. So they failed there.

I have not had that experience, most of the time the duplicate question was answered, but to address the argument, it seems like it would be correct to mark a question as duplicate even if the original isn't answered. Why should there be two instances of the same question with no answer as opposed to one instance with no answer?

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

#206

Post by spiderfarmer »

jakeydus wrote: post #27
spiderfarmer wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In 10 years what will the LLMs train on? Why do people think this is necessary? When you learn new things, like bicycling, you don't start with relearning how to walk.

The issue here is borrowing from the future to pay for the present. The bicycle analogy (unless I'm missing something huge here) does not seem relevant at all.

Why do you think source code and documentation are not enough for an LLM to train on?

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

#208

Post by man8alexd »

A more interesting metric is a steadily declining percentage of answered questions. It used to be above 90% in the first year and since then dropped to 35% but stabilized around this number for the last 2-3 years.

Source: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426250/unanswered-q...

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

#209

Post by BoxOfRain »

AlexandrB wrote: post #78
ronbenton wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with this. You can tell someone that a question is not appropriate for a community without being a jerk. Or you can tell them that there needs to be more information in a question without being a jerk. I do not think being mean is a prerequisite for successful curation of information.

To play devil's advocate, I think some people confuse terse, succinct communication with being mean. I find this to be a common cultural difference between contributors from different backgrounds. Personally I find a lot of "welcoming" language to be excessively saccharine and ultimately insincere. Something between being talked down to like I'm a child and corpo-slop. Ultimately I don't think there's necessarily a o…

Personally I'm not a fan of terse writing; if something's worth saying at all it's worth using suitably expressive language to describe it, and being short and cold with people isn't a good form of interpersonal communication in my view. Pleasantries are important for establishing mutual respect, if they're considered the baseline of politeness in a particular culture then it's overtly disrespectful to forgo them with strangers. Terseness is efficient for the writer certainly, but it's not necessarily for the reader.

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

#210

Post by myvoiceismypass »

cogman10 wrote: post #132
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

/active vs the actual front page here are two very very very different experiences.
Post reply on HN