I disliked the pedantic nature of stackoverflow like the next guy but this seems like a naive take.
SO solved a problem, that problem is now gone
We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
211–220 of 225 posts
Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#212The average answer writer on SO is not actually that toxic: really it's the voters. The top answer will almost always be an explanation of why the asker is wrong to want to do the thing they want to do. But that's not most answers, or most answerers, just the top ones. The bottom answer will almost always be an honest attempt to write code that answers the question. Sometimes the code doesn't work, or needs explanati…
Please show an example of a question following this pattern. That is radically different from my experience.
Sure, just look at the famous question about how to parse HTML with Regex[0].
Since this question has received so much attention, even the bottom answer has a positive score. Otherwise the pattern looks typical.
[0]https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...
Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#213I must be incredibly fortunate, I got a lot of good value from SO and have not experienced any of the toxicity that the author mentions here. I have written questions, comments, and answers.
This was my experience using StackOverflow. I've commented, asked questions, and received answers. Aside from a few questionable downvotes I received occasionally, I never felt like the community was toxic.
Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wit…
Written like you're on one side of the cultural barrier and think that you have to be somehow naturally correct because that's what's natural to you. To others, that attitude is just arrogant and self-centered. Why should one particular culture dictate the behavior of everyone, and especially why should it be your culture?
What you call "establishing mutual respect" is just "insincere and shallow" to others. I do not believe for a second that a grocery store cashier wants to know how my day has been.
Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#215Well, I was a top 2%er, and answered more questions than I asked, with about 20k, and I made a point to be nice to newbies
being mean is a personal choice, not a requirement. being courteous and considerate and being experienced or knowledgeable can both co exist
Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#216one thing that grabbed me right away about chat gpt is how it understood my question. it wasn't obtuse, let alone intentionally so. it wasn't pedantic; it just helped. And without a side dish of attitude.
Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#217StackOverflow 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…
The toxicity was the point?
That's a psychopathic take on the matter, I'm sorry.
Nothing or no one forced anyone to be harsh to other human beings. That was a deliberate choice by a bunch of sociopaths
Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#218Like so many things in American life these days, we've arrived at a "better solution" that extracts value from the past without producing a future. The decades of Stack Overflow answers fed into LLM training produce plausible answers for today . In 10 years what will the LLMs train on? So much of life these days is purely extractive, trying to squeeze more money out of less productive activity. It's no wonder young p…
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Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wit…
Written like you're on one side of the cultural barrier and think that you have to be somehow naturally correct because that's what's natural to you . To others, that attitude is just arrogant and self-centered. Why should one particular culture dictate the behavior of everyone, and especially why should it be your culture? What you call "establishing mutual respect" is just "insincere and shallow" to others. I do no…
That's not what I mean, I don't like corpo-speak either. I mean just treating people like they're human beings, neither with affected shortness nor affected warmth. I really don't like the common notion that you have to be cold and short with people to be a good engineer, it makes the culture considerably less pleasant and more abrasive than it needs to be in my view.
I could just as well turn that around and say why should we all adopt your preference of unpleasantly curt communication? Is that not also an imposition of someone else's culture?
Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#220Like so many things in American life these days, we've arrived at a "better solution" that extracts value from the past without producing a future. The decades of Stack Overflow answers fed into LLM training produce plausible answers for today . In 10 years what will the LLMs train on? So much of life these days is purely extractive, trying to squeeze more money out of less productive activity. It's no wonder young p…
Why, us of course. The results of your claude code session, for example, make fine training data. Did the user commit the final answer? What changes were made before they did?
Is anyone actually doing that level of fine-tuning? My understanding of LLMs is that they shovel in all the code they can find regardless of quality and let the Lord sort it out.