301–310 of 363 posts
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Are you talking about Quora?
I read it to mean Stack Overflow, whose drop in traffic has been widely discussed. But it could be Quora or other sites--effectively validating OP's original point.
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I agree. Is there any way to "inoculate" organisation to prevent this failure mode?
Giving the organization very clear rules and goals from the start and making wide range correcting changes towards them even when they hurt the whole organization. For companies this usually means pushing product cannibalisation and accepting to forgo additional profit in exchange for better long term viability. I think Apple was good at this during most of Steve Jobs's second term. Didn't last long though. Perhaps t…
After an editor, who has edited millions of pages and seems to be a jack-of-all-trades, unjustifiably rejects your contribution on a topic where you have dozens of scientific articles published, the only conclusion is that the system is flawed. There's a need for a fundamental change in approach, probably to a system where censorship exists only in cases of clearly illegal content, and various opinions are allowed to…
That literally happened hundreds of times and every single one of them is dead.
Whatever is it what Wikipedia is doing, it seems to be working far better then alternatives.
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I read it to mean Stack Overflow, whose drop in traffic has been widely discussed. But it could be Quora or other sites--effectively validating OP's original point.
The drop of traffic to SO is due to LLM proliferation. Some people use LLM to get answers (trained on SO etc), other people use LLM to spam SO.
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-...
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/394772/lets-talk-ab...
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Yeah, whenever I ask a question on SO, I literally have to write paragraphs of text exhorting people to answer my question instead of a different question they find easier, or why my question is not the same as some vaguely similar one. Then I have to constantly remind people about the same stuff in the comments. That culture problem has been getting worse and worse at SO over time. I only go there as a last resort.
I found SO very frustrating until one of the moderators explained it rather clearly: SO isn't about me (or you). They don't want to help me (or you). They want to help everyone else. In that light all the weirdness made sense. Of course, I am very interested in getting my problems solved, so I simply stopped asking on SO to avoid the frustration.
I know that's what they say. The thing they have trouble understanding is that "helping everyone else" does not mean bending every question into some 101 level software design advice thing.
"Helping everyone else" very much can mean being a repository of answers to hard questions or solutions when non-typical constraints are at play. Every software engineer worth his salt must have had an experience where the answer he was looking for was in some old, weird forum post that was the single hit to his search query, but a lot of SO doesn't seem to get that.
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The problem is thinking that we can create a space where the powerful outside the space won't be powerful inside the space. Same thing with crypto.
I.e. anti-gov, anti-corp spaces can and will exclude those entities once discovered. Sure there's espionage but that's true of any situation.
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To some degree you see this pattern repeated over and over anytime you have an organization gain any sort of longevity. A culture develops to create a power structure that favors those who have devoted a large portion of their personal identity to the success of the organization. This culture serves as a moat against anyone who would integrate themselves within the organization and attempt drastic changes that would…
I agree. Is there any way to "inoculate" organisation to prevent this failure mode?
Maybe competent moderators, and a kind of rock-paper-scissors rule structure. Where you have rules, but excessive rules lawyering is a grave, bannable offense.
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To parent's point, I think this is still better than what we had before. I mean, encyclopedias didn't have sources at all, and people were overly confident in books being correct. On the niche topic part, I wonder if we'll ever be able to do something about it. I don't believe in AI check being a good fit for specialized or rare contexts, and as there's fewer eyes it's by definition more complicated to cross referenc…
To be fair, I don't think there's much more Wikipedia could do better. Wikipedia is largely self-correcting in that the more eyeballs an article has, the more likely that wrong or biased claims will be challenged. I actually think the idea of creating a separate class of "proven experts" would make the situation worse: it'd just entrench whatever the expert opinion is which may even be more biased than the normal con…
I think that concept is a fairy tale. It's kind of like open source software: just because the code is out there doesn't mean anyone's looking for bugs in or or fixing them.
Wikipedia articles settle on the stalemate between its most obsessive or motivated users, the result of which is frequently is wrong or biased. The quantity of eyeballs is irrelevant.
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The drop of traffic to SO is due to LLM proliferation. Some people use LLM to get answers (trained on SO etc), other people use LLM to spam SO.
StackExchange has been going downhill since late 2019. A significant number of power users (moderators) have left and the writing has been on the wall for a number of years. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-... https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/394772/lets-talk-ab...
I'm a power user on SO with some moderation capabilities. There's no mods per se I think just people who have different functions enabled to them (editing questions, closing, review etc). Admittedly I don't moderate it much (never did)
I still use it daily as a lazy reference. Haven't noticed any decline apart from it having covered all topics so there's mostly nothing new left to ask. Which is the best thing that can happen to Q&A site
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I consider Wikipedia to be the last standing wonder of the WWW (world wide web). - Google search results get worse every year. - Stackoverflow lies in ruins (albeit the ruins are still useful). - ICQ/Gtalk/AIM completely dead and all in silos now (Slack). - Twitter is dead. - Facebook is too annoying now. Google Maps is still amazing, but I consider that more a miracle of the internet as opposed to a miracle of the W…
I sadly agree with everything you said, except would add that Google Maps has already died for many users outside of urban areas. Satellite view has always been great for scouting outdoor areas but the app falls apart if you actually go anywhere with poor service and try to use it. One of the most basic features, saving a pin on a map, broke years ago and despite many complaints on their support forum it hasn't been…
Trying to use Google Maps in France usually ends up being send down a dirt road or up a mountain.
Trying to use Google Maps to check my train the other day and I showed the next train and then a train 2 hours later, I had to put the depart time to 1 minute after the train leaving to see the next one.
I've said for years now the product owners of Google Maps are some of the most incompetent on the planet for the size of app they have.