Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms

>If you're out there-- how does it feel to know that what you meant as a efficient course-correction for newcomers was instead a social shaming that cut so deep that the message you wrote is still burned verbatim into their memory after all these years?

I've never been a IRC mod for a channel of anywhere near that significance. But as someone who has put in considerable effort for the last few years trying to explain basic fundamental ideas about what Stack Overflow is and how it's supposed to work to people (including to people whose accounts are 15+ years old but who insist on continuing to treat the Q&A like a discussion forum)...

... I'm kinda envious.

Being presented with a text entry box, and the implied contract that what you type there will be broadcast to a wide audience, is not supposed to imply a right to reject the community's telos and substitute your own. Gatekeeping of this sort is important; otherwise you end up with the Wikipedia page for "Dog" being flooded with people trying to get free veterinary consultation. Communities are allowed to have goals and purposes that aren't obvious and which don't match the apparent design, and certainly they aren't required to have goals which encompass everything possible with the sites software.

There are countless places on the Internet that work like a discussion forum where you can post a question, or a request for help, or just a general state of confusion, about a problem where you're just completely lost; and where you can expect to have a back-and-forth multi-way conversation with others to try and diagnose things or come to a state of understanding; and where nobody cares if your real concern ever surfaces in the form of an explicit, coherent question; and where there's no expectation that any of this dialogue should ever be useful to anyone else.

Stack Overflow is not that, explicitly and by design; and that came about specifically so that people who do have some clue and want to find an answer to an actual question, can do so without having to pick through a dialogue of the sort described above, following an arbitrarily long chain of posts of questionable relevance (that might well end in "never mind, I fixed it" with no explanation).

But in order to become a repository of such questions, people presented with the question submission form... need to be restricted to asking such questions.

If the latter were true, then we would have seen the demand increase for all those specialized fields from graduates, but we have seen its just like what it was, no jobs and more debt, Older people fulfilling roles, until they retire or die and positions that aren't getting filled despite advertising for months to years. My generation will be dead within that time period, you should see at least some replacement by now but if you look closely, there isn't much replacement going on at all because there's no money in it. Greybeards are the only minders left running many of these IT departments if they are left at all and not completely outsourced.

For the amount of responsibility to get things right, you now have jobs that have significantly less responsibilities or entry skills that are now competing with the same positions thanks to inflation. Who would bother signing up for that stress for no economic benefit when they can get any number of other jobs at 3/4 of the pay and none of the responsibility. This type of chaos is what you've discounted as not happening (ECP).

> The economic calculation problem ... is solved

Then why are we having chaotic disruptions, in growing frequency and amplitude, continually more concentrated business sectors based in Lenin's comments on attacking capitalism through debauching currency through inflation as he mentioned to Keynes (towards non-market socialism), and more importantly shortages that are starting to self-sustain at the individual level.

When common food goods are not getting replenished on a weekly basis, and they are 2-3x the normal price, there is an issue. When it hits 2-3 weeks it starts to compound as demand skyrockets for non-discretionary goods (and they can't keep up). Goods sell out almost immediately (as they have been more recently), and people start hoarding (which they are doing again with TP).

You don't seem to realize this is the problem in action. It is hardly solved, we aren't even to the non-market part yet and we are far enough along to see that chaos is increasing, distortions are increasing, and shortages are increasing and not being corrected within JIT shipping schedules.

Those three observations are cause for concern to stop and lookaround because chaos is a major characteristic of the ECP. Moving goods around doesn't perform economic calculation, and soviet-style demand planning failed historically once shortages occurred, the next things coming up in the near future is sustaining shortage and death from famine. India stopped exporting its food because they see this on the horizon and have a intimate history with famine.

The 1921 famine (bolshevik non-market) reduced national population by 4% YOY and dropped the birthrate negative; Mao killed off more than 33+ million during his non-market stint which caused famine. No accurate numbers to draw up a percentage YOY but it was significant.

Every single non-market socialist state has failed in the history of socialism, and that includes its derivatives. Its not appropriate to call it ideology when there is a historic record where not even a single non-market state exists today. The fact that they all had to have markets tied to capitalist states to get their prices shows the gravity of the issue, and now that the last capitalist state is falling to non-market socialism (through intentional design/sabotage), what do you suppose is going to happen to all those market-socialist countries that can no longer get their price data. Its already happening, and chaos is unpredictable; and inflation/deflation measures are limited in resolution (as a high hysteresis problem).

Non-market socialist states run into the slavery and death part, but you are not recognizing that, and discounting it because it hasn't happened to us yet (though its likely within 5 years for a point of no return), and it has happened to every non-market system.

The point of no return to non-market socialism is when debt growth exceeds GDP (outflows exceed inflows). This is structural of any ponzi scheme. Who decides, the producers. This is when rational producers abandon the market, and start shutting down because its no longer possible to make a profit in terms of purchasing power. From there its a short but inevitable jaunt to collapse.

Have you noticed that China's stimulus through printing isn't doing much? Every printing requires exponentially greater amounts, with diminishing returns.

I think you've sorely confused objective observation with ideology and discounted it without taking into account the factors rationally; these are factors showing a clear and present danger to all existing market-socialist states, as well as those capitalist bastions that will be pulled down in the near future from ongoing subversion.

Amazon doesn't produce, its a logistics company. Shortages self-sustain because producers are leaving the market, we saw this first with baby formula in 2020 when the last producer was closed, but what's coming will leave only state-run capacity for most sectors and industry.

Most knowledgeable people know these systems are brittle and parasitic and aren't capable of ECP for a myriad of already written and rational reasons by themselves.

Socialist production absent a market, doesn't work without slave labor. It doesn't even work longer-term either with slave labor because of inefficiencies at current population don't scale well with tech levels.

You might be fine claiming everything is fine now, despite a lot of evidence to the contrary that things are getting progressively worse, and will continue down that path because of these consequences, but what about in 5 years when you can't get food. Will it matter then, when you can't do anything about it, because the time to do something came and passed?

You think the Elites in China don't know this is going to happen? They are pushing so hard for the BRICS because they know this is going to happen, because they helped cause it in their dogmatic and blind fervor and orchestration.

Name one modern real non-market socialist state that exists today that has not failed, and I'll be willing to consider your last statement. As far as I know, none exist and that should frighten every single person today because that is where we are going whether we like it or not (as a function of system dynamics).

Stack Overflow always had a code of conduct - it just wasn't always called that, and it started out based in some naive assumptions about human behaviour.

Someone who tells you something along the lines of "this is is common misconception, maybe you're looking for X instead" is being helpful and kind, and is not at all "labeling you as stupid". On Stack Overflow, it's not at all required that you actually need the question answered, as asked, in order to ask it. (You're even actively encouraged to ask and answer your own questions, as long as both question and answer meet the usual standards, as a way to share your expertise.)

It has never been acceptable to insult others openly on the site - but moderation resources are, and always have been, extremely strained, and the community simply doesn't see certain things as insulting or "mean" that others might. In particular, downvotes aren't withheld out of sympathy, because they are understood to be purely for content rating - but many users take them personally anyway. Curators commonly get yelled at when they comment (thus identifying themselves) to explain policy in polite but blunt copy-paste terms; and they get seethed at when they don't comment. There is a standard set of reasons to close questions (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476), and a how-to-ask guide (https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask), and a site tour (https://stackoverflow.com/tour), and an entire Meta site with a variety of FAQ entries and other common references (for example, I wrote the "proposed faq" of https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808); but very few people seem interested in checking the extant documentation for the community norms, and then feel slighted when the community norms aren't what they assume they ought to be (because it works that way everywhere else). Communities should be allowed to have their own norms, so that they can pursue their own goals (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770).

A ton of users confuse "know better or find the answer ahead of time" for debugging. Stack Overflow allows for what are commonly called "debugging questions", but this does not mean questions wherein you ask someone to debug the code for you. Why? Because that can't ever be helpful to someone else - nobody else has your code, and thus they can't benefit from someone locating the bug in your code. The "debugging questions" that Stack Overflow does want are questions about behaviour that isn't understood, after you have isolated the misbehaving part. These are ideally presented in the form of a "minimal reproducible example" or MRE (https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example).

Stack Overflow explicitly expects you to do research before asking your question (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/261592) - because most of the goal of the site is to cover questions that can't be answered that way. Traditional reference documentation is only part of the puzzle (https://diataxis.fr/); the Q&A site format allows for explanations (for "debugging questions") and how-to guides (in response to simple queries about how to do some atomic, well-specified task). (Tutorials don't fit in this format because they don't start with a clear question from the student.)

I agree that "accepted answer" is a misfeature; but the default is for questions to remain open to new answers indefinitely.

On the one hand, good new answers can remain buried under mediocre and outdated answers more or less indefinitely, because they received hundreds of questionable upvotes in the past. (Despite popular perception, the average culture of Stack Overflow is very heavily weighted towards upvoting. I have statistical analysis of this on the meta site somewhere.)

On the other hand, there are tons of popular reference questions that had to be "protected" so that people couldn't just sign up and contribute the 100th answer (yes, the count really does range into triple digits in several cases, especially if you have access to deleted answers) to a question where there are maybe five actually reasonable-considered-distinct answers possible. And this protection is a quite low barrier - 10 reputation, IIRC. (I'm not sure what motivates people to write these new answers. It might have something to do with being able to point to a Stack Overflow profile which boasts that you've "reached" millions of people, due to its laughably naive algorithm for that.)

Stack Overflow's policies exist for clearly documented reasons that are directly motivated by a clearly documented purpose (which happens not to be aligned with what most new users want the site to be, but they aren't the ones who should get to decide what the site is). They are certainly not politically motivated or created for the sake of a power trip. They came out of years of discussion on the meta site, and have changed over time due to the community realizing that previous iterations missed the mark.