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What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
371–380 of 615 posts
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just noticed that by around 2015 it had got super toxic and snippy. Usually I’d find answers on SO. Relatively rarely I’d ask questions but, when I did, I’d always try and follow the netiquette rules of yore, and think in terms of, if I was a support engineer trying to help with this, what would I need to know? Because I have supported products, and we’ve all seen enough bug reports and questions come in that we ca…
The anonymity of people giving aggressive and confrontational "answers" to a question reminds me of: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...
For anyone else who's maliciously IP-address-blocked from Penny Arcade, the link is just to the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you saying that the decline of SO can be explained by that and not AI? I don't buy it.
People were willing to put up with SO in the before times, nobody was excited to ask a question, it was a dreadful experience. It was their UX that doomed them immediately. Reddit and HN are still here after all.
Reddit is full of bots instead of actual humans. Arguably, so is HN.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#374I never had an LLM tell me my question was already answered and imply I was stupid for not finding it. SO dug its own grave and jumped in.
But the LLM will confidently give you a wrong answer and then waste three hours of your time going down tangential rabbit holes trying to sort it out. I never had an account, never asked or answered a question on SO, but found the answer I needed there plenty of times and got on with my work.
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Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#375I never had an LLM tell me my question was already answered and imply I was stupid for not finding it. SO dug its own grave and jumped in.
I feel like I've seen this comment before...
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#376I never had an LLM tell me my question was already answered and imply I was stupid for not finding it. SO dug its own grave and jumped in.
Sometimes your question was simply visually similar to another but conceptually very different, and it'd get closed for being a duplicate anyway. Then you have to re-ask it, now with a couple extra disclaimers spelling out that indeed you did use the search function but no, the other visually similar question isn't actually the same as yours. Then you'd get maybe 2 comments and -2 in downvotes.
Sometimes you'd get banned for asking an exact duplicate of a previous question of yours that was closed. They'd tell you to edit the closed question and it would be reopened.
But if you'd edited the closed question instead, it wouldn't be reopened.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#377Stack overflow was always going to die. AI just sped it up. The misconception that it was a community is surprising. People went there for an answer and left, very few would stick around, not only because there was no incentive, but if you did you'd likely get crapped on by one of the hostile moderators which would ensure you'd leave and never come back, because who wants to willingly be treated badly.
It was basically an imposer syndrome enforcing machine.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#378I used to read Coding Horror, I have been a programmer for longer than I had high speed Internet, yet somehow I never felt the urge to create a StackOverflow account. I have literally never browsed the site, always landed from Google and left when I found my answer. There was an era of the Internet where moderators were seen as the solution to all the problems of Internet communities. Then we discovered that those pe…
It definitely seems like politics ruins everything. Nerds once thought they'd transcended politics and then discovered they hadn't.
"Politics" being another word for "game theory when it's about humans"
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
for a lot of stuff it just made more sense to ask on the github project's issue tracker.
- Open issue on GitHub issues: Maintainer closes issue citing "Bug reports only" - Open question on SO: Moderators close because it's too specific to a library - Ask on IRC: Get piled on for not using the right vocabulary and your IP isn't masked - Ask the LLM: Get hallucinated answer based on old API docs - Ask technical lead: Get burned for asking basic question and put on PIP - Ask my mom: She doesn't know enough…
SO allows questions that are specific to a library.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#380I still use stack exchange, or I did until this week. I was looking for help with something and the answers and comments are intersliced with advertisements (albeit internal ones).
It's obvious that LLMs affected their traffic by a huge amount, but making the page flow worse for me was their doing