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

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

#51

Post by ge96 »

I get the point of moderating things, try to reduce duplication, low-effort, etc... but it is funny the gut reaction I feel (angry) when my post is auto-deleted (Reddit for example). For SO I remember having questions get blocked and accounts being blocked from downvoted questions. But I understand too, I could have researched more, it's one of those "I want the immediate reward/answer" vs. searching the old questions.

This actually could be a good argument for LLMs, you won't get told your question is dumb.

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

#52

Post by groundzeros2015 »

okaleniuk wrote: post #24

There should be a lesson for other communities but, unfortunately, there is none. StackOverflow used to be a fun and welcoming place in 2009. It became a toxic hellhole overtime There are no obvious flows in the original design, and there were no endemic wrongdoings in the governance either. It just rotted slowly like any other community does. And nobody in the world knows how to keep communities from becoming toxic.…

> there were no endemic wrongdoings in the governance either

Once it became a product there was constant tension between community and management. A 24 year old PM who had never worked in software would come declare a sweeping change and then accuse the community for being toxic uninclusive trolls.

Also Joel violated all rules and norms and used it to promote his personal political platform.

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

#53

Post by miningape »

ndriscoll wrote: post #37
xeromal wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they are positing that LLMs do not produce new thought. If a new framework (super magic new framework) is released, current LLMs will not be able to help.

Why wouldn't the LLM just read the source of the framework to answer questions directly? That's how I do things as a human. Given the appropriate background knowledge (which current LLMs are already extremely capable with), it should be pretty easy to understand what it's doing, and if it's not easy to understand the source, it's probably a bad framework. I don't expect an LLM to have deep inbuilt knowledge of librar…

Because LLMs do not work like that - there's no "understanding" the source and answering questions, it simply "finds" similar results in its training data (matching it with the context) and regurgitates (some part of) it (+ other "noise").

Meaning as technology evolves and does things in novel ways, without explainers annotating it the LLM won't have anything to draw on - reducing the quality of answers. Which brings us full circle, what will companies use as training data without answers in places like SO?

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

#54

Post by spiderfarmer »

ndriscoll wrote: post #37
xeromal wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they are positing that LLMs do not produce new thought. If a new framework (super magic new framework) is released, current LLMs will not be able to help.

Why wouldn't the LLM just read the source of the framework to answer questions directly? That's how I do things as a human. Given the appropriate background knowledge (which current LLMs are already extremely capable with), it should be pretty easy to understand what it's doing, and if it's not easy to understand the source, it's probably a bad framework. I don't expect an LLM to have deep inbuilt knowledge of librar…

LLM’s can already do this without training. I recently uploaded a manual for an internal system and it can perfectly answer questions from the context window.

So adding a new framework already doesn’t need human input. It’s artificial intelligence now, not a glorified search engine or autocomplete engine.

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

#55

Post by jjice »

This may be a controversial take based on the last few years of SO discourse, but the strictness in SO was part of what made it a good resource.

For a question asker, it could be really toxic. I've had toxic responses as well. The problem is, there are _a lot_ of bad questions that would pollute that site otherwise.

For a case study into what it would look like if it invited all questions, look at many subreddits.

I'll occasionally go on /r/ObsidianMD to see if there are interesting product updates, but instead I just see questions that get re-asked _constantly_. There's a very bad culture around searching for previous thread for info on many subreddits. People also ask questions unrelated to the sub at all. I've seen so many times people asking questions about some Android specific problem unrelated to the issue. While ideally I'd like to help these people, it pollutes real questions, discussion, and most valuably to future users, the ability to properly search for previous discourse.

SO best acts as library of information. I will say, people on there could benefit from removing the rude tone (this is a trait I see in software engineers frequently, unfortunately). But closing activity when it's inappropriate or duplicate (which despite many testimonials, I have seen is more common than not) is a good habit IMO.

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

#56

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

foobarian wrote: post #14
throwway120385 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not. A lot of moderators on SO thought that technology stayed the same from 2014 onward. So I'd often see questions that were exactly the same as the one I asked, but they'd be closed as a duplicate of a question that was subtly different in wording but totally different in technical content. And you would have had to be intimately aware of the systems the question was about to recognize the difference. Most of t…

Seems like the LLM training problem but just manifesting in humans. Actually wonder if replacing all the moderators with LLM would be an improvement.

>Seems like the LLM training problem but just manifesting in humans.

There are people at the periphery of my life that I suspect are little more than biological LLMs. Their drivel has much in common with AI slop. I'm sure some of you have had similar experiences.

>Actually wonder if replacing all the moderators with LLM would be an improvement.

This might be like putting Skynet in charge of traffic court penalties.

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

#57

Post by herbturbo »

oceanplexian wrote: post #33
jrjeksjd8d wrote: post #13

Like 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…

I think this is seeing the past with rose tinted glasses, it’s not like SO was on the cutting edge of computer science. The world is probably better off that we don’t need another 12 ways to develop a CRUD app or learn the framework of the month from gatekeepers with a bad attitude.

You must have been using SO different to me then. For me it was more like a Wikipedia for specific language errors, compiler/IDE issues etc.

Never once saw anyone discussing how to implement CRUD or claiming one framework was better than another. That was the point - concrete answers not opinions.

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

#58

Post by spiderfarmer »

miningape wrote: post #53
ndriscoll wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't the LLM just read the source of the framework to answer questions directly? That's how I do things as a human. Given the appropriate background knowledge (which current LLMs are already extremely capable with), it should be pretty easy to understand what it's doing, and if it's not easy to understand the source, it's probably a bad framework. I don't expect an LLM to have deep inbuilt knowledge of librar…

Because LLMs do not work like that - there's no "understanding" the source and answering questions, it simply "finds" similar results in its training data (matching it with the context) and regurgitates (some part of) it (+ other "noise"). Meaning as technology evolves and does things in novel ways, without explainers annotating it the LLM won't have anything to draw on - reducing the quality of answers. Which brings…

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

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

#59

Post by smallerfish »

simianparrot wrote: post #47
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…

And they get confident lies back 2/10 times, not enough to make them constantly question the answers, but just enough to _really_ mess with them over time. And not just that, almost no new good questions and answers are created anymore for the next iterations of LLM's to train on, so they'll be consuming more and more AI-centered SEO slop until that ratio becomes so high it becomes useless. But by then most of us who…

> And they get confident lies back 2/10 times

That _might_ have been true in 2023.

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

#60

Post by groundzeros2015 »

whstl wrote: post #38
ronbenton wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And nobody in the world knows how to keep communities from becoming toxic. There is simply no recipe. And that's why StackOverflow doesn't serve as a lesson either. I think a well-moderated community can be non-toxic. Lobste.rs is a good if not extreme example: it's kind of a vouch system for the people you refer and there's pretty good moderation to prevent overly mean discussion.

HN itself is way better than people give credit to. The toxicity tends to be very isolated, and divisive topics disappear quickly from the front page. I find that there's still a subset of users that make it worse than it should be, by making too much noise about "tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage" , but that is already against the rules/guidelines.

So much is removed that it gives a false appearance of consensus and harmony.
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