What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph • Hacker News Board

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#611

Post by kazinator » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 5:35 AM UTC

pygy_ wrote: post #313

DrewADesign wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their rules, (I believe unintentionally) give iron-fisted fiefdom rulers a toolbox of justifications to control and alienate under the guise of protecting the quality of the site data. I honestly don’t even think most of the control freak mods could objectively judge the propriety of their actions because it was all encouraged by the rules. (And I do not think this was universal among the mods, but it was certainly e…

I remember having to fight a mod for him to restore a reply penned by Mike Pall, to a LuaJIT question. Mike Pall is the author of LuaJIT. The reply had been either deleted or edited to the point of being wrong (memory is foggy), because Mike Pall wasn't an expert at SO, and had somehow not used the site exactly as intended. The mod was very dismissive and patronizing.

These kinds of incidents always remind me of https://wiki.c2.com/?KornShellStory

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#612

Post by 20k » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 10:11 AM UTC

zahlman wrote: post #464

kstrauser wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I reverted nearly every single edit to my answers other than obvious typos. If I’d have meant something other than what I said, I’d have said it. You want to see your own words on the page? Write an answer of your own. Lordy, that use to piss me off most fiercely. I don’t want someone else’s words attributed to me.

It is taken very seriously in Stack Overflow editing policy that edits are not supposed to go against the author's apparent intent. But it does involve removing a lot of things that you might want the answer to say, but don't meet the guidelines for what answers are supposed to contain. When you join the site, you agree to Terms and Conditions that, among other things, grant a Creative Commons license to the communit…

>People with the attitude you demonstrate here are consistently among the worst-behaved and hardest-to-deal-with participants on the meta site, because of a stubborn refusal to accept a core principle of the site.

Most edits I saw to answers on stack overflow were crap though, the system was regularly abused

That stubborn refusal was because it was a terrible idea, and one of the reasons why the site died

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#613

Post by fenomas » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 1:46 PM UTC

zahlman wrote: post #563

fenomas wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So ideally that question should have answers that apply to the new question as well. The point is who decides. If you ask a question and I flag it as a dupe, I might think the answers on the other question apply to yours, but only you know whether they solved your problem or not. > I've no idea if the rate of bad duplicates is so much higher than I observed, Sure, and neither does SO! They didn't even measure it. T…

> The point is who decides. If you ask a question and I flag it as a dupe, I might think the answers on the other question apply to yours, but only you know whether they solved your problem or not. The site is not about solving your problem. The site is about answering your question . By policy, whether a question is a duplicate depends on whether answers at the target answer the question that is actually present in…

> The site is not about solving your problem. The site is about answering your question.

The point stands either way, reread my comment. When you ask a question on SO and somebody posts a regular answer, you the asker decide whether they've answered your question/solved your problem/Xed your Y/whatever else. Until you accept it as correct, SO assumes the posted answer did not X your Y.

In contrast when random people flag your question as a dupe, they the random people decide that the other question Xes your Y. If they misread your question, tough luck, SO assumes they are correct even though you're the only one who actually knows. That's the point I was making.

> This fundamentally can't be measured.

Again, reread my comments. If SO let other people suggest that an existing question Xes your Y, and gave you a button to accept their suggestion, then SO would know roughly how often dupe flags are correct.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#614

Post by zahlman » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 6:02 PM UTC

dpkirchner wrote: post #531

matheusmoreira wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stack Exchange has degenerated to the point of overt deletionism . It wasn't enough to just close the questions, they actually felt the need to delete the content people put effort into writing as well. There's nothing quite like trying to find a closed question that nonetheless had useful answers and comments with links, only to find that the entire thing had been deleted . They even do this in those beta sites whic…

They'd even delete chats. You'd see, in comments, someone inviting the author to chat, but the link would (in the present) take you to a 404 page. Did the question get an answer? Did chat ever work? Was something useful shared? We'll never know.

The system for managing chat rooms was buggy, but the entire point of the chat rooms was to keep things out of the way long term. If the invitation comment didn't also get deleted, that was a system bug. As someone who comes by "in the present", you are not supposed to go through a chat room to figure out whether "something useful was shared". The way you answer "did the question get an answer?" is by observing whether there is an answer post underneath the question. If you didn't see one and you're trying to parse the comments, then the answer to that is no.

Those discussions are not about figuring out the answer to the question. Anyone who used them that way, for example to try to provide individualized debugging assistance, was abusing the system. The point was to iron out issues with the question, so that it can be answered. Publicly.

It was extremely by-design that comments got removed. The comment section is, per the template moderator explanation of large-scale cleanups, not for extended discussion.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#615

Post by zahlman » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 6:02 PM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #544

zahlman wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> overt deletionism. It wasn't enough to just close the questions, they actually felt the need to delete the content people put effort into writing as well. The site has more than three times as many publicly-visible questions as Wikipedia has articles . And that's with the scope restricted to just programming.

Is that supposed to somehow excuse the deletionism?

No excuse is required, because there's nothing wrong with it.