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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

#71

Post by socalgal2 »

Someone1234 wrote: post #46
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…

Which directly resulted in the answers (and even the questions) to get quickly out of date, providing jQuery w/IE11 compatibility still being the non-dupe approved "answer" in 2025. They drove people away, on purpose, who were creating their content. Which was a successful strategy until it wasn't.

Sounds like Reddit to me. Topics closed, answers out of date, ask again, closed as dupe

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

#72

Post by stackskipton »

ronbenton wrote: post #40
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…

I disagree with this. You can tell someone that a question is not appropriate for a community without being a jerk. Or you can tell them that there needs to be more information in a question without being a jerk. I do not think being mean is a prerequisite for successful curation of information.

As Ops person who has to tell people "This is terrible idea, we are not doing it.", I've always struggled with how to tell someone nicely "No" without them seeing it as "Well, I guess my idea delivery is off, my idea is fine though."

When dealing with those personalities, seems only way to get them to completely reconsider them approach is hard "F off". Which I why I understand old Linus T. Emails. They were clearly in response to someone acting like "I just need to convince them"

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

#73

Post by virgil_disgr4ce »

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.

> 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

Are you saying that because you don't like web apps or the frameworks that people use to make them, there shouldn't be a way for people to publicly ask questions about programming?

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

#74

Post by smallerfish »

simianparrot wrote: post #69
smallerfish wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And they get confident lies back 2/10 times That _might_ have been true in 2023.

If you think it's not true today, it's just the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.

You're claiming 20% of LLM responses are hallucinations, today?

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

#75

Post by kstrauser »

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…

Eh. I’m pretty highly ranked on SO, not stratospherically, but in the top 1% in a popular topic. I stopped going there waaaaayyyy before LLMs came on the scene because it stopped being fun. Perfectly good questions were closed before they could get traction. Answers were shot down because they weren’t phrased in the form of an MLA essay. It became the end result of how Wikipedia would look like if deletionist roomdwellers got their way and drove everyone else away.

Instead of a rich interaction forum, it became a gamified version of Appease The Asshole. I stopped playing when I realized I’d rather be doing almost anything else with my free time.

For me, SO is a proof that communities need a BDFL with a vision for how they should run, who is empowered to say “I appreciate your efforts but this isn’t how we want to do things here” and veto the ruiners. Otherwise you inevitably seem to end up with a self-elected bureaucracy that exists to keep itself in place, all else be damned.

(Bringing it back to a local example, I can’t imagine HN without dang and the new mods. Actually, I guess I can: it would look a lot like Reddit, which is fine if that’s what you’re into, but I vastly prefer the quality of conversation here, thanks.)

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

#76

Post by Someone1234 »

socalgal2 wrote: post #71
Someone1234 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which directly resulted in the answers (and even the questions) to get quickly out of date, providing jQuery w/IE11 compatibility still being the non-dupe approved "answer" in 2025. They drove people away, on purpose, who were creating their content. Which was a successful strategy until it wasn't.

Sounds like Reddit to me. Topics closed, answers out of date, ask again, closed as dupe

I would agree, Reddit is in a slow death spiral. I'd point at bad management primarily. The main thing keeping them afloat may be lack of good competition.

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

#77

Post by miningape »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #58
miningape wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's well known that even current LLMs do not perform well on logic games when you change the names / language used.

i.e. try asking it to swap the meanings of the words red and green and ask it to describe the colors in a painting and analyse it with color theory - notice how quickly the results degrade, often attributing "green" qualities to "red" since it's now calling it "green".

What this shows us is that training data (where the associations are made) plays a significant role in the level of answer an LLM can give, no matter how good your context is (at overriding the associations / training data). This demonstrates that training data is more important (for "novel" work) than context is.

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

#78

Post by AlexandrB »

ronbenton wrote: post #40
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…

I disagree with this. You can tell someone that a question is not appropriate for a community without being a jerk. Or you can tell them that there needs to be more information in a question without being a jerk. I do not think being mean is a prerequisite for successful curation of information.

To play devil's advocate, I think some people confuse terse, succinct communication with being mean. I find this to be a common cultural difference between contributors from different backgrounds.

Personally I find a lot of "welcoming" language to be excessively saccharine and ultimately insincere. Something between being talked down to like I'm a child and corpo-slop. Ultimately I don't think there's necessarily a one-size-fits-all solution here and it's weird that some people expect that such a thing can or should exist.

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

#79

Post by Permit »

brigade wrote: post #42
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…

As someone who did predominately use stack overflow through Google search… I remember that half the time the top result was someone asking the question I had, only for it to be duped to a different question that didn’t answer the original. So they failed there.

> I remember that half the time the top result was someone asking the question I had, only for it to be duped to a different question that didn’t answer the original.

This is an entirely different problem than toxicity is it not? Like, if the moderators are bad at their job that seems uniquely different than the moderators were mean to me while doing their job.

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

#80

Post by ourmandave »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #54
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…

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.

Who wrote the manual?
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