Technology

Undoubtedly. But you agree that the crowdsourced knowledge base of existing answers is useful, no? That is what the islop searches and reproduces. It is more convenient than waiting for a rude answer. But I don't think islop will give you a good answer if someone has not been bothered answer it before in SO.

islop is a convenience, but you should fear the day you lose the original and the only way to get that info is some opaque islop oracle

I was contributing to SO in 2014-2017 when my job wanted our engineers to be more "visible" online.

I was in the top 3% and it made me realize how incredibly small the community was. I was probably answering like 5 questions a week. It wasn't hard. For some perspective, I'm making like 4-5 posts on Lemmy A DAY.

What made me really pissed was how often a new person would give a really good answer, then some top 1% chucklefuck would literally take that answer, rewrite it, and then have it appear as the top answer. And that happened to me constantly. But again, I didn't care since I'm just doing this to show my company I'm a "good lil engineer".

I stopped participating because of how they treated new users. And around 2020(?), SO made a pledge to be not so douchy and actually allow new users to ask questions. But that 1% chucklefuck crew was still allowed to wave their dicks around and stomp on people's answers. So yeah, less "Duplicate questions", more "This has been answered already [link to their own answer that they stole]".

So they removed the toxic attitude with asking questions, but not the toxicity when answering. SO still had the most sweaty people control responses, including editing/deleting them. And you can't grow a community like that.

The Redditification of SO

I'm sorry, but I've had to close your comment because it was too speculative.

Works well for now. Wait until there's something new that it hasn't been trained on. It needs that Stack Exchange data to train on.

The hot concept around the late 2000's and early 2010's was crowdsourcing: leveraging the expertise of volunteers to build consensus. Quora, Stack Overflow, Reddit, and similar sites came up in that time frame where people would freely lend their expertise on a platform because that platform had a pretty good rule set for encouraging that kind of collaboration and consensus building.

Monetizing that goodwill didn't just ruin the look and feel of the sites: it permanently altered people's willingness to participate in those communities. Some, of course, don't mind contributing. But many do choose to sit things out when they see the whole arrangement as enriching an undeserving middleman.

I stopped using it once I found out their entire business model was basically copyright trolling on a technicality that anyone who answers a question gives them the copyright to the answer, and using code audits to go after businesses that had copy/pasted code. Just left a bad taste in my mouth, even beside stopping using it for work even though I wasn't copy/pasting code.

And even before LLMs, I found ignoring stack exchange results for a search usually still got to the right information.

But yeah, it also had a moderation problem. Give people a hammer of power and some will go searching for nails, and now you don't have anywhere to hang things from because the mod was dumber than the user they thought they needed to moderate. And now google can figure out that my question is different from the supposed duplicate question that was closed because it sends me to the closed one, not the tangentially related question the dumbass mod thought was the same thing. Similar energy to people who go to help forums and reply useless shit like RTFM. They aren't really upset at "having" to take time to respond, they are excited about a chance to act superior to someone.

The humans of StackOverflow have been pricks for so long. If they fixed that problem years ago they would have been in a great position with the advent of AI. They could've marketed themselves as a site for humans. But no, fuckfacepoweruser found an answer to a different question he believes answers your question so marked your question as a duplicate and fuckfacerubberstamper voted to close it in the queue without critically thinking about it.

To AI using Stack Overflow data.

Removed. Someone else already said this before. Also, please ensure you stick to the stlye guides next time, and be less ambiguous. SO could mean a plethora of things.

I will never forget the time I posted a question about why something wasn't working as I expected, with a minimal example (≈ 10 lines of python, no external libraries) and a description of the expected behaviour and observed behaviour.

The first three-ish replies I got were instant comments that this in fact does work like I would expect, and that the observed behaviour I described wasn't what the code would produce. A day later, some highly-rated user made a friendly note that I had a typo that just happened to trigger this very unexpected error.

Basically, I was thrashed by the first replies, when the people replying hadn't even run the code. It felt extremely good to be able to reply to them that they were asshats for saying that the code didn't do what I said it did when they hadn't even run it.

Realistically though, asking an LLM what’s wrong with my code is a lot faster than scrolling through 50 posts and reading the ones that talk about something almost relevant.

It was a vast improvement over expert sex change, which was the king before SO.

Locking this comment. Duplicate of https://lemmy.world/comment/21433687

That site is an incredible resource