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Comment by tiffanyh | Hacker News Reader

It doesn’t help either that for the past 14-years, SO has always been quick to close questions and/or answers become out of date.

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Even when they aren't closing questions, the userbase is so insanely hostile to anyone who dares ask a question. ChatGPT is such a breath of fresh air after having knowledge gatekept behind an army of smug moderators for so long.

Imagine if the typical response on SO was ChatGPT-esque:

  To convert an ArrayBuffer to a Buffer in Node.js using the node-fetch library, you can use the Buffer.from() method.
   
  Here's an example: [...]

I feel like someone could quickly build up a strong SO profile by taking the question, asking ChatGPT, validating it, then just copy/pasting.

I like that example. Why the heck would you choose to use node-fetch library to convert between your buffers? What are you trying to do? You will be asked that on SO and forced to restate and understand your problem better in the first place, while ChatGPT will just tell you whatever because LLM doesn't understand ideas.

Extra credit if you wire up ChatGPT to the right tools so it can, as well as coming up with the initial response, construct the tests to validate the response, execute and evaluate the tests, and post to SO after validation.

Not my experience, but I have a few kilopoints there already. A well researched question will stay and I am thankful to mods who keep low grade stuff to minimum.

That’s the point. ChatGPT has infinite patience for “low grade stuff”.

That's the point, humans don't. Why call them hostile to you if you are wasting their time

By the way low grade stuff doesn't mean a basic question, it just means a question that shows no effort made to read, comprehend, understand, research. Pretty sure I came out fair bit more resourceful and fluid-intelligent thanks to SO rules...

They are hostile compared to most other platforms. I stopped using SO a while ago because it’s useless. You get much better results asking on a discord community where people are happy to help you out rather than spend all day scouring the site looking for posts to report.

I use SO a lot. I almost never ask questions these days. I think this is actually what is supposed to happen, as more and more questions were answered already you don't need to create duplicates, you just need to search. The only questions left to answer is legit uncharted territory, new tech stacks or rare issues.

I leave chat groups with many people asking stupid low effort questions without using search or any research. Signal noise ratio, waste of time. But there are chat groups where low effort junk is moderated away, just like SO.

> That's the point, humans don't. Why call them hostile to you if you are wasting their time

If you think a question if wasting your time, you can just ignore it.

The person asking the question most likely is not even aware that their question is shit.

ChatGPT is just a much better resource for it, especially considering that most likely it was trained on many SO answers already.

When I visit SO in a spare moment, I don't want to first skim and ignore 2000 (and I really think this is an underestimation) questions from people who basically want me to google something for them, because since my life is finite and I have other things to do I would never get to interesting stuff. It's all about respecting others time and expecting respectful attitude back

Then there should be no complaint that people that would ask stupid questions (considering that asking stupid questions is part of a learning process) are using a different tool.

I actually use SO as you suggest. I don't ask questions, if what I want to know is not answered, I just go and find my answer elsewhere. In the desire yo not bother the "incredibly nice" people on SO, I just never engage with them. Can't really get more respectful than that. For all intents and purposes, I'm the perfect SO user.

ChatGPT, in that sense is an amazing learning tool. I learned more in a couple of months with it than in years of stumbling upon SO replies after searching stuff online. SO, on the other hand, is just about getting lucky in finding some old reply and the code snippet you found works, or move along in your search.

> no complaint that people that would ask stupid questions (considering that asking stupid questions is part of a learning process) are using a different tool.

Hmm. Did I complain about it?

Did I say that you complained?

However, we are in a thread that eminently discusses how SO lost relevance I relation to ChatGPT as a tool used by developers. All my answers are framed in this context.

> However, we are in a thread that eminently discusses how SO lost relevance I relation to ChatGPT

The comments leading up to my comment also didn't complain about ChatGPT, they all just piled on SO for no clear reason. Maybe you mixed up threads.

Was a big supporter in the early years. Still am when all else fails! ;)

After the strange decision to split it into fiefdoms, with separate accounts and reputation, I rarely had enough points to contribute free feedback that may have saved someone’s day. I happen to know stuff on multiple topics, but it wasn’t wanted.

We should be glad all the code and advice has always been being scraped. It was all provided by community. This is probably a better outcome than just seeing a wrong answer about an obscure error code on 3 fake seo blogs.

These restrictions go away once you get 200 reputation on any Stack Exchange site. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/141648/what-is-the-...

True. But it still asks me to re-sign in and check my cookie settings nearly every time I use it. On purpose or by search result.

Today, happens to be brisket. Last time, welding. Even when it’s all programming stuff, seems like I’m constantly being asked to take action before participating on the post.

(There have been so many worse ideas. I just hate that stuff.)

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