Hacker News Reader

Comment by torginus | Hacker News Reader

> Stack Overflow has to be actually dead at this point. There's no reason to go there, or even Google, anymore.

I wonder if we are going to pay for that, as a society. The number of times I went there, asking some tricky question about a framework, and have the actual author or one of the core contributors answer me was astonishing.

View on HN

As I wrote in a root comment, it’s decimating the traffic of informational websites. We will lose a lot of those websites that produced high-effort, simple-conclusion information. Who will bother with in-depth reviews if someone else gets the sale? Who will patiently answer questions if no one asks anymore?

I think that a certain kind of craftsmanship will be lost.

AI companies are eating their seed corn.

What a nice analogy!

I've been using SO since it first launched, and through time it has changed a lot already. It used to be simple to ask questions and get answers, when it grew and the huge influx of questions required moderation it was a nice smooth change but over time the pearl clutching of mods to mark many reasonable questions as irrelevant started to grip the usefulness.

I used to answer a lot of the basic questions just to help others as I've felt I had been helped, the moderation shift applying more and more rules started to make me feel unwelcomed to ask questions and even to answer. I do understand why it happened, with the influx of people trying to game the platform to show off in their resumés they were at the "top" of whatever buzzword was hot in the industry at the time but it still affected me as a contributing user out of kindness.

By 2018 I would not even login to vote or add comments, and I feel it was already going on a slow downhill path, and LLMs will definitely kill it.

We will definitely suffer, SO has been an incredible resource to figure out things not covered well in documentation, I remember when proper experts (i.e. maintainers of libraries/frameworks) would jump in to answer about a weird edge case, or clarify the usage of a feature, explain why it was misuse, etc.

Right now I don't see anything else that will provide this knowledge to LLMs, in 10-20 years time there will be a lot missing in training datasets, and it will be a slow degradation of knowledge available in the open for us all to learn from.

Yeah, SO had many problems, I'd argue most stemming from the points system that:

- Made people treat it like a contest and tried to game it

- Obscure, difficult questions, with obscure, difficult answers barely being valued, while 'How do I make a GET request in node' going gangbusters.

as an aside, the ranking/rating systems are largely why I quit using social media a long time ago and stick to a small chatroom of people I know. it's relatively tolerable here where scores aren't next to posts (and the user base generally tolerant, lets whoever say their piece and move on), but I use following ublock filter to hide the score stuff:

news.ycombinator.com###karma

news.ycombinator.com##.score

news.ycombinator.com##td:has-text(/^karma:$/):upward(tr)

I've thought about removing the graying feature and maybe doing a random sort of replies, but haven't accumulated enough spite yet.

I’m addicted to Reddit but confess it’s mostly about saying something clever or funny to get high scores, not necessarily insightful or informative.

Still better than X though.

AI has to draw it's answers from somewhere.

if they're not in stack overflow they have to be in reddit, or a discord channel, or something.

or else the AI has to be able to discern answers from first principles themselves, which most LLMs can't -- they're language model.

We are losing the next generation of content to train future AIs on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com