Comment by zahlman
1 year ago
> Even with the beginnings of computer aided flows we didn't need to alienate most to get the best content and develop the few.
The large majority of new questions from new accounts are from people who are clearly there only to solve a personal problem, who show no interest in considering the value of their question to third parties, and rarely put any effort into attempting to even diagnose or specify a problem.
Even after it became possible for most of these people to get an instant answer from an LLM. Which is actively preferable from the standpoint of Stack Overflow curators. Before LLMs, the point was for them to use a search engine to find an existing question that lets them figure out the problem. But for the Q&A to help such users, they need to apply at least basic problem-solving and debugging skills. (It is explicitly out of scope for the Stack Overflow community to do that for others; and attempting to do this in an answer actively degrades the site for everyone else.) If an LLM can fill in some hypotheses for those users to test, then the LLM is doing what it's best at, and Stack Overflow is doing what it's best at.
Stack Overflow is not there to troubleshoot or debug anything for you, nor to reason about a multi-step problem and break it down into its natural logical steps. It's there to give a direct, objective answer to how to do each individual step, and to explain why the specific point of failure in a failing program fails, after you have identified it and made the problem reproducible.
So yes, we absolutely do need to "alienate most", because "most" are there for a reason that has absolutely nothing to do with getting the best content.
> So yes, we absolutely do need to "alienate most", because "most" are there for a reason that has absolutely nothing to do with getting the best content.
How many of the "desirable" contributors did you alienate in the process?
I may be naive, but when people say "I have been using SO for 10 years but it has become toxic so I left", it doesn't sound like new accounts asking for their homeworks.
The people who have been around for 10 years or so who disagree with the basics of question closing policy (or who act without any apparent awareness of it) are even worse than the people seeking a quick fix for their problem. Because they flood the site with inherently low-quality answers to low-quality questions. In doing so, they dilute higher quality content (it becomes harder to find with search engines, because search engines have no way to understand our internal quality rating systems) and incentivize the quick-fix-seekers. Both sides of that are ignoring policy and acting against the site's goal.
When people describe something as "toxic" I generally consider this to be content-less without further elaboration. It doesn't concretely describe what is supposedly wrong - it only dramatizes the complaint.
> The people who have been around for 10 years or so who disagree with the basics of question closing policy [...] Because they flood the site with inherently low-quality answers to low-quality questions
I see that you just don't hear the complaints.
I don't hear people who have been around for 10 years or so complaining because they can't answer to low-quality questions.
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