Comment by 999900000999
6 hours ago
Well, I always found SO to be an intensely hostile community. Chat GPT doesn't ban you for asking which IDE to use
6 hours ago
Well, I always found SO to be an intensely hostile community. Chat GPT doesn't ban you for asking which IDE to use
SO wasn't a discussion forum, it was wikipedia for programming. It was already dying long before the question rate dropped off, since most new questions were "plz write/debug my code for me" which tend to be the sort of question that SO was not designed for. Chatgpt replaced that, and github issues replaced project-specific debugging. Now there's nobody left to write/read/answer the small amount of questions that are still a good fit.
I remember when SO had codegolf on the main site. Maybe if they weren't such killjoys people would have still been interested in participating in some programming oriented community even though AI displaced the actual writing of computer languages.
> SO wasn't a discussion forum, it was wikipedia for programming.
They changed what they wanted to be multiple times, and even after they had settled on a policy they didn’t enforce it consistently.
I feel like the "repository of knowledge" identity was pretty clear for around a decade (at least for main Q&A, not Chat or Discussions). It was inconsistently enforced because the volume of low-quality questions exceeded the ability of the "moderators" to enforce it. At its peak, the backlog of questions in the process of being closed was about a full month's worth of question volume (this doesn't include questions that did get closed or questions that didn't yet start the process of being closed).
There is something about the gamification of social interaction which breeds a hostile community. Power hungry users chasing internet points, or moderators needlessly raising their hammer.
I am not going to miss Stack Overflow. "Question already asked" for some hyper specific question where this is the first google result. "Not enough status" to do x/y/z (sorry, can't answer that unanswered question!), out of date answers, wrong answers being accepted as right, a right answer left high and dry.
The “can't answer” thing is probably the reason I never contributed. I don't know the specific reasoning behind it, but it's such a self-defeating solution to whatever problem they thought they were solving.
I’m curious what both of these comments are referring to, since it’s not supposed to take any privileges to answer a question on Stack Overflow (you can even answer without making an account). Maybe some anti-spam block?
My favorite point was when you're the single person to have worked on a problem, published an answer, published a paper had the answer accepted and some MUPPET edits your answer to mean something else entirely, and it has your 'name' now beside an incorrect answer.
1 reply →
I didn't do much community stuff on Stack Overflow, but Server Fault suffered from a certain class of user who was more interested in curating and rules-lawyering the "quality" of questions than actually helping people. It was hard work to keep those people in check, and the Stack Exchange metaphor seemed to draw those kind of people like moth to flame.
Those people are always drawn to these unpaid positions of power and they’re absolute death-knells for the community. Time and time again you see it.
ChatGPT bans you for asking it to list all malware that comes with your Samsung TV, or anything biotech related.
Does it really? I'm not going to mess with biotech because I have no idea what I am on about there. I did ask about Samsung TVs:
https://chatgpt.com/share/6ae2955c-9ff0-83eb-9ad4-e936f99db8...
Well, maybe it does, but it seems that an average developer asks which IDE to use a thousand times more often than what malwares are installed in their Samsung TV.
So there's a clear difference in expected utility.
it does not
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In a dystopian fufure where a few or ONE AI company bested the rest, the company might banned you from using the AI for coding because the AI thinks you're incompetent or require you to pass a test to activate the coding function, because it's dangerous.
Assuming that there's still SWE jobs, when you attend an interview, the AI interviewer from the same AI company may just reject you because you asked which IDE to use just a week ago and it thinks you're not fit for the job.
I always hate it when a person tries to "X Y problem" me.
I have to explain that, yes, I'm looking at other options, but I'm also exploring this option and need to answer this specific question.
People try to use "X Y problem" to feel superior somehow.
To be fair, there was a lot of X Y question asking there. "Would it be better to use MySQL or PostgreSQL to implement a clone of the Redis protocol? We're deploying an app that needs a 100% compatible Redis API. We own the Linux server it'll run on. Which should we use?" Uh, can you just use Redis? "Don't XY me!"
I'm not saying that's the problem you had, not at all. I do see why some of the answerers were quick to jump to it though.
Most online platforms I have used to ask questions or make comments (whether it's real-time chat, mailing lists, forums, etc.) were extremely hostile and always have been... I guess it's just human nature.
StackOverflow, Reddit, Lemmy, Matrix, IRC (esp. Freenode/Libera), Mastodon, Bluesky, Lobsters, Phoronix, GNOME Forums, Discord, Twitter, LKML, ... over time I quit all of them because of just how unbelievably abusive, dogmatic and out of touch people were.
Even on HN I have had to block dozens of different accounts due to breathtaking entitlement, self-righteousness and arrogance.