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Not mentioned in the article is the negativity found with asking questions on Stack Overflow, where your question is marked as duplicate if it's vaguely like so

Not mentioned in the article is the negativity found with asking questions on Stack Overflow, where your question is marked as duplicate if it's vaguely like something else, if it's not worded exactly correctly, etc. A remarkable thing about asking ChatGPT questions is that you don't have to be defensive, you can just ask your question no matter how basic, dumb, or simple it is without justification. Seems a bad state of things that the inhuman AI is extending more grace than the human community.

idiotsecant 3y ago
On the other hand, I have no doubt that it takes a lot of effort to ensure that stack overflow is full of high quality answers. The tendency of any system like that is toward entropy. The moderators might be forgiven for being a little too judicious in pruning similar questions and splitting focus where the benefit to the whole is to keep answers focused in one place.
the_jeremy 3y ago
If you ask a bad question on SE (leave "bad" to be defined separately), you waste time of people who try to answer it, and of people who stumble across it hoping that it relates to them and solves their problem. If you ask a bad question to ChatGPT, you waste no one's time but your own. If answering SE was a job where you got paid, I would expect a lot more hand-holding (and some amount of kindness, to keep the revenue stream coming back), but instead, the people who answer questions do it more-or-less for fun. Having someone waste your time isn't fun.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  In those cases it's easy enough to just move on to another question rather than shut down the discussion. It's not like anyone's being forced to answer.
  - the_jeremy 3y ago
    But as an answerer, you will empathize more with the other answerers than the askers. You don't want the other answerers to also waste their time on this question, so you close it / downvote / mark it as duplicate.
  - d0mine 3y ago
    The primary (95+%) use case for Stack Overflow is being the destination for a web search. "Bad" questions make signal/noise ratio worse.
  - bhandziuk 3y ago
    But by being closed as a duplicate with the duplicate linked hundreds of future askers who arrive at that question in the future from a search engine are saved the trouble.
    - dotnet00 3y ago
      The posts being discussed are cases where the question is marked as duplicate for being vaguely similar but not actually the same. Of course marking literal duplicates as duplicates is fine.
pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
If you were to look at hundreds upon hundreds of easily-researchable questions titled "plz halp i am n00b" asked by people who didn't bother to apply a slightest amout of elementary analytic skill, you would be just as negative.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Which is why it's better to offload this to a bot who doesn't have that kind of emotional response. > hundreds upon hundreds of easily-researchable questions titled "plz halp i am n00b" asked by people who didn't bother to apply a slightest amout of elementary analytic skill I'm sure ChatGPT gets not just "hundreds upon hundreds" of these each day, but thousands upon thousands of them each hour. And it remains cheery about it. Which is a much better experience for its users. It just turns out to be a better tool for this job than relying on the good will of human volunteers.

idiotsecant 3y ago

On the other hand, I have no doubt that it takes a lot of effort to ensure that stack overflow is full of high quality answers. The tendency of any system like that is toward entropy. The moderators might be forgiven for being a little too judicious in pruning similar questions and splitting focus where the benefit to the whole is to keep answers focused in one place.

the_jeremy 3y ago

If you ask a bad question on SE (leave "bad" to be defined separately), you waste time of people who try to answer it, and of people who stumble across it hoping that it relates to them and solves their problem. If you ask a bad question to ChatGPT, you waste no one's time but your own. If answering SE was a job where you got paid, I would expect a lot more hand-holding (and some amount of kindness, to keep the revenue stream coming back), but instead, the people who answer questions do it more-or-less for fun. Having someone waste your time isn't fun.

dotnet00 3y ago
In those cases it's easy enough to just move on to another question rather than shut down the discussion. It's not like anyone's being forced to answer.
- the_jeremy 3y ago
  But as an answerer, you will empathize more with the other answerers than the askers. You don't want the other answerers to also waste their time on this question, so you close it / downvote / mark it as duplicate.
- d0mine 3y ago
  The primary (95+%) use case for Stack Overflow is being the destination for a web search. "Bad" questions make signal/noise ratio worse.
- bhandziuk 3y ago
  But by being closed as a duplicate with the duplicate linked hundreds of future askers who arrive at that question in the future from a search engine are saved the trouble.
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    The posts being discussed are cases where the question is marked as duplicate for being vaguely similar but not actually the same. Of course marking literal duplicates as duplicates is fine.

pwdisswordfishc 3y ago

If you were to look at hundreds upon hundreds of easily-researchable questions titled "plz halp i am n00b" asked by people who didn't bother to apply a slightest amout of elementary analytic skill, you would be just as negative.

sanderjd 3y ago
Which is why it's better to offload this to a bot who doesn't have that kind of emotional response. > hundreds upon hundreds of easily-researchable questions titled "plz halp i am n00b" asked by people who didn't bother to apply a slightest amout of elementary analytic skill I'm sure ChatGPT gets not just "hundreds upon hundreds" of these each day, but thousands upon thousands of them each hour. And it remains cheery about it. Which is a much better experience for its users. It just turns out to be a better tool for this job than relying on the good will of human volunteers.