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If I wanted to use OpenAI, I would. If I wanted to use StackOverflow, I would. Now I just only get to use OpenAI no matter what. This hellscape is forming way

If I wanted to use OpenAI, I would. If I wanted to use StackOverflow, I would. Now I just only get to use OpenAI no matter what. This hellscape is forming way too fast.

rocgf 2y ago
Conversely, if you don't want to use OpenAI and/or SO, you are free to do so. SO has no obligation to continue losing users for your whims. On top of this, you could say the same about any disrupting technology.
venusenvy47 2y ago
Can't we continue to use StackOverflow as normal? Wouldn't that normal use case (using the web page) be unencumbered by any AI stuff?
- wokwokwok 2y ago
  Honestly it's not clear the SO actually gets anything out of this deal, other than: > provide attribution to the Stack Overflow community within ChatGPT ...and that didn't seem important enough for OpenAI to bother to mention it on any of their media channels that I've seen. so, who knows? It feels like it's a whole lot of nothing to me, and exchange they're letting OpenAI having all of their Q/A data. I doubt it will make any significant difference to S/O for most people; and anyone who thinks putting S/O links in a chatGPT response is going to drive traffic back to S/O is kiddddddddddding themselves.
cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
If you want to be the only customer of a service, and have them do exactly what you want, you can foot the entire bill.
- gabrielgio 2y ago
  What is the point of your comment? We are not allowed to complain about a service we don’t own anymore?
irjustin 2y ago
Honestly I barely use stack anymore. I know I'm not the only one and they're losing their lunch just like experts-exchange
- apwell23 2y ago
  yea me too. i don't even understand entirely why i don't use stackoverflow anymore.
  - code_runner 2y ago
    Over zealous moderation and the average age of a question/answer being like 8 years. There are very few novel questions and the ones that are there use outdated apis.
  - airstrike 2y ago
    moderation there is done so poorly it continues to discourage users from participating while not really slowing down entropy as the site ages and the number of posts grow moderation there is done so poorly it has become a meme of sorts, so even if and when it improves, any improvement in perception will lag... and because users choose to use the site based on their perception of its value rather than its true value, it has sort of become a vicious cycle
  - moralestapia 2y ago
    It's full of assholes now and people generally prefer not to be around those.
  - fire_lake 2y ago
    I can tell you exactly why my engagement is down with the site. It’s because every time I ask a question, it gets closed as a duplicate by people who clearly haven’t read my question carefully. It’s exhausting and not really worth the effort to fight for it to be reopened.
    - zadokshi 2y ago
      Yep, knowing this problem well, I asked a question the other day and defensively linked to the other similar questions to explain why they were not duplicates. My question was still closed with the claim of it being a duplicate. Last time I’ll ever bother trying to use SO again. The decision to close my question in spite of it having a clear technical difference made no sense at all. It honestly felt like a bot that just noticed that a lot of the content of the question was related to other questions-a bot without the ability to understand why the question is literally different. Why is SO like this these days. Is it just because there is such a large history of content in the site, that it’s easy for people who don’t want to think to just mark questions closed?
Gormo 2y ago
The article says that they're partnering to incorporate OpenAI's algorithms into a generative AI solution that SO was already working on in parallel to their Q&A sites, and to allow data from SO sites to be accessible to OpenAI's own solutions. It doesn't indicate that generative AI is going to be shoehorned into StackOverflow's websites. It would seem counterproductive, in fact, to do that, since the gist of this seems to be that StackOverflow provides a large wealth of organized, validated human-generated knowledge, which is exactly the sort of thing you want to train LLMs on. Feeding AI-generated data back into that would diminish the value of the data SO hosts for that purpose.
- jononor 2y ago
  I hope that StackOverflow people understand this. And that they do not panic because their usage/engagement metrics is down quite a bit over the last years.
  - jessetemp 2y ago
    Might very well be in panic mode. They're also partnering with Indeed to bring back a new version of StackOverflow Jobs. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/399440/testing-a-new-version-of-stack-overflow-jobs?cb=1 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/399440/testing-a-ne...
  - Max-Ganz-II 2y ago
    Regarding usage, I was on SO. I specialize in Amazon Redshift. I've written a lot of PDFs about Amazon Redshift - serious stuff, deep technical investigations and explanations, published along with the source code which produces the evidence which the PDF is based on - and when people asked questions where I'd written up the answer, I pointed them at the appropriate PDF. After some months, I received a direct message, which looked to me to be a pro-forma, a standard message sent in this situation, from the staff that I was promoting my site and I should not do so. It was well written and polite. That's fine - I have no problems with that, it's their web-site. What I did not like, however, and what came over as slimey, was that the staff had also deleted every post I had made. This was not mentioned, at all, in the well written and polite message, which then of course became disingenuous. If you're going to do something serious like that, you need to tell people, not let them discover it for themselves. This was for all posts, where I'd explained something directly or pointed to a PDF - presumably it's a standard action SO take in this situation. I deleted my account and left.
ralfn 2y ago
I feel like they are announcing that OpenAI is going to be getting worse at answering technical questions. I use OpenAI because StackOverflow answers are just the absolute wrong answer. A combination of gaslighting (you shouldn't be having this problem), dogmatic enforcement of good ideas that started as guidelines and problematic example code that should not be trusted. You are better of with a reddit thread or a blogpost and much better of with actual documentation. StackOverflow is the thing that causes the bugs and the tech debt in the first place. At least now OpenAI's competition has a fighting chance, because their models won't be poisoned by SO
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mattbrewsbytes 2y ago
I feel like they are already very similar in the sense that any answers you read should be assumed as being wrong first and let them prove they are correct before putting something in your code.

If I wanted to use OpenAI, I would. If I wanted to use StackOverflow, I would. Now I just only get to use OpenAI no matter what. This hellscape is forming way too fast.

rocgf 2y ago

Conversely, if you don't want to use OpenAI and/or SO, you are free to do so. SO has no obligation to continue losing users for your whims. On top of this, you could say the same about any disrupting technology.

venusenvy47 2y ago

Can't we continue to use StackOverflow as normal? Wouldn't that normal use case (using the web page) be unencumbered by any AI stuff?

wokwokwok 2y ago
Honestly it's not clear the SO actually gets anything out of this deal, other than: > provide attribution to the Stack Overflow community within ChatGPT ...and that didn't seem important enough for OpenAI to bother to mention it on any of their media channels that I've seen. so, who knows? It feels like it's a whole lot of nothing to me, and exchange they're letting OpenAI having all of their Q/A data. I doubt it will make any significant difference to S/O for most people; and anyone who thinks putting S/O links in a chatGPT response is going to drive traffic back to S/O is kiddddddddddding themselves.

cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago

If you want to be the only customer of a service, and have them do exactly what you want, you can foot the entire bill.

gabrielgio 2y ago
What is the point of your comment? We are not allowed to complain about a service we don’t own anymore?

irjustin 2y ago

Honestly I barely use stack anymore. I know I'm not the only one and they're losing their lunch just like experts-exchange

apwell23 2y ago
yea me too. i don't even understand entirely why i don't use stackoverflow anymore.
- code_runner 2y ago
  Over zealous moderation and the average age of a question/answer being like 8 years. There are very few novel questions and the ones that are there use outdated apis.
- airstrike 2y ago
  moderation there is done so poorly it continues to discourage users from participating while not really slowing down entropy as the site ages and the number of posts grow moderation there is done so poorly it has become a meme of sorts, so even if and when it improves, any improvement in perception will lag... and because users choose to use the site based on their perception of its value rather than its true value, it has sort of become a vicious cycle
- moralestapia 2y ago
  It's full of assholes now and people generally prefer not to be around those.
- fire_lake 2y ago
  I can tell you exactly why my engagement is down with the site. It’s because every time I ask a question, it gets closed as a duplicate by people who clearly haven’t read my question carefully. It’s exhausting and not really worth the effort to fight for it to be reopened.
  - zadokshi 2y ago
    Yep, knowing this problem well, I asked a question the other day and defensively linked to the other similar questions to explain why they were not duplicates. My question was still closed with the claim of it being a duplicate. Last time I’ll ever bother trying to use SO again. The decision to close my question in spite of it having a clear technical difference made no sense at all. It honestly felt like a bot that just noticed that a lot of the content of the question was related to other questions-a bot without the ability to understand why the question is literally different. Why is SO like this these days. Is it just because there is such a large history of content in the site, that it’s easy for people who don’t want to think to just mark questions closed?

Gormo 2y ago

The article says that they're partnering to incorporate OpenAI's algorithms into a generative AI solution that SO was already working on in parallel to their Q&A sites, and to allow data from SO sites to be accessible to OpenAI's own solutions. It doesn't indicate that generative AI is going to be shoehorned into StackOverflow's websites. It would seem counterproductive, in fact, to do that, since the gist of this seems to be that StackOverflow provides a large wealth of organized, validated human-generated knowledge, which is exactly the sort of thing you want to train LLMs on. Feeding AI-generated data back into that would diminish the value of the data SO hosts for that purpose.

jononor 2y ago
I hope that StackOverflow people understand this. And that they do not panic because their usage/engagement metrics is down quite a bit over the last years.
- jessetemp 2y ago
  Might very well be in panic mode. They're also partnering with Indeed to bring back a new version of StackOverflow Jobs. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/399440/testing-a-new-version-of-stack-overflow-jobs?cb=1 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/399440/testing-a-ne...
- Max-Ganz-II 2y ago
  Regarding usage, I was on SO. I specialize in Amazon Redshift. I've written a lot of PDFs about Amazon Redshift - serious stuff, deep technical investigations and explanations, published along with the source code which produces the evidence which the PDF is based on - and when people asked questions where I'd written up the answer, I pointed them at the appropriate PDF. After some months, I received a direct message, which looked to me to be a pro-forma, a standard message sent in this situation, from the staff that I was promoting my site and I should not do so. It was well written and polite. That's fine - I have no problems with that, it's their web-site. What I did not like, however, and what came over as slimey, was that the staff had also deleted every post I had made. This was not mentioned, at all, in the well written and polite message, which then of course became disingenuous. If you're going to do something serious like that, you need to tell people, not let them discover it for themselves. This was for all posts, where I'd explained something directly or pointed to a PDF - presumably it's a standard action SO take in this situation. I deleted my account and left.

ralfn 2y ago

I feel like they are announcing that OpenAI is going to be getting worse at answering technical questions. I use OpenAI because StackOverflow answers are just the absolute wrong answer. A combination of gaslighting (you shouldn't be having this problem), dogmatic enforcement of good ideas that started as guidelines and problematic example code that should not be trusted. You are better of with a reddit thread or a blogpost and much better of with actual documentation. StackOverflow is the thing that causes the bugs and the tech debt in the first place. At least now OpenAI's competition has a fighting chance, because their models won't be poisoned by SO

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

mattbrewsbytes 2y ago

I feel like they are already very similar in the sense that any answers you read should be assumed as being wrong first and let them prove they are correct before putting something in your code.