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The ones that struggle had pre-existing issues : - quora pivoted from quality content to cheap clickbait - SO has overbearing moderation. Chatgpt doesn't clos

The ones that struggle had pre-existing issues : - quora pivoted from quality content to cheap clickbait - SO has overbearing moderation. Chatgpt doesn't close your question the second you've submitted it. And so on. In short, quality platforms are fine.

bluedino 2y ago
SO also has the "eternal September" problem
darth_avocado 2y ago
Quora has sucked for a while now. When the second answer on every question is completely unrelated to the question asked, in some weird attempt to make you look up more content on the site, the site starts losing its usefulness.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  Yeah, it's so blatantly frustratingly tone-deaf that the real message is: "This site purposely wants to be full of irrelevant spammy shit, so get whatever you needed and get out ASAP."
- ForTheKidz 2y ago
  Quora has never, in my memory, provided any value to the internet. The answers it seems to provide to google are seemingly inaccurate and also seem completely unmoderated. Furthermore you seemingly have to pay to even ask answers to get updated.
  - smcin 2y ago
    Quora was fantastic back around 2011. It did provide value. That has been decreasing gradually as the site declined. No you don't have to pay on Quora to get answers; that's incorrect. Having said that, these days most questions languish without good, or often any, answers. The only ones that get traffic from humans are in what Quora calls Spaces, i.e. a group for Q&A around a certain topic, and/or a certain point of view.
    - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
      > No you don't have to pay on Quora to see answers; that's incorrect. Some authors decided to join the Quora+ program where you do have to pay to see some of their answers.
      - smcin 2y ago
        I know that. There's nothing forcing you to join Quora+ premium subscription to see a small subset of answers. I wouldn't. Most Quora users don't. It's not necessary. The vast majority of Quora posters are unmonetized, and if you can't find figure out how to use Quora to get quality answers among them (e.g. figure out which Spaces to join to get traction), you might as well equally consider which Medium/Substack/Patreon to subscribe to than the not-at-all-necessary Quora+. I'd much rather that 90% of any subscriptions I paid went to sponsoring human writers.
    - smcin 2y ago
      Quora 2011 = Treehouse 2020. An invite-only community with a lot of specialist knowledge.
  - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
    > Quora has never, in my memory, provided any value to the internet. In the very early years of Quora, quite a lot of answers there were written by experts in their area.
    - gcanyon 2y ago
      I'll never forget when I read the question, "Who is the mayor of San Jose?" on Quora, and the answer was "Joe Bloe is the mayor of San Jose. Source: I'm Joe Bloe, mayor of San Jose." Reading that defined Quora in my mind for the next few years.
      - edgarvaldes 2y ago
        >Reading that defined Quora in my mind for the next few years. Because he was an impersonator? Or because he really was Joe Bloe?
        caminante 2y ago
        Appears there was never a Joe Bloe. [0] It's also whimsical of Quora because there are many "San Jose" locations. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayor_of_San_Jose,_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayor_of_San_Jose,_California
        gcanyon 2y ago
        It was a made-up name for the example, since a. I don't remember the exact year; and b. I'm not sure it was San Jose -- it was some city in the bay area, but maybe not San Jose. Chuck Reed was mayor from 2007 to 2015, and I don't see him on Quora, so probably it was some other city.
        gcanyon 2y ago
        Who knows? I harbored a 10% skepticism that Quora astroturfed the question. That was just the first example like that I found, in the early days questions like that were common. That should have either removed my skepticism or driven it to 100% :-)
  - 3vidence 2y ago
    The early days of Quora was incredibly high quality content from experts in all sorts of fields. Was probably my favorite website, then they decided to start paying people for questions / answers and it all went to shit so incredibly quickly. The site today is completely unrecognizable from it's origins, really sad.
    - dredmorbius 2y ago
      This is incidentally an endemic problem of online discussion sites. There is only one possible quality flow gradient, and that is downwards. If a site begins well, with high-quality and relevant content, then those who wish to exploitatively extract value from that factor will be attracted to it. Eventually the clue up and leaves. If a site begins poorly, with low-quality and irrelevant content, and quite often, abuse, disrespect, fraud, crime, and disinformation to boot ... the clue leaves early and the site rapidly becomes a cesspit. There's a third option, of course, though one still consistent with the quality flow gradient: holding a steady state. Site quality doesn't improve, but it doesn't markedly deteriorate either. I'd put a small handful of online sites in that category, HN, LWN, and Metafilter top my own list, though I suspect there are others. What's key is that there's a sufficiently small community that norms enforcement is significantly socialised, there's effective and diligent moderation, and crucially (and possibly not the case with my examples) there's fresh blood introduced over time consistent with quality standards. Absent this last, such fora can continue for a time, even over many decades, but eventually stale, often becoming incestuous, and ultimately dying out. Among real-world institutions which seem to manage to find similar stable points, I'd include most especially academic institutions, which balance a high flux of students with a far more stable faculty and staff cohort. Selective-admissions schools have retained high rank for many decades or centuries, in some cases millennia. Cities, larger political units (states and/or empires), some businesses (including especially professional services firms) and professional organisations (e.g., not-for-profits rather than businesses) may also succeed, at least over the decades-to-centuries span. (Charles Perrow includes a discussion of several noncommercial / nongovernmental organisations with significant changes, we'd now call them "pivots", over the 20th century, in Complex Organizations (1972, 1984).) The media-quality-gradient is largely a result of scaling laws, the fact that elite cohorts (high degrees of expertise, sociability, and intelligence) tend to be small, and that once an interaction grows beyond the size of such a cohort it will incorporate participants less able, willing, and/or interested in maintaining original standards. I've posted occasionally on large-scale detailed studies of literacy (in the US) and computer skills (OECD) which show that at a population level only about 15% of the population has high literacy, numeracy, and/or computer skills, and that as much as half operate at poor or "worse than poor" levels. As I've discussed previously, this is both discouraging to those who consider themselves among the higher levels, and of significant concern in constructing systems which must and can be used by large portions of society, including those with low intrinsic capabilities (very young, old, sick, injured/traumatised, and the intrinsically less able). Ideally I'd prefer to see elite support where appropriate, but common accessibility where at all possible.
  - CPLX 2y ago
    Quora was great for awhile and then it sucked. I used to post there a lot they put me in the top writer program at one point and I went to a party once. I can pinpoint the exact moment the site started to suck. It was when they started combining questions. Instantly and immediately they took hundreds of thousands of thoughtful answers written by real people and made them incomprehensible, because the exact wording of questions really matters. Often the answers were quite clever, or touched on a specific word used by the asker, or something. Then they'd end up moved and under some generic question on the same topic. There were a million examples, one dumb one that comes to mind is a question that was something like "If a man is willing to sleep with me, does that mean that he thinks I am attractive" and the top answer was the two word answer "attractive enough". Kind of silly obviously but funny, and accurate, and amusing content. Then they merged questions so it ended up something like "How can I know if a man I am dating casually likes me" or something, and now the top answer of "attractive enough" makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Many such cases. Almost immediately the entire site felt like weird AI output before AI output was really a thing. That happened around ten years ago, and the site never recovered.
- nickpsecurity 2y ago
  That was the main reason I stopped using Google and Quora. I wanted real, relevant results. Instead, they tried to trick me with advertisements. These companies are just intentionally throwing away users.
- m3kw9 2y ago
  When ever I go into a Quora page it has always 99% confused me on where the answer lies
- flessner 2y ago
  For the past 3 years one of the top answer has always been advertising, rambling on about an absurd story with whacky characters. Yet I just want StackOverflow for "life" questions.
- ashleyn 2y ago
  Yahoo Answers walked so Quora can run. Quora today is mostly stuff like "can u get pargnet from givng oral????" or "Is it normal to find my sister attractive?" It's like the Nazi bar problem except instead of Nazis, it's low quality troll bait.
immibis 2y ago
Nor does ChatGPT ban you from the entire network because you answered a Palestine question on the politics sub-section. (Happened to me.) It's like Stack Exchange doesn't want questions and answers any more, just wants to harvest Google traffic and shows ads. Actual content production is too hard.
- bluedino 2y ago
  > Nor does ChatGPT ban you from the entire network because you answered a Palestine question on the politics sub-section. (Happened to me.) Some Reddit subs (as well as web forums/messageboards) have the same problem. If your views don't align with the majority (or the minority, if they run the sub), you're likely to get banned or lose the ability to post.
  - echelon 2y ago
    We need P2P social media where bigoted, power hungry mods can't enforce their unilateral views on everyone else.
    - 6510 2y ago
      We get what we've paid for. I wouldn't want the thankless work for free job.
    - theamk 2y ago
      Plenty of such things exist, and I (and everyone I know) generally avoid visiting them. There is simply too much spam, trolling, hate speech, wrong information, ads, off-topic conversations.. Turns out moderation is actually useful if you want to have interesting conversations.
    - immibis 2y ago
      We tried that but they filled up with spammers and morons. Other people who are neither don't want to use those systems. It's the Nazi bar effect, but for spam. Somewhere between there, and "recite these falsehoods someone paid us to make you recite or get banned", there may or may not be a point that's actually okay.
whiplash451 2y ago
True, but Q&A platforms were the prime collateral damage for ChatGPT. I am not sure that quality content on a Q&A platform would help you much. You’d have to pivot significantly.
- RandallBrown 2y ago
  Isn't that because ChatGPT is trained on those QA platforms? If real humans aren't answering questions on the Internet, how will LLMs learn the answers to those questions?
  - 6510 2y ago
    Make new q&a websites.
  - layer8 2y ago
    While true, this doesn’t change the problem that Q&A platforms have a hard time competing with LLMs, and I don’t see how that is likely to change.
    - bluefirebrand 2y ago
      It is frankly absurd that they should be expected to These LLMs could not exist without them, but now they're expected to compete? If all of the Q&A platforms die off, how are LLM training datasets going to get new information? This whole AI boom is typical corporate shortsightedness imo. Kill the future in order to have a great next quarter I hope I'm wrong. If I am right, then I hope we figure this out before AI has bulldozed everything into dust
      - pipes 2y ago
        In my experience, they do seem to be very good at synthesizing answers from docs. However I don't know if that will work for edge cases which is one of the things SO is good at.
        deleted 2y ago
francisofascii 2y ago
um, I would argue overbearing moderation is positive for overall "quality" of content. But not as useful as ChatGPT that will spoon feed you answers and not care about misspellings, bad English, asking the same question, etc. It is truly remarkable how good it is.
- immibis 2y ago
  Depends on the moderation. /r/worldnews bans any user who says anything that makes Israel look bad (I'm not exaggerating). That does nothing for quality of content.
  - fady0 2y ago
    Reddit's subreddits can sometimes create echo chambers(all the big sub reddit are like that), and depending on the moderators' viewpoints, you might find opposite opinions in different communities.
- dumbledoren 2y ago
  Nope. Stack mods close questions related to major programming debates because the moderator and his clique decided that one practice is 'the best' etc.
emcell 2y ago
I think this is true. I personally hated those Seo clickbait pages for a while, because it was so hard to find the information i'm looking for. doing all of this with ai now. On the other hand, I really like to read a good article more than ever before
jsemrau 2y ago
Wasn't poe.com supposed to be the quora replacement since its run by the same guy who also sat on the OpenAI board?
johnfn 2y ago
Hm, not sure I agree with you about SO. The experience I have with SO 99%+ of the time is that I google my question, get a result on SO which has a correct and decent quality answer, and I'm back to work. That's a pretty great experience, and I certainly wouldn't say that it misses the bar to be a 'quality platform'. I do agree the moderation is overbearing at times, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater here. The utility of SO - getting answers to questions - is basically unmatched websites that aren't LLM wrappers. While you won't hear me bemoaning the death of Quora, I'm quite a bit more concerned about SO. After all, where is GPT 5 going to scrape the next set of answers for new libraries and frameworks..?
- 1R053 2y ago
  I think it depends a lot on how research AI generated traffic counts towards these stats. Also, if there is no answer yet on the web the AI may also not know it. Then these questions should still end up on SO. I might add, that SO also could build their own chat / research UI. It would need to have some benefit over others, but I guess the community aspect of it alone would suffice...
- BrenBarn 2y ago
  > After all, where is GPT 5 going to scrape the next set of answers for new libraries and frameworks..? From its own incorrect answers that got parroted around the web.
  - kibwen 2y ago
    In the grim darkness of the future, we deliberately base the APIs of new libraries and frameworks on the hallucinations of the most popular LLMs.
- joelthelion 2y ago
  > The experience I have with SO 99%+ of the time is that I google my question, get a result on SO which has a correct and decent quality answer, and I'm back to work. You and I are talking about different things. Before these great questions and answers ended up in your search result, someone asked them, and someone else provided a good answer. I used to be one of these people. I got 50k+ SO karma, mostly by asking good questions. I no longer bother, because SO moderators don't even read your questions anymore before closing them for a random reason. Needless to say, I no longer bother trying to answer questions as well. So, it's no wonder that SO is struggling. You can't thrive forever on a stock of aging questions.
dumbledoren 2y ago
> - quora pivoted from quality content to cheap clickbait Huh? If you follow the right people and only interact content that you like, Quora is still as good. Just like any other social network. People click stuff they don't like and they end up getting the same kind of thing served for 2-3 days and then think that its 'site gone bad'. No my good man. Its just how the social network engagement algorithms work. You gotta watch what you interact with. Even if you drop a comment to correct someone, it still counts as an engagement and you'll get more of it. So the best thing to do when you see content you don't like is to ignore it.
- Larrikin 2y ago
  Who cares about the quora community? Who wants to do any of that dance?
  - dumbledoren 2y ago
    There are a lot of people who are experts in their field there. Roman history. Chinese history. Defense technology. History of warfare. Archaeology. Biology. Virology. Civilian aviation. Marine technology. You just gotta know the right people to follow. Your loss.
torginus 2y ago
SO dying is going to be a major bummer. It's been an invaluable resource to me once I engaged with it. While I did experience the overbearing moderation that you've mentioned, as well as the typical bullying for 'asking the question wrong' and other grating encounters I also have asked very obscure questions, and received amazingly knowledgeable answers, in one case, I asked about a brand new C# compiler feature, and I had the actual top compiler guy reach out to me, and told me that what I want isn't possible right now, but should be, and I should raise a GH issue about it. LLMs might be good at writing React code, and all the super-common stuff (probably in large part due to harvesting the SO database), but these sort of interactions are going to be gone forever.
begueradj 2y ago
You need moderation to reduce low quality content.
- acdha 2y ago
  Yes, but moderation comes in many flavors. SO’s moderation culture famously deterred newcomers from becoming part of the community and that long-term trend was worrisome even before the LLM scrapers showed up.
  - xpe 2y ago
    Seems to me that the SO moderation level was a design decision. The pros and cons were consciously weighed. As for me, SO found a nice balance, since I dislike the common failure modes of so many other fora.
    - acdha 2y ago
      I don’t hate it, but I was also experienced when it launched and never had the bad experiences many younger people have reported. The number of dormant profiles and lack of growth was getting a fair amount of discussion even before LLMs entered the picture so even if the old moderation culture was intentional it wasn’t working out well for the future.
  - QuadmasterXLII 2y ago
    Just weighing in, I always appreciated SO’s moderation style
xpe 2y ago
I think the claim above simply redefines “quality platform” with the benefit of hindsight.
m3kw9 2y ago
Interestingly I have not seen a single quora result for months either from ChatGPT, perplexity or google
giancarlostoro 2y ago
> - SO has overbearing moderation. Chatgpt doesn't close your question the second you've submitted it. Even worse your question is slightly different and you asked it because the one they just linked as a duplicate didnt help or didnt fit fully. I get so angry when someones asking the right question but some a-hole SO mod closes it almost as if they took no care to compare context and want to meet some obscure metrics for SO. I love SO but as you say the mods are the worst part.
- TZubiri 2y ago
  Still, much of ChatGPTs success in code can be owed to SO success in generating a mountain of useful googleable archives. See stacksort: https://xkcd.com/1185 https://xkcd.com/1185 Remember that the objective of SO is not to provide answers to users who post questions, but to provide answers to users who google questions.
  - giancarlostoro 2y ago
    My frustration is that I google questions wind up in SO and a mod links to an irrelevant but related question from 20 years prior.
ForTheKidz 2y ago
For the most part, google drives me to documentation rather than Stack Overflow. Much faster than chatgpt can produce the answer, I might add. Sure, not all questions can be answered with documentation, but once you know your domain and tech stack well most of these resources fall off a cliff in terms of value. Curiously at that point it's much easier to use ChatGPT because you can babysit it with one eye while thinking ahead with the other.
skeeter2020 2y ago
OG Quora feels a lot like ChatGPT: some wierd mix of good info with a lot of garbage, all delivered with 100% confidence. The difference is ChatGPT still makes it relatively easy to ask a question and view the results.
ozim 2y ago
Because you should not ask questions on SO - you should search for an answer first - asking question there was not really what most people thought it was. It is the same at work - you should first and foremost check the documentation and read stuff on your intranet and then bother other people for help. Epitome of that was "what have you tired" that was first thing in the interface for asking questions of SO and that's first thing I ask co-workers. Somehow people did not understand all of that or did not care. AI chatbots are only disguising search as a question. It is definitely much better from UX point of view - but with hallucinations it is worse for everyone who gets imagined responses, because there is no "hey I don't know, let's really figure this out together".

bluedino 2y ago

SO also has the "eternal September" problem

darth_avocado 2y ago

Quora has sucked for a while now. When the second answer on every question is completely unrelated to the question asked, in some weird attempt to make you look up more content on the site, the site starts losing its usefulness.

Terr_ 2y ago
Yeah, it's so blatantly frustratingly tone-deaf that the real message is: "This site purposely wants to be full of irrelevant spammy shit, so get whatever you needed and get out ASAP."
ForTheKidz 2y ago
Quora has never, in my memory, provided any value to the internet. The answers it seems to provide to google are seemingly inaccurate and also seem completely unmoderated. Furthermore you seemingly have to pay to even ask answers to get updated.
- smcin 2y ago
  Quora was fantastic back around 2011. It did provide value. That has been decreasing gradually as the site declined. No you don't have to pay on Quora to get answers; that's incorrect. Having said that, these days most questions languish without good, or often any, answers. The only ones that get traffic from humans are in what Quora calls Spaces, i.e. a group for Q&A around a certain topic, and/or a certain point of view.
  - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
    > No you don't have to pay on Quora to see answers; that's incorrect. Some authors decided to join the Quora+ program where you do have to pay to see some of their answers.
    - smcin 2y ago
      I know that. There's nothing forcing you to join Quora+ premium subscription to see a small subset of answers. I wouldn't. Most Quora users don't. It's not necessary. The vast majority of Quora posters are unmonetized, and if you can't find figure out how to use Quora to get quality answers among them (e.g. figure out which Spaces to join to get traction), you might as well equally consider which Medium/Substack/Patreon to subscribe to than the not-at-all-necessary Quora+. I'd much rather that 90% of any subscriptions I paid went to sponsoring human writers.
  - smcin 2y ago
    Quora 2011 = Treehouse 2020. An invite-only community with a lot of specialist knowledge.
- aleph_minus_one 2y ago
  > Quora has never, in my memory, provided any value to the internet. In the very early years of Quora, quite a lot of answers there were written by experts in their area.
  - gcanyon 2y ago
    I'll never forget when I read the question, "Who is the mayor of San Jose?" on Quora, and the answer was "Joe Bloe is the mayor of San Jose. Source: I'm Joe Bloe, mayor of San Jose." Reading that defined Quora in my mind for the next few years.
    - edgarvaldes 2y ago
      >Reading that defined Quora in my mind for the next few years. Because he was an impersonator? Or because he really was Joe Bloe?
      - caminante 2y ago
        Appears there was never a Joe Bloe. [0] It's also whimsical of Quora because there are many "San Jose" locations. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayor_of_San_Jose,_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayor_of_San_Jose,_California
        gcanyon 2y ago
        It was a made-up name for the example, since a. I don't remember the exact year; and b. I'm not sure it was San Jose -- it was some city in the bay area, but maybe not San Jose. Chuck Reed was mayor from 2007 to 2015, and I don't see him on Quora, so probably it was some other city.
      - gcanyon 2y ago
        Who knows? I harbored a 10% skepticism that Quora astroturfed the question. That was just the first example like that I found, in the early days questions like that were common. That should have either removed my skepticism or driven it to 100% :-)
- 3vidence 2y ago
  The early days of Quora was incredibly high quality content from experts in all sorts of fields. Was probably my favorite website, then they decided to start paying people for questions / answers and it all went to shit so incredibly quickly. The site today is completely unrecognizable from it's origins, really sad.
  - dredmorbius 2y ago
    This is incidentally an endemic problem of online discussion sites. There is only one possible quality flow gradient, and that is downwards. If a site begins well, with high-quality and relevant content, then those who wish to exploitatively extract value from that factor will be attracted to it. Eventually the clue up and leaves. If a site begins poorly, with low-quality and irrelevant content, and quite often, abuse, disrespect, fraud, crime, and disinformation to boot ... the clue leaves early and the site rapidly becomes a cesspit. There's a third option, of course, though one still consistent with the quality flow gradient: holding a steady state. Site quality doesn't improve, but it doesn't markedly deteriorate either. I'd put a small handful of online sites in that category, HN, LWN, and Metafilter top my own list, though I suspect there are others. What's key is that there's a sufficiently small community that norms enforcement is significantly socialised, there's effective and diligent moderation, and crucially (and possibly not the case with my examples) there's fresh blood introduced over time consistent with quality standards. Absent this last, such fora can continue for a time, even over many decades, but eventually stale, often becoming incestuous, and ultimately dying out. Among real-world institutions which seem to manage to find similar stable points, I'd include most especially academic institutions, which balance a high flux of students with a far more stable faculty and staff cohort. Selective-admissions schools have retained high rank for many decades or centuries, in some cases millennia. Cities, larger political units (states and/or empires), some businesses (including especially professional services firms) and professional organisations (e.g., not-for-profits rather than businesses) may also succeed, at least over the decades-to-centuries span. (Charles Perrow includes a discussion of several noncommercial / nongovernmental organisations with significant changes, we'd now call them "pivots", over the 20th century, in Complex Organizations (1972, 1984).) The media-quality-gradient is largely a result of scaling laws, the fact that elite cohorts (high degrees of expertise, sociability, and intelligence) tend to be small, and that once an interaction grows beyond the size of such a cohort it will incorporate participants less able, willing, and/or interested in maintaining original standards. I've posted occasionally on large-scale detailed studies of literacy (in the US) and computer skills (OECD) which show that at a population level only about 15% of the population has high literacy, numeracy, and/or computer skills, and that as much as half operate at poor or "worse than poor" levels. As I've discussed previously, this is both discouraging to those who consider themselves among the higher levels, and of significant concern in constructing systems which must and can be used by large portions of society, including those with low intrinsic capabilities (very young, old, sick, injured/traumatised, and the intrinsically less able). Ideally I'd prefer to see elite support where appropriate, but common accessibility where at all possible.
- CPLX 2y ago
  Quora was great for awhile and then it sucked. I used to post there a lot they put me in the top writer program at one point and I went to a party once. I can pinpoint the exact moment the site started to suck. It was when they started combining questions. Instantly and immediately they took hundreds of thousands of thoughtful answers written by real people and made them incomprehensible, because the exact wording of questions really matters. Often the answers were quite clever, or touched on a specific word used by the asker, or something. Then they'd end up moved and under some generic question on the same topic. There were a million examples, one dumb one that comes to mind is a question that was something like "If a man is willing to sleep with me, does that mean that he thinks I am attractive" and the top answer was the two word answer "attractive enough". Kind of silly obviously but funny, and accurate, and amusing content. Then they merged questions so it ended up something like "How can I know if a man I am dating casually likes me" or something, and now the top answer of "attractive enough" makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Many such cases. Almost immediately the entire site felt like weird AI output before AI output was really a thing. That happened around ten years ago, and the site never recovered.
nickpsecurity 2y ago
That was the main reason I stopped using Google and Quora. I wanted real, relevant results. Instead, they tried to trick me with advertisements. These companies are just intentionally throwing away users.
m3kw9 2y ago
When ever I go into a Quora page it has always 99% confused me on where the answer lies
flessner 2y ago
For the past 3 years one of the top answer has always been advertising, rambling on about an absurd story with whacky characters. Yet I just want StackOverflow for "life" questions.
ashleyn 2y ago
Yahoo Answers walked so Quora can run. Quora today is mostly stuff like "can u get pargnet from givng oral????" or "Is it normal to find my sister attractive?" It's like the Nazi bar problem except instead of Nazis, it's low quality troll bait.

immibis 2y ago

Nor does ChatGPT ban you from the entire network because you answered a Palestine question on the politics sub-section. (Happened to me.) It's like Stack Exchange doesn't want questions and answers any more, just wants to harvest Google traffic and shows ads. Actual content production is too hard.

bluedino 2y ago
> Nor does ChatGPT ban you from the entire network because you answered a Palestine question on the politics sub-section. (Happened to me.) Some Reddit subs (as well as web forums/messageboards) have the same problem. If your views don't align with the majority (or the minority, if they run the sub), you're likely to get banned or lose the ability to post.
- echelon 2y ago
  We need P2P social media where bigoted, power hungry mods can't enforce their unilateral views on everyone else.
  - 6510 2y ago
    We get what we've paid for. I wouldn't want the thankless work for free job.
  - theamk 2y ago
    Plenty of such things exist, and I (and everyone I know) generally avoid visiting them. There is simply too much spam, trolling, hate speech, wrong information, ads, off-topic conversations.. Turns out moderation is actually useful if you want to have interesting conversations.
  - immibis 2y ago
    We tried that but they filled up with spammers and morons. Other people who are neither don't want to use those systems. It's the Nazi bar effect, but for spam. Somewhere between there, and "recite these falsehoods someone paid us to make you recite or get banned", there may or may not be a point that's actually okay.

whiplash451 2y ago

True, but Q&A platforms were the prime collateral damage for ChatGPT. I am not sure that quality content on a Q&A platform would help you much. You’d have to pivot significantly.

RandallBrown 2y ago
Isn't that because ChatGPT is trained on those QA platforms? If real humans aren't answering questions on the Internet, how will LLMs learn the answers to those questions?
- 6510 2y ago
  Make new q&a websites.
- layer8 2y ago
  While true, this doesn’t change the problem that Q&A platforms have a hard time competing with LLMs, and I don’t see how that is likely to change.
  - bluefirebrand 2y ago
    It is frankly absurd that they should be expected to These LLMs could not exist without them, but now they're expected to compete? If all of the Q&A platforms die off, how are LLM training datasets going to get new information? This whole AI boom is typical corporate shortsightedness imo. Kill the future in order to have a great next quarter I hope I'm wrong. If I am right, then I hope we figure this out before AI has bulldozed everything into dust
    - pipes 2y ago
      In my experience, they do seem to be very good at synthesizing answers from docs. However I don't know if that will work for edge cases which is one of the things SO is good at.
      - deleted 2y ago

francisofascii 2y ago

um, I would argue overbearing moderation is positive for overall "quality" of content. But not as useful as ChatGPT that will spoon feed you answers and not care about misspellings, bad English, asking the same question, etc. It is truly remarkable how good it is.

immibis 2y ago
Depends on the moderation. /r/worldnews bans any user who says anything that makes Israel look bad (I'm not exaggerating). That does nothing for quality of content.
- fady0 2y ago
  Reddit's subreddits can sometimes create echo chambers(all the big sub reddit are like that), and depending on the moderators' viewpoints, you might find opposite opinions in different communities.
dumbledoren 2y ago
Nope. Stack mods close questions related to major programming debates because the moderator and his clique decided that one practice is 'the best' etc.

emcell 2y ago

I think this is true. I personally hated those Seo clickbait pages for a while, because it was so hard to find the information i'm looking for. doing all of this with ai now. On the other hand, I really like to read a good article more than ever before

jsemrau 2y ago

Wasn't poe.com supposed to be the quora replacement since its run by the same guy who also sat on the OpenAI board?

johnfn 2y ago

Hm, not sure I agree with you about SO. The experience I have with SO 99%+ of the time is that I google my question, get a result on SO which has a correct and decent quality answer, and I'm back to work. That's a pretty great experience, and I certainly wouldn't say that it misses the bar to be a 'quality platform'. I do agree the moderation is overbearing at times, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater here. The utility of SO - getting answers to questions - is basically unmatched websites that aren't LLM wrappers. While you won't hear me bemoaning the death of Quora, I'm quite a bit more concerned about SO. After all, where is GPT 5 going to scrape the next set of answers for new libraries and frameworks..?

1R053 2y ago
I think it depends a lot on how research AI generated traffic counts towards these stats. Also, if there is no answer yet on the web the AI may also not know it. Then these questions should still end up on SO. I might add, that SO also could build their own chat / research UI. It would need to have some benefit over others, but I guess the community aspect of it alone would suffice...
BrenBarn 2y ago
> After all, where is GPT 5 going to scrape the next set of answers for new libraries and frameworks..? From its own incorrect answers that got parroted around the web.
- kibwen 2y ago
  In the grim darkness of the future, we deliberately base the APIs of new libraries and frameworks on the hallucinations of the most popular LLMs.
joelthelion 2y ago
> The experience I have with SO 99%+ of the time is that I google my question, get a result on SO which has a correct and decent quality answer, and I'm back to work. You and I are talking about different things. Before these great questions and answers ended up in your search result, someone asked them, and someone else provided a good answer. I used to be one of these people. I got 50k+ SO karma, mostly by asking good questions. I no longer bother, because SO moderators don't even read your questions anymore before closing them for a random reason. Needless to say, I no longer bother trying to answer questions as well. So, it's no wonder that SO is struggling. You can't thrive forever on a stock of aging questions.

dumbledoren 2y ago

> - quora pivoted from quality content to cheap clickbait Huh? If you follow the right people and only interact content that you like, Quora is still as good. Just like any other social network. People click stuff they don't like and they end up getting the same kind of thing served for 2-3 days and then think that its 'site gone bad'. No my good man. Its just how the social network engagement algorithms work. You gotta watch what you interact with. Even if you drop a comment to correct someone, it still counts as an engagement and you'll get more of it. So the best thing to do when you see content you don't like is to ignore it.

Larrikin 2y ago
Who cares about the quora community? Who wants to do any of that dance?
- dumbledoren 2y ago
  There are a lot of people who are experts in their field there. Roman history. Chinese history. Defense technology. History of warfare. Archaeology. Biology. Virology. Civilian aviation. Marine technology. You just gotta know the right people to follow. Your loss.

torginus 2y ago

SO dying is going to be a major bummer. It's been an invaluable resource to me once I engaged with it. While I did experience the overbearing moderation that you've mentioned, as well as the typical bullying for 'asking the question wrong' and other grating encounters I also have asked very obscure questions, and received amazingly knowledgeable answers, in one case, I asked about a brand new C# compiler feature, and I had the actual top compiler guy reach out to me, and told me that what I want isn't possible right now, but should be, and I should raise a GH issue about it. LLMs might be good at writing React code, and all the super-common stuff (probably in large part due to harvesting the SO database), but these sort of interactions are going to be gone forever.

begueradj 2y ago

You need moderation to reduce low quality content.

acdha 2y ago
Yes, but moderation comes in many flavors. SO’s moderation culture famously deterred newcomers from becoming part of the community and that long-term trend was worrisome even before the LLM scrapers showed up.
- xpe 2y ago
  Seems to me that the SO moderation level was a design decision. The pros and cons were consciously weighed. As for me, SO found a nice balance, since I dislike the common failure modes of so many other fora.
  - acdha 2y ago
    I don’t hate it, but I was also experienced when it launched and never had the bad experiences many younger people have reported. The number of dormant profiles and lack of growth was getting a fair amount of discussion even before LLMs entered the picture so even if the old moderation culture was intentional it wasn’t working out well for the future.
- QuadmasterXLII 2y ago
  Just weighing in, I always appreciated SO’s moderation style

xpe 2y ago

I think the claim above simply redefines “quality platform” with the benefit of hindsight.

m3kw9 2y ago

Interestingly I have not seen a single quora result for months either from ChatGPT, perplexity or google

giancarlostoro 2y ago

> - SO has overbearing moderation. Chatgpt doesn't close your question the second you've submitted it. Even worse your question is slightly different and you asked it because the one they just linked as a duplicate didnt help or didnt fit fully. I get so angry when someones asking the right question but some a-hole SO mod closes it almost as if they took no care to compare context and want to meet some obscure metrics for SO. I love SO but as you say the mods are the worst part.

TZubiri 2y ago
Still, much of ChatGPTs success in code can be owed to SO success in generating a mountain of useful googleable archives. See stacksort: https://xkcd.com/1185 https://xkcd.com/1185 Remember that the objective of SO is not to provide answers to users who post questions, but to provide answers to users who google questions.
- giancarlostoro 2y ago
  My frustration is that I google questions wind up in SO and a mod links to an irrelevant but related question from 20 years prior.

ForTheKidz 2y ago

For the most part, google drives me to documentation rather than Stack Overflow. Much faster than chatgpt can produce the answer, I might add. Sure, not all questions can be answered with documentation, but once you know your domain and tech stack well most of these resources fall off a cliff in terms of value. Curiously at that point it's much easier to use ChatGPT because you can babysit it with one eye while thinking ahead with the other.

skeeter2020 2y ago

OG Quora feels a lot like ChatGPT: some wierd mix of good info with a lot of garbage, all delivered with 100% confidence. The difference is ChatGPT still makes it relatively easy to ask a question and view the results.

ozim 2y ago

Because you should not ask questions on SO - you should search for an answer first - asking question there was not really what most people thought it was. It is the same at work - you should first and foremost check the documentation and read stuff on your intranet and then bother other people for help. Epitome of that was "what have you tired" that was first thing in the interface for asking questions of SO and that's first thing I ask co-workers. Somehow people did not understand all of that or did not care. AI chatbots are only disguising search as a question. It is definitely much better from UX point of view - but with hallucinations it is worse for everyone who gets imagined responses, because there is no "hey I don't know, let's really figure this out together".