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I'm surprised you read my post and thought I was trying to say that using more public forums and less private chats will solve the so-called "human issue". My a

I'm surprised you read my post and thought I was trying to say that using more public forums and less private chats will solve the so-called "human issue". My argument is not about making customer support more pleasant, or users less hostile. It's about making information more accessible so people can help themselves. If we make information more accessible, support will reduce in volume. Currently there's a tendency for domain experts to hoard all relevant information in their heads, and dole it out at their discretion in various chat forums. Forums whose existence is often not widely known to begin with (not to mention gated behind making accounts in certain apps the users may or may not care about/want to). So my point is: instead of trying to automate a decidedly bad solution to make it scalable and treating that as a selling point of AI, we could instead make the information more accessible in the first place?

perching_aix 1y ago
The number of messages in the #help channels I participated in was limited not by the number of participants on either side, but by the speed of the chat. If it went on too quick, people would hold off from posting. This meant you had a fairly low and consistent ceiling for messages. What you'd also observe over the years is a gradual decline in question quality. According to every helper that is. How come? Admittedly we'll never really know, so this is speculation on my part, but I think it was exactly because of the better availability of information. During these years, we tried cultivating other resources and implementing features with the specific goal of improving UX. It worked. So the only people still "needing" assistance were those who failed to navigate even this better UX. Hence, worse questions, yet never ending. Another issue with this idea is that navigating through the sheer volume of information can become challenging. AWS has a pretty decent documentation for example, but if you don't know the given service's docs you're paging through somewhat well, it's a chore to find anything. Keyword search won't be super helpful either. This is because it's a lot of prose, and not a lot of structure. Compare this to the autogenerated docs of AWS CLI, and you'll find a stark difference. Finding things, especially among a lot of faff, is tiring. Asking a natural language question is trivial. The rest is on people to believe that AI isn't the literal devil, unlike what blogposts like the OP would like one to believe.

perching_aix 1y ago

The number of messages in the #help channels I participated in was limited not by the number of participants on either side, but by the speed of the chat. If it went on too quick, people would hold off from posting. This meant you had a fairly low and consistent ceiling for messages. What you'd also observe over the years is a gradual decline in question quality. According to every helper that is. How come? Admittedly we'll never really know, so this is speculation on my part, but I think it was exactly because of the better availability of information. During these years, we tried cultivating other resources and implementing features with the specific goal of improving UX. It worked. So the only people still "needing" assistance were those who failed to navigate even this better UX. Hence, worse questions, yet never ending. Another issue with this idea is that navigating through the sheer volume of information can become challenging. AWS has a pretty decent documentation for example, but if you don't know the given service's docs you're paging through somewhat well, it's a chore to find anything. Keyword search won't be super helpful either. This is because it's a lot of prose, and not a lot of structure. Compare this to the autogenerated docs of AWS CLI, and you'll find a stark difference. Finding things, especially among a lot of faff, is tiring. Asking a natural language question is trivial. The rest is on people to believe that AI isn't the literal devil, unlike what blogposts like the OP would like one to believe.