8 ms·

> The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question I read an interview once with one of the founders of SO. They said the main value

• nine_k 10mo ago
  LLMs also search Google for answers. Hence the knowledge may be not lost even for those who only supervises machines that write code.
• CamperBob2 10mo ago
  Sad? No. A good LLM is vastly better than SO ever was. An LLM won't close your question for being off-topic in the opinion of some people but not others. It won't flame you for failing to phrase your question optimally, or argue about exactly which site it should have been posted on. It won't "close as duplicate" because a vaguely-similar question was asked 10 years ago in a completely-different context (and never really got a great answer back then). Moreover, the LLM has access to all instances of similar problems, while a human can only read one SO page at a time. The question of what will replace SO in future models, though, is a valid one. People don't realize what a massive advantage Google has over everyone else in that regard. So many site owners go out of their way to try to block OpenAI's crawlers, while simultaneously trying to attract Google's.
  • hombre_fatal 10mo ago
    What's sad about it is that SO was yet another place for humans to interact that is now dead. I was part of various forums 15 years ago where I could talk shop about many technical things, and they're all gone without any real substitute. > People don't realize what a massive advantage Google has over everyone else in that regard. Site owners go out of their way to try to block OpenAI's crawlers, while simultaneously trying to attract Google's. Not really. Website operators can only block live searches from LLM providers like requests made when someone asks a question on chatgpt.com, only because of the quirk that OpenAI makes the request from their server as a quick hack. We're quickly moving past that as LLMs just make the request from your device with your browser if it has to (to click "I am not a robot"). As for scraping the internet for training data, those requests are basically impossible to block and don't have anything in common with live answer requests made to answer a prompt.
    • CamperBob2 10mo ago
      What's sad about it is that SO was yet another place for humans to interact that is now dead. Whatever. I haven't seen a graph like that since Uber kicked the taxi industry in the yarbles. The taxi cartels had it coming, and so does SO. That sort of decline simply doesn't happen to companies that are doing a good job serving their customers. (As for forums, are you sure they're gone? All of the ones I've participated in for many years are still online and still pretty healthy, all things considered.)
      • oofbey 10mo ago
        I’m sad SO died, even if they deserved it.
• dahart 10mo ago
  > This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer. My personal single biggest source of frustration with SO has been outdated answers that are locking out more modern and correct answers. There are so many things for which there is no permanently right answer over time. It feels like SO started solidifying and failed to do the moderation cleaning and maintenance needed to keep it current and thriving. The over-moderation you described helps people for a short time but then doesn’t help the person who googles much later. I’ve also constantly wished that bad answers would get hidden or cleaned out, and that accepted answers that weren’t very good would get more actively changed to better ones that showed up, it’s pretty common to see newer+better answers than the accepted one.
  • jbaber 10mo ago
    Having gotten used to SO, I was shocked when I found I could mark multiple answers correct on AskMetafilter. It felt like an innovation.
  • zahlman 10mo ago
    > outdated answers that are locking out more modern and correct answers. There are so many things for which there is no permanently right answer over time.... I’ve also constantly wished that bad answers would get hidden or cleaned out, and that accepted answers that weren’t very good would get more actively changed to better ones that showed up, it’s pretty common to see newer+better answers than the accepted one. Okay, but who's going to arbitrate that? It's not like anyone was going to delete answers with hundreds of upvotes because someone thought it was wrong or outdated. And there are literally about a million questions per moderator, and moderators are not expected to be subject matter experts on anything in particular. Re-asking the question doesn't actually help, either, except sometimes when the question is bad. (It takes serious community effort to make projects like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722 work.) The Trending sort was added to try to ameliorate this, though.
    • dahart 10mo ago
      Reading the rest of this thread, it sounds like moderation truly was SO’s downfall, and almost everyone involved seems to agree the site became extremely anti-social. Not sure I’ve ever seen the word ‘toxic’ this many times in one thread before. Anyway, that is a good question you asked, one that they didn’t figure out. But if there are enough people to ask questions and search for answers, then aren’t there enough people to manage the answers? SO already had serious community effort, it just wasn’t properly focused by the UX options they offer. Obviously you need to crowd-source the decisions that can’t scale to mods, while figuring out the incentive system to reduce gaming. I’m not claiming this is easy, in fact I’m absolutely certain this is not easy to do, but SO brought too little too late to a serious problem that fundamentally limited and reduced the utility of the site over time. Moderation should have been aimed squarely at making the site friendly, and community should be moderating the content entirely, for exactly the reasons you point out - mods aren’t the experts on the content. One thing the site could have done is tie questions and answers to specific versions of languages, libraries, tools, or applications. Questions asked where the author wasn’t aware of a version dependency could be later assigned one when a new version changes the correctness of an answer that was right for previous versions. This would make room for new answers to the same question, make room for the same question to be asked again against a new version, and it would be amazing if while searching I could filter out answers that are specific to Python 2, and only see answers that are correct for Python 3, for example. Some of the answers should be deleted (or just hidden but stay there to be used as defense when someone tries to re-add bad or outdated answers.) The policy of trying to keep all answers no matter how good allowed too much unhelpful noise to accumulate.
• BrenBarn 10mo ago
  I agree with that and I think it was the right decision. There was grousing about overmoderation but I think a lot of people got unreasonably annoyed when their question was closed. And the result was a pretty well-curated and really useful knowledge base.
• lurk2 10mo ago
  > This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer. Having duplicates of the question is precisely why people use LLMs instead of StackOverflow. The majority of all users lack the vocabulary to properly articulate their problems using the jargon of mathematicians and programmers. Prior to LLMs, my use case for StackOverflow was something like this: 30 minutes trying (and failing) to use the right search terms to articulate the problem (remember, there was no contextual understanding, so if you used a word with two meanings and one of those meanings was more popular, you’d have to omit it using the exclusion operator). 30 minutes reading through the threads I found (half of which will have been closed or answered by users who ignored some condition presented by the OP). 5 minutes on implementation. 2 minutes pounding my head on my desk because it shouldn’t have been that hard. With an LLM, if the problem has been documented at any point in the last 20 years, I can probably solve it using my initial prompt even as a layman. When you’d actually find an answer on StackOverflow, it was often only because you finally found a different way of phrasing your search so that a relevant result came up. Half the time the OP would describe the exact problem you were having only for the thread to be closed by moderators as a duplicate of another question that lacked one of your conditions.
  • zahlman 10mo ago
    > Having duplicates of the question is precisely why people use LLMs instead of StackOverflow. The majority of all users lack the vocabulary to properly articulate their problems using the jargon of mathematicians and programmers. Yes; so the idea is they fail to find the existing question, and ask it again, and get marked as a duplicate; and then everyone else with the same problem can search, possibly find the new duplicate version, and get automatically redirected to the main version with high quality answers.
    • zarzavat 10mo ago
      Yes but that only works if the questions are identical. Often however they are merely similar, but closed as duplicates nonetheless.
      • 10mo ago
• zahlman 10mo ago
  > Sad now though, since LLMs have eaten this pie. By regenerating an answer on command and never caring about the redundancy, yeah. The DRY advocate within me weeps.
• rendaw 10mo ago
  I think that's a great policy. I don't think anyone wants duplicate questions. The problem is moderation marking unrelated questions as duplicates. I'd say 9/10 times I find a direct match for my question on SO it's been closed as offtopic with links to one or more questions that are only superficially similar. There are other problems that they don't even try to address. If 10 people ask the same question, why does only the first person to ask it get to choose the answer? Then lots of "XY" questions where the original asker didn't actually have problem X so selects an answer for Y, leaving the original X unsolved, and now all the duplicates only have an answer for Y too.
  • Izkata 10mo ago
    > The problem is moderation marking unrelated questions as duplicates. The idea was, if there's an answer on the other question that solves your question, your question remains in existence as a signpost pointing to the other one without having to pollute and confuse by having a mixture of similar answers across both with different amounts of votes.
  • matt_kantor 10mo ago
    > The problem is moderation marking unrelated questions as duplicates. This problem isn't directly solvable (what counts as a "duplicate" is inherently subjective, and therefore mistakes/differences of opinion are inevitable). I think a deeper problem is that once a question becomes closed (for any reason), it's unlikely that it'll ever be reopened. The factors behind this are social (askers interpret close votes as signals that they should give up), cultural (there's not much training/feedback/guidelines about what "duplicate" means for those with voting privileges), and technical (there's no first-class feature for askers to contest closure, and it takes just as many votes to reopen a question as it does to close it (with the same voter reputation requirement)).
    • zahlman 10mo ago
      > and technical (there's no first-class feature for askers to contest closure It's not quite that bad: when the OP edits the question, there is a checkbox to assert that the edit resolves the reason for closure. Checking it off puts the question in a queue for reconsideration. However, there's the social problem (with possibly a technical solution) that the queue is not as discoverable as it ought to be, and provides no real incentive; the queues generally are useful for curators who work well in a mode of "let's clean up problems of type X with site content today", but not for those (like myself) who work well in a mode of e.g. "let's polish the canonical for problem Y and try to search for and link unrecognized duplicates". Given the imbalance in attention, I agree that reopening a question should have lesser requirements than closing it. But better yet would be if the questions that don't merit reopening, weren't opened in the first place. Then the emphasis could be on getting them into shape for the initial opening. I think that's a useful frame shift: it's not that the question was rejected; rather, publishing a question basically always requires a collaborative effort. The Staging Ground was a huge step forward in this direction, but it didn't get nearly the attention or appreciation (or fine-tuning) it deserved.
• ItsMonkk 10mo ago
  The disconnect here is that they built it this way, but still call it a question and answer site and give a lot of power over to the person who created the question. They get to mark an answer as the solution for themselves, even if the people coming from Google have another answer as the solution. If they were to recreate the site and frame it as a symptom and issue site, which is what the interview described, that would yield many different choices on how to navigate the site, and it would do a lot better. In particular, what happens when two different issues have the same symptom. Right now, that question is closed as a duplicate. Under a symptom and issue site, it's obvious that both should stay as distinct issues.
• chamomeal 10mo ago
  > They were primarily trying to make google searches more effective for the broader internet This is mostly how I engaged with SO for a long, long time. I think it’s a testament to SO’s curation of answers that I didn’t ask almost any questions for like 5+ years after starting programming
• mannykannot 10mo ago
  Quite often, when my search returned a 'closed as duplicate' reply, I found the allegedly duplicate question did not accurately describe my problem, and the answers to it were often inferior, for my purposes, than those which had been given to my original question before the gate was closed.
  • solumunus 10mo ago
    This is because the real goal was SEO.
    • josephg 10mo ago
      It doesn't appear to have worked.
  • oofbey 10mo ago
    I think many would agree that this policy was the single biggest moderation failure of the site. And it would Have been so easy to fix. But management believed fewer high quality answers were better. Management was wrong.
• bill3478 10mo ago
  If this were true, then treating any question as an X-Y problem shouldn't be allowed at all. I.e. answers should at least address the question as posed before/instead of proposing an alternative approach. In reality the opposite is encouraged. For countless times, I've landed on questions with promising titles/search extracts, only to find irrelevant answers because people grabbed onto some detail in the question irrelevant to my case and provided X-Y answers. This often also causes subsequent useful questions to be marked as dups even though they no longer contain that irrelevant detail. The appeal process is so unfriendly that most would not bother. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36068243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36068243