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Comment by moomoo11 | Hacker News Reader

Imo the high ranking people today on SO are annoying as fuck and on a power trip. I haven’t asked question in a long time and I had a unique situation and asked the question. Within seconds some guy adds some snarky unhelpful and honestly toxic reply and I had to repost my question. I ran a quick survey and found others who have had similar experiences and I feel this is terrible for newbies and even people like me who know what we are doing and posting good questions. I mean I have many millions of people reached according to SO with my answers.

I can’t stand these people.

It would be nice if SO would go back to evolving Q&A and stop letting toxic losers become mods.

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Human society 101: moderation is work, like any other. And if you are not paying your moderators to do the job (like on HN), you will quickly find that it once the initial wave of idealists fades out, it will attract people who get "paid" by having petty power over others. The kind of people we call "toxic assholes". Then your platform will die and the cycle will repeat.

So you're saying we should clone dang?

Dang is very well paid

How do you know that?

Seriously.. I just posted a rather nuanced question (can a CSS gradient extend into over-scroll like color can), and it just got instantly closed by someone who didn’t understand the question at all. Apparently I need “cred” to even request review on this using their meta channels. Really bad FTUE.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75240915/is-it-possible-...

To be fair, FTUE has a really bad First Time User Experience, I just had to Google it.

I see two issues with your question, which I just edited:

* The images should be inlined so people can see it without having to click to another site. Stackoverflow also has its own image server so it doesn't have to rely on the other site (giphy) not deleting the image, and you add images just by clicking the "image" icon above the edit box.

* The title of the question didn't match the body, which is probably what got it closed. The original title was an obvious "yes" because you already had an example of it in the question.

Edit: Left closed I guess, not originally closed. I see in the history the question was much improved, but it still didn't get past the review queue.

Stackoverflow is like online gaming . Just mute/ignore the morons and jerks, and get on with you life. I've received a ton of hate on SO, but I've also received so many answers to questions that would have taken me at least a day to figure out on my own. Some angry dweeb launches a tirade at me, and some kind soul gives me an answer. Ignore the dweeb, go to lunch, ship the feature.

Plus, all the highly rated, high SEO answers are ancient at this point. It's hard to find anything relevant to tech from this decade.

And any attempt to ask a question about modern tech gets closed as being a duplicate of some tangentially related question asked about perl 2.

One of the reasons ChatGPT is so refreshing is the lack of toxic replies.

One of the reasons it's useless is that if there's no way to do exactly what you're asking, ChatGPT will just invent a way. I've wasted a bunch of time trying to find docs for functions ChatGPT claims exist, only to conclude that it made them up.

ChatGPT is like a smart human inventing a hypothetical API which would solve your problem. A service like StackOverflow has people who are actually familiar with what actually exists in reality. The human will usually know enough to come up with some alternative approach or workaround where ChatGPT hallucinates an answer.

It’s like when you go looking for an answer in GitHub’s issues discussion, and while scanning down you see a code snippet with a perfectFunctionForThis()… only to realize a few moments (or longer) later the commenter is suggesting it would be nice if this function existed and if this pattern could work.

That's because it's still an early version. Also, it's trained on data over 2 years old. OpenAI needs to figure out how to regularly refresh its training. Newer and better models for programming should also help.

The info being old is an excuse for not knowing about recent stuff. It's not an excuse for hallucinating answers to questions it doesn't know the answer to (or for which no answer exists).

I have seen nothing to suggest that future modes will fix the hallucination problem. I wouldn't be surprised if it's just an inherent, unfixable issue with the concept of neural network language models – they don't have a model of the world from which they produce logically coherent text, they simply have a giant statistical model for which words tend to occur in which order – so I don't see why we should expect a language model to not hallucinate. But I'm not an expert on the current state of the art, so if you have some links to papers which indicate that the language model hallucination problem is solvable, I'm open to admitting I may be wrong.

Sounds solvable though once LLMs like ChatGPT become "live" (e.g connected to the internet) they can perhaps verify their answers. They will probably have their own development environment at some point. So these things might still happen in the future but rarely.

ChatGPT may not feel outright toxic but easily devolves into a buttheaded condescending nanny if you try to push some of it's "moral" boundaries. I tried to have it help me come up with ideas for a programming language that would be used to spite employers and or coworkers. Boy did I get a lesson about my negative attitude.

You can tell ChatGPT to reply in the style of someone else, or even take on another role, which makes its responses differ. It's interesting that it even has moral boundaries. This could be part of safe AI, which a lot of people have complained about long before ChatGPT launched.

> I haven’t asked question in a long time

By design I literally can't add comments/engage in conversation. I need 50 reputation on each individual StackOverflow sites.

https://stackexchange.com/sites

Once you have 200 reputation on at least one site you get a 100 point bonus when joining a new site.

50 reputation is only 5 upvotes, and there's an association bonus that means you start with an extra 100 rep on every site once you establish yourself on one. Also, you can always comment on your own questions. The requirement only applies to commenting on others' questions.

It encourages "farming" in my opinion. I'm sure it's a net positive (maybe) and keeps spam down but... it's weird. They want you to contribute in a certain way before you can contribute in the way that you're most likely to encounter (randomly landing on a question from Google during the middle of a busy day, drop a quick note, try to move on, etc.)

> 50 reputation is only 5 upvotes

On answers you get 10 for upvotes, on questions you only get 5. Then you can also get 2 at a time by making edits to others' questions/answers to improve them (this only works up to some limit, you stop getting the bonus past that).

> On answers you get 10 for upvotes, on questions you only get 5.

That hasn't been true since 2019: https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/11/13/were-rewarding-the-que...

> Then you can also get 2 at a time by making edits to others' questions/answers to improve them (this only works up to some limit, you stop getting the bonus past that).

The limit is 1000 reputation earned from edits or 2000 reputation total, whichever comes first.

TBH I got fed up so I used a few different accounts (they do have different purposes) to vote each up.

That's been my case too. I don't receive an answer to my question, just someone telling me I shouldn't do it that way. I then explain why I have to do it this way and of course crickets from them because they never had anything helpful to contribute in the first place.

This is a common problem on internet forums / communities generally.

Whenever a community gets large enough that people start to care about their status within that community you get people who just want to throw around their authority.

In Stackoverflow's case though the value of the site comes from how helpful the user base is. I think part of the reason a lot of devs are asking questions on places like Reddit and discord servers these days is because you're less likely to deal with some dickhead picking holes with how you formatted your question before some power user comes along and closes the thread completely before you have an answer.

I have asked several somewhat embarrassing questions in the Go and Bash categories in the last year. Got amazing results quickly with zero snark. I am super grateful for SO.

I especially love the ones who tell people they don't understand their own requirements. I tried SO a couple times but the responses I got back were "oh. you should just do it in python" (it's a 50 engineer project using C# and while dotnet isn't perfect, trying to convince management and other engineers to switch a large project to BOTO just to use one particular easy to use method isn't going to work.)

Then there are the mansplainers who very calmly explain they ignored half of my question because I clearly didn't know what I was doing.

But I still click on SO search results when searching for obscure AWS errors. It's not like the AWS docs explain them. I think there's still some decent content from 5-10 years ago, but it's slowly becoming less relevant as technology marches ahead.

>Then there are the mansplainers

Are you a woman? Do they know you're a woman?

Is mansplaining gender neutral at this point?

I ask because to me the act is quite sexist, but accusing someone of the same without basis seems quite sexist, and I don't see how gender would come up on SO.

I used to contribute to another community at stack exchange and 100% stopped a few years back because of this. A handfull of individuals completely ruined the website for me. I haven't asked or answerd a question in years with the exception of the home improvement community.

> I had to repost my question

This is against the rules. The fact that you did it anyway makes me believe that your original question probably broke other rules too, and that the "unhelpful" and "toxic" comments were probably telling you that.

You an SO mod? The "I'm just gonna presume your question broke some rules and you deserve shit for it" attitude suits you.

Is it not a reasonable assumption that someone who you know broke one rule probably broke others too?

Oh wow. I was going to write this whole thing about how just because someone posts a question twice doesn't mean that there's anything rule-breaking about the question itself; that the two seem almost entirely orthogonal. But I went searching for some rules, and I could not find the rule you're talking about. Hell, I wasn't even able to find anything which calls itself "rules" for how you're supposed to ask questions. Even the "What should I do if no one answers my question" help page [1] doesn't even advice against re-posting. All I can find is certain users claiming reposting is against the rules, but nothing official. (In fact, I'm having a hard time finding anything other than the CoC which describes itself as "rules" rather than guidelines intended to help the user write better questions or answers -- and even these don't advice against reposting.)

Maybe there is some deeply hidden rule against reposting. Or maybe you're just full of shit. But either way, reposting is clearly not a sign of reckless disregard for clearly laid out site rules, so the fact that a person has reposted their question does not indicate in any way that the person has a propensity for rule-breaking.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/help/no-one-answers

"Rule" is a bit strong, but it's true that you shouldn't do that. One of the courtesy assumptions stackoverflow works on is that you looked for an answer before posting your question, and the second post would have been closed as a duplicate of the first.

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