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Comment by tylerneylon | Hacker News Reader

This post, to me, is about the rise of ChatGPT — but I do think over-moderation is a huge problem.

I had a hard moment on the gamedev stackexchange where I was stuck trying to learn how to do something in OpenGL. A moderator immediately closed my question as a duplicate because there was a similar question about OpenGL ES, which is a (related but) different API. I tried to plead my case, but was shut down.

Shortly after that, I gave up on the game I'd been working on for a couple years. The mod's decision contributed to that.

I felt stuck by a wall between me and answers to some of my game programming questions. Over-moderation is more than an inconvenience. It can destroy the ability of users to get things done.

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The graphs in the post show the traffic decline starting around May 2022, months before ChatGPT was available. I'd wager the cause is a change in Google's algorithm. Most of the time I end up on Stack Overflow, it's because I've typed a question into a search engine.

The top search resuls used to be either a SO answer, or a forum post or the actual docs having the answer to the question. These days it's either a dupe site copy pasting ad verbatim, a recurgitated and slightly modified variant of the former, or a "AI" generated answer, all full of ads. And to make it worse, none of them are useful as they obfuscate the answer or are simply wrong.

Looks like Google started to prioritise ads even more than actual useful results is what changed mostly.

Anecdotally it seems like Google is favoring spam sites that have crawled answers from SO

I had to use ublock origin to start blocking those sites

https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter

Thanks, I've been looking for this kind of filter for ublock. Those copycat sites are a pest.

Oh, you're right about the timing. It's probably not ChatGPT.

This is a problem on the other side of the experience spectrum too. Sometimes I want to ask an advanced question and interact with other experienced users on SO. However I have to battle the mods (who clearly don’t understand my question) to keep it open.

My questions usually go unanswered for years with several "me too"s and "did you ever figure it out?"s nailing my inbox.

I do typically self-answer if I figure it out, but you know, if I'm going to be ignored maybe it should be a github issue so I can get the sweet zero replies and that juicy 90 day auto-close from inactivity.

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