Moderation Strike: Results of Negotiations | Hacker News Reader

Moderation Strike: Results of Negotiations

meta.stackexchange.com

70 pointsthyrsus29 comments

If five years ago I would have read this as a parody I would have dismissed it as unbelievable. Unpaid volunteers go on strike and the resulting agreement is a bureaucratic masterpiece of procedures that (probably) don't solve the problem and create working groups to establish more of them. What a world we live in.

A world where intentional communities of peers deliberate with each other to iron out past problems and agree on new procedures going forward?

It's always easier to have a dictator come in and tell people what to do, but people complain about it.

Unpaid volunteers just want stuff to be involved in. The weird notion that unpaid volunteers are some pure force for good is falsely perpetuated by internet greybeards who only say it because they themselves were those people. Ask any young person their opinion of people in these positions and they’ll rightfully paint them in a negative light. Somehow we took being on body corporate and fetishised it.

When the jannies are unpaid you have to wonder why they’re doing it. They will always say it’s from love for the community, but that can often be suspect.

(We known dang moderates us out of the goodness of his paycheck, which means he’s free to love us all :)

The weird notion that unpaid volunteers are some pure force for good is falsely perpetuated by internet greybeards who only say it because they themselves were those people

that is an interesting argument, but i don't understand how it is relevant here.

as far as i can tell the moderators were acting with good intentions as a force for good as it were. if anything the problem was not that but that the company seemed to think that they can dictate what volunteers do. but really, they can't. reddit is doing the same, and if they don't listen to the volunteers they will eventually pay the price.

That's breathtakingly reductive, cruel, and that's coming from me, who smiled and am amenable to the overall premise.

I'll try to lead by example here: I'm glad they established its okay to moderate answers flagged as AI and that moderation rules should be public.

it may not solve the problem, but i think it is better than leaving AI submissions on there.

in short what they achieved is that the company can't just override the moderators at will, which is think is reasonable. if i volunteer somewhere i want to be respected, not be treated as a lackey that does their bidding.

This looks really good; thanks Cody, Makyen, and Mithical, and thanks SE for engaging!

Note: Judging from the timestamps, this seems to be about three weeks old.

And, judging by the words, it seems to be written in English.

Very mysterious.

Got a good chuckle from this, thank you.

Judging by how your comment appears to already have been flagged by other users though, you may want to include your actual point after the punchline.

lol this was made insanely better by your handle

"particularly about the lack of communication ahead of time"

Yup. SE Inc. gonna SE Inc. Not coming back this time either.

What are the circumstances where StackOverflow is still competitive against ChatGPT? As far as I can tell SO.com and google are both obsolete for getting answers to programming questions. I haven't used either in a while and as locally hosted LLMs get more pervasive I don't see the situation tilting back towards those services.

I think it's very likely that StackExchange is the key data source for ChatGPT answers of this kind. If you want LLMs to give good answers, it's important to have their sources correct.

Time passing is the circumstance. ChatGPT knows the answers from SO, but for new languages the quality will degrade over time. ChatGPT already isn't great at answering questions about new version of Swift for example. It won't be able to use new languages / APIs either. Given how rarely the model is updated (officially anyway), it will always lag behind the new tech.

It may be actually in the interest of OpenAI to start paying SO for the data and make sure it flows to the community in some way. Otherwise they will be starved.

This is just one aspect, but some people strongly prefer typing only a few search terms and then exploring links over holding a linear synchronous conversation with a chatbot. It’s a significantly different usage mode.

It’s a bit like browsing through a book vs. interviewing a random person who read the book.

A SO post usually has an answer that works and is a reasonably good idea. ChatGPT lacks the ability to see if its responses pass even a basic sanity test. Sometimes it's answers are good and sometimes they are totally wrong. Hard for a person asking the question to determine which answer they got.

With code interpreter, ChatGPT can check that it's code at least runs without errors

    rm -rf $INSTALL_DIR/*

this line of code has at least two gotchas. if you run it to test it out, there is a good chance you will destroy your data. It is otherwise a valid line of code.

This is not a theoretical problem: https://github.com/valvesoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3671

ChatGPT warns about gotchas with that line.

The point being that:

> With code interpreter, ChatGPT can check that it's code at least runs without errors

is not a solution to gotchas/caveats that build up over time that ChatGPT won't know about. ChatGPT can warn about caveats from that line of code because it's old code. It does not have a magical defense that will allow it to warn about caveats, errors, security risks, or deprecations that are introduced after its knowledge cutoff.

The best solution that we've been able to find so far is for ChatGPT to do a search and feed the results into its context. But that has its own problems, and importantly it only works if the underlying search engines are still returning up-to-date relevant results and documentation from sites like StackOverflow.

Yes, but ultimately it's still a "statistically likely" answer and not the "right" one. Often the two overlap and maybe one day they'll make it an overlapping venn diagram. But that day is not today.

If SO can’t compete on hard problems then we should all change job titles to prompt engineers.

That's a strange claim. SO's short q-and-a format doesn't even begin to tackle hard problems.

We can't keep training ChatGPT on SO and then pretend that SO is made obsolete by ChatGPT. That makes no sense.

IME ChatGPT provides more useful results than SO, especially because ChatGPT doesn't try to guess what I'm asking and takes my request at face value (by its very nature). If ChatGPT struggles with a particular topic, companies like OpenAI could hire some subject matter experts (SMEs) to write material that could be used for future training. I don't see how SO can survive much longer.

Two things SO could do to beat ChatGPT as it exists now:

1) Require all questions and answers to include the names of tools and their version numbers. Hide Qs and As until those are added. This is so critical, I have no idea why it wasn't required since day 1.

2) Discourage answers that don't answer the question, through moderation. If you don't know the answer, don't post, or at least leave your notes as a comment.

Bonus: Stop removing chats. The number of times we see someone link to a chat that 404s is too damned high. Cf: complaints from folks about the unsearchability of Discord chats wrt software tools.

i never understood why new users are allowed to post answers but not comments. it doesn't make sense. i mean it makes sense to restrict what new users can do, but the current mode results in new users posting comments as answers, and it irritates me every time i see one. on the other hand maybe it avoids answers as comments. but in the end maybe it should just be easier to convert between the two.

i like your idea of including versions.

My faith in the bureaucracy that maintains SE was irrevocably destroyed when Monica Cellio was terminated. An act of complete insanity and cowardice will do that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com