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Comment by melagonster | Hacker News Reader

For people who first read this: the sweet part is in the comments :)

What’s even more sad is that the SO community has since consequently destroyed SO as the home for this type of info. This post would now be considered off topic as it’s “not a good format for a Q&A site”. You’d never see it happen today. Truly sad.

Thing is, it could only be that way in its early days, when the vanguard of users came to it from word of mouth, from following Joel Spolsky or Coding Horror or their joint podcast. The audience is much bigger now and with the long tail of people, the number willing to put effort into good questions is too low, and on-topicness is a simple quality bar which can improve the signal to noise ratio.

They had a voting system. By having mods decide what was and what wasn't a 'good' question undermined the whole point of the voting system. Mods should use their powers to filter out hate/spam/trolling/egregiously off topic issues not determine relevance/usefulness. As others have pointed out SO was a site with great answers but awful for asking questions. This is why ChatGPT is eating SO for breakfast.

Even if a question was super similar to one that was previously asked has value in exactly that it might be phrased slightly better and be a closer match to what people were Googling.

Except, I doubt anybody would argue that a lower signal to noise ratio has improved the site. (Plus, has the actual metric even improved and how is it measured?) And, did anybody ever stop to ask whether S:N should even be the champion metric in the first place, at a product level? With a philosophy of “Google is our homepage”, I honestly don’t understand why S:N even matters since search pretty effectively cuts out noise. I guess it makes a mod’s life easier though. The site is less useful today than it’s ever been. The road to hell…

Very broadly, I find the quality/value of a given thing is inversely proportional to how many people are involved.

So with regards to the internet: The 90s and early 00s were great, then the internet became mainstream and it all just became Cable TV 2.0.

Relatedly, I have seen the graph showing the dip in SO traffic by ~30% if I'm not wrong (and the corresponding hot takes that attribute that to the rise of LLMs).

I know most people are pessimistic that LLMs will lead to SO and the web in general to be overrun by hallucinated content and AI-training-on-AI-ouroboros, but I wonder if it might instead allow for curious people to query an endlessly patient AI assistant about exactly this kind of information. (A custom GPT perhaps?)

GPT info tools will fully replace SO in most dev workflows if it hasn’t already.

And what will GPT info tools learn from, once the public curated sources are gone?

Probably the great swaths of documentation out there that for most use cases people need not waste time sifting through if a computer can do it faster...

Isn't it fun, that ChatGPT's success poisoned the well for everyone else? :)

By then, AGI will be ready, right?

A rephrasing of this might be on-topic on retrocomputing: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/q/3083/21450

But almost nobody reads that.

This is somewhat revisionist. They would mark stuff like this as off topic even in the early days.

His stackexchange profile is a gold mine itslef.

https://stackexchange.com/users/1136690/mark-adler#top-answe...

Hah, imagine asking Mark Adler for gzip history references.

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