Comment by pornel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pornel | Hacker News Reader

StackOverflow has always been quite open that they're primarily building a dataset for SEO, rather than being a user-centered website. So I don't feel this deal changed much. SO users are still serfs building them a dataset for sale, only the buyer has changed.

LLMs are faster and infinitely more patient than interaction with StackOverflow, so I don't expect SO to survive for long. They're in crisis regardless whether they sell to OpenAI or not, so they may as well get something out of it before they're decimated.

I think they're in crisis because they sold out there community not because LLMs are better. As a developer, if you offer me StackOverflow vs ChatGPT, I'd take StackOverflow any day of the week 100x over.

Respectfully, how would you know if you never use ChatGPT?

I said I don't use it. I didn't say I've never used it. In my experience browsing SO is way easier, more accurate, more precise, more controllable, navigable, and ... gives attribution.

you spend more time on SO than me. without looking, can you name three stack overflow contributors? I can't.

Yes.

I was offered a job a few years ago by someone who saw my Stack Overflow answers, does that count? I don't see something like this happening with ChatGPT.

I can do two, Jon Skeet (C#) and S. Lott (Python) are names I remember for providing great answers.

For some reason , but a lot of of the answers here seem to care more about "but tell em /I/ solved it" re: attribution rather than helping the user. Somewhat egoist or some such? ( and I don't mean it as an aggressive tone, just ESL so don't know how to say it othrewise)

If I license something as MIT, I personally don't care who uses it for what purpose, hell I don't even care generally that they attribute me. I put it out for people to use. But maybe that's just me.

I'm in the opposite boat. Going through Stackoverflow answers has become quite a chore.

For simple things GPT gives me the correct answer most of the time. And even when it's won't it's quicker to discern it is wrong than trying to parse a given SO page.

Of course I still use SO for more complex questions.

As a rule, if I can quickly find the answer via SO, then chances are GPT will give me the answer more rapidly.

>As a developer, if you offer me StackOverflow vs ChatGPT, I'd take StackOverflow any day of the week 100x over.

Really? Hm, I wouldn't. I can use nuance and clarify my answers and have a respectable back and forth (GPT-4 doesn't call me names when I mess up or say something dumb) and arrive at an answer.

Are you sure that's not an X vs Y problem???

I actually have no idea what you mean. can you clarify pls?

It's a common non-answer on stack overflow.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-x...

lol that makes sense, thanks.

> GPT-4 doesn't call me names when I mess up or say something dumb

I’ve heard this accusation a lot, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it happen. People call you names on Stack Overflow? Where?

>Where?

-50

Marking duplicate. "You should attempt searching before asking such obvious questions."

This question has already been answered here: < https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20861356 >

Closed 3 seconds ago.

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or some such ;) You may not come across it personally, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. SO is successful as a QA platform(or was anyway) despite this shortcoming, not because it is a feature and it doesn't happen. If a lot of people are talking about the same thing, maybe people should at least pay cursory attention to the issue rather than "No, it doesn't happen" (Not aimed at you, but there are absolutely comments like this every time this gets bought up.)

You linked to a discussion of about a hundred comments. I skimmed it but didn’t see name calling. Can you be more specific?

And I'd take ChatGPT any day of the week 1000x over. That doesn't mean anything.

> SO users are still serfs building them a dataset for sale

That is a very negative spin.

Users get access to other people's answers for free. They get that free service and are required to contribute nothing. Those that do contribute do it to help other users. S.O. isn't doing anything bad. They're providing a free service where everyone wins. Users get answers. Answerers get to help other humans at scale. S.O. makes a little money.

As for the dataset, it's been available under CC-BY-SA for years. The entire database is backed up and made available here for free every month.

https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

There are even free tools to query it here

https://data.stackexchange.com/

Why a company makes money on someone’s free work? This is obviously not okay. We have even more egregious examples but this is certainly one of them.

The company is paying the people working by providing a free service.

It's like youtube. Youtube provides a free hosting of your videos. In exchange they monetize them. You're free to host them on your own servers. That will likely cost you way more than putting them on youtube. So you're getting something from them. You're also getting their advertising service to monetize your videos. You could do it yourself, hire a bunch of people and try to get companies to put ads on your self-hosted videos. Again, unless you're wildly successful it's unlikely you'll be able to do that and make a profit. So, youtube is effectively paying you.

Same with Stack Overflow. They're providing the servers, the bandwidth, etc. It costs them $. They're providing that service to you.

> StackOverflow has always been quite open that they're primarily building a dataset for SEO

Do you have a source / more details about this? What good is SO's content for SEO?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com