Stackoverflow mods and power users being arseholes reduces the use of Stackoverflow. ChatGPT is just the first viable alternative.
There have been two places that I remember where arrogance of the esoterati drive two feedback cycles:
1. People leave after seeking help for an issue they believed needed the input of masters.
2. Because of gruff treatment, the masters receive complaints and indignation, triggering a backfire effect feedback loop, often under the guise of said masters not wanting to be overwhelmed by common problems and issues.
There is a few practical things that can help with this (clear guides to point to, etc.), but the missing element is kindness / non-judgmental responsiveness.
When that stopped, the site (and to some degree its growing number of sister sites) continued on its ballistic curve, slowly but continuously descending into the abyss.
My primary take away is that we have not found a way to scale moderation. SO was doomed anyway, LLMs have just sped up that process.
Compared to anything before it (endless phpBB forums, expertsexchange, etc.) it was just light years ahead.
Even today compared the SO UI with Quora. It's still 10x better.
Except of course that reading Stackoverflow directly has better retention rates, better explanations and more in-depth discussions.
(My view is that moderators can be annoying but the issue is overblown.)
What I find is that the LLMs are not spitting out SO text word for word, as one would when plagiarizing. Rather, the LLM uses the context and words of my question when answering, making the response specific and cohesive (by piecing together answers from across questions).
It's a core issue in academia and other areas where the output is heavily the written word.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism#Self-plagiarism
[1] https://ori.hhs.gov/self-plagiarism
[2] https://www.aje.com/arc/self-plagiarism-how-to-define-it-and...
(1) If you are reading your entrypoint into an area of research, or a group, it is useful context on first encounter
(2) If you are not, then you can easily skip it
(3) Citing, instead of reproducing sections like background work, means you have to go look up other papers, meaning a paper can no longer stand on its own.
Self-plagiarism is an opinion among a subset of academics, not something widely discussed or debated. Are there bad apples, sure. Is there a systemic issue, I don't think so.
No, you don't. You license it. The community gets a Creative Commons license (https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing), and the company gets a few additional rights (https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public#lice...). You retain copyright.
I am Stack overflow mod, dealing with other mods. There is definitely unnecessary hostility there, but most of question closes and downvotes Go 90% to low quality questiond which lack proper professionalism to warrant anyone's time. It is remaining 10% that turns off people.
We can also take analogs from the death of Usenet.
Without seeing faces, people just don't do this very well.
Q&A was designed to handle the social explosion problem and the eternal September problems by having a larger percent of the username take an interest in the community over time and continue to maintain that ideal. Things like comments and discussions being difficult is part of the design to make it so that you don't get protracted discussions that in turn needs more moderation resources.
The fraction of the people doing the curation and moderation of the site overall has dropped. The reasons for that drop are manyfold. I believe that much of it falls squarely upon Stack Overflow corporate without considering second order effects of engaging and managing the community of people who are interested in the success of the site as they envision.
Ultimately, Stack Overflow has become too successful and the people looking to it now have a different vision for what it should be that comes into conflict with both the design of the site and the vision of the core group.
While Stack Overflow can thrive with a smaller number of people asking "good" (yes, very subjective) questions it has difficulty when it strays into questions that need discussion (which its design comes into conflict with) or too many questions for the committed core group to maintain. Smaller sites can (and do) have a larger fraction of the user base committed to the goals of the site and in turn are able to provide more individual guidance - while Stack Overflow has long gone past that point.
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Stack Overflow and its Q&A format that has been often copied works for certain sized user bases. It needs enough people to keep it interesting, but it fails to scale when too many people participate who have a different idea of what questions should be there.
There is a lack of moderation tools for the core user base to be able to manage it at scale (you will note the history of Stack Overflow has been removing and restricting moderation tools until it gets "too" bad - see also removal of 20k users helping with flag handling and the continued rescoping of close reasons).
Until someone comes up with a fundamentally different approach that is able to handle moderation at scale or sufficient barriers for new accounts (to handle the Eternal September problem), we are going to continue to see Stack Overflow clones spout and die on the vine along with a continued balkanization of knowledge in smaller areas that are able handle vision and moderation at a smaller scale.
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Every attempt at a site I've seen since (and I include things like Lemmy in this which did a "copy reddit" and then worry (or not) about moderation) have started from a "get popular, then work on the moderation problem" which is ultimately too late to really solve the problem. The tools for moderation need to be baked into the design from the start.
While they are certainly not perfect, they willingly spend their own spare time to help other peoples for free. I disagree with calling them arseholes.
The problems are two-fold:
1. Any community with volunteer moderators attracts the kind of people you don't want to be moderators. They enjoy rigidly enforcing the rules even if it makes no sense.
2. There are two ways to find questions and answer them: random new questions from the review queue, and from Google when you're searching for a problem you have. SO encourages the former, and unfortunately the vast majority of questions are awful. If you go and review questions like this you will go "downvote close, downvote close, downvote close". You're going to correctly close a load of trash questions that nobody cares about and a load of good questions you just don't understand.
I've started recording a list of questions I've asked that get idiotic downvotes or closed, so I can write a proper rant about it with concrete examples. Otherwise you get people dismissing the problem as imaginary.
These mods now hold SO hostage. SO is definitely aware of the problem but they can't instigate proper changes to fix it because the mods like this situation and they revolt if SO tries to remedy it.
Sure the mods were arseholes etc.. but before gpt never minded using it .