Calling It Quits on ServerFault | Hacker News Reader

Calling It Quits on ServerFault

sysadmin1138.net

76 pointszdw51 comments

People may be dismissive of Serverfault and the other sites but pretty much all LLMs are trained on them.

Yes, it's like a lot of other content that no one will bother to maintain anymore because it is easier to ask an LLM. Not sure where they are planning to get their new training data from ...

Stackexchange network has died for me way before LLMs were even a dream.

Passive aggressive commenting and deleting questions because it looked remotely similar to another one was enough for me.

I was there for learning and sharing, not for the proverbial fighting cage.

I can spend 5 minutes more and use a search engine, and then take my own notes and keep them to myself. Thanks.

The aggressive moderation on StackOverflow was so annoying. I still remember multiple times where I found a question about my exact issue, but it had been closed as a duplicate, and the "duplicate" was basically irrelevant.

And plenty of times I had an answer to a question but couldn't because I didn't have enough 'karma'. Sorry I'm not going to waste my time gaming the system to answer a question and be helpful.

People do still talk about programming online, just not on Stackoverflow.

I think since AI finally provided a non-adversarial alternative to Stackoverflow it lost the critical mass to be a one stop shop for all tools/languages/projects. So people just reverted to communication forums specific to those tools/languages/projects.

There are plenty of project mailing lists, GitHub issues, language forums, blog posts etc. that are still active. E.g. just the Rust users forum gets more than 2-3 posts per day.

The AI "understood" the concepts enough. It can generate readable code in new syntax like Typst, D2lang etc; refer 80 page documentation scattered across urls (looking at you AWS); clone tools from Github to find undocumented features.

I mean, most frontier labs train on user input by default, seems like a pretty good source of information.

Average user input quality is not optimal by definition. SO's upvote system and reputation system is what really refined quality. Much like Reddit's system is helping a lot for conversation. Much like academia's publish and citation system is an even better system.

I'm not saying LLM won't be able to train further, but tough and sound reviews are paramount to improving the corpus of quality content. And with the replacement of SO by LLMs, one can wonder if one quality system went down the drain. Anyway there's still code reviews on GitHub and in private repos, but we're still far from getting the human judgement out of the loop.

"Average user input quality is not optimal by definition."

Absolutely.

"SO's upvote system and reputation system is what really refined quality."

Absolutely not!

SO's problem was exactly that they gave average users moderating power. That lead to half of the questions being closed because they were over the head of the average user/moderator regardless of being interesting and useful questions or not.

This issue was mostly on SO itself. For most other stack exchange servers, it worked really well.

I'm sure there were plenty of people like me who couldn't help because they didn't have the right amount of "karma".

I do expect there will be more closed knowledge forums. Unfortunately one person exposing it to LLM provider will be enough to break the whole idea. But I believe there will be many that will keep secrets for some in group.

You can train on questions, but I will rarely answer to a chat with a SO-quality answer.

It was great while it was good. The demise wasn’t quality as such, but rather the insane moderation - closing everything as duplicates or out of scope etc.

CoSOMO (Content Stolen; Obsoleted, Move On)

Ouch ... brutal, disheartening, but true.

You guys tbh are just infuriating. StackOverflow and ServerFault in particular are CC BY-SA. I contributed to a lot of websites which are currently switching from public access to login required. I did it under the assumption that anyone will be able to read it. Thank god Stack Exchange and HN so far are not showing petty resentment.

You are absolutely right. These contributions were given willingly under a very permissive license. That is on the contributors.

It might not have been that apropos to roll out in this context, but the point goes for all LLM vacuuming.

PS: Although those contributors might have been willing to let anyone, corporation or person, manually use their submissions, they might have felt differently about remix machines.

> Although those contributors might have been willing to let anyone, corporation or person, manually use their submissions, they might have felt differently about remix machines.

How does a corporation "manually use" a submission?

How people are not "remix machines"? I mean it is a common joke that bad programmers used to copy-paste code from Stack Overflow.

Surely you don't mean that GPT-6 itself is at fault here.

And all the sites trained on humans, something which we never found offense with, for some interesting reason.

17 years and 202,000 internet points -https://stackexchange.com/leagues/2/alltime/serverfault

I contributed heavily to that site and spent the meat of my IT career posting about my gained experience. It helped me get jobs, and opened all sorts of consulting opportunities. I used to proudly point at that body of work because Stack Exchange and ServerFault were universally known in the industry.

It is wild knowing the LLMs were trained on these contributions. And today, I encounter IT professionals who confidently say, "I've never used anything from that site"

The stackexchange sites are too fragmented into too many narrow topics for the traffic. They should consider merging.

E.g. Network Engineering and Server Fault could easily be one thing. Just ignore the questions you're not into about problems with switches, if application services are more your thing. Throw in Super User also: "TechExchange".

We head this before. It was called ExpertsExchange.

but it had the letters s, e and x in a row, so that wont pass the work web filtering software.

Let's try: https://www.experts-exchange.com

They are founded in 1996, and still going on. They are a mature business at this point.

How is this page so bad to read on mobile?

Article content is using less than 56% of the available width, due to:

    #content-inner { width: 80%; }
    #content-inner #alpha { width: 70%; }

For me it is line space, I keep reading the same line over and over (desktop Macos).

There's something here that I can't put my finger on. Sites like ServerFault (and the rest of the trilogy in tfa) were places where people like the author literally, and pretty silently dramatically improved my life. I owe such a great debt to what looks like the end of the end for these places. A sad moment where the machines just sliced everything up and took over.

We're collectively discovering that it was about the process too, not just results.

I'm not questioning if AI delivers, it does, and you need - cannot say it more politely - a reality check if you think it's completely useless.

It's just that we are social creatures and those communities provided more than just technical answers to many.

> We're collectively discovering that it was about the process too, not just results.

Being able to judge the reliability of the source was huge. AI is a great discovery engine, but a terrible source for reliable information.

I wouldn't say terrible, and even the most reliable people have bad days. I think the difference is when you are dealing with people, you don't get a generic "you're absolutely right" when you point at a mistake.

Sometimes you get an apology, sometimes you get a wall of ego, sometimes you get reverse-corrected etc., instead of a statistically significant "remedy". This is totally not efficient, but if life should be all about efficiency, we should never live at all.

I’ve spent a lot of time chasing really plausible sounding explanations from AI. I’ve also saved a lot of time by having AI give me immediate, correct answers for problems I can only vaguely describe. The reason I call it a terrible source is that it doesn’t “know” which is which, so it can’t favor the accurate content.

StackExchange could always “learn” to favor accurate answers with social queues; votes, poster rep, etc.. IMHO it’s far more reliable than AI.

And, note, that perhaps - even more of those social interactions will also be absorbed, along with the participants, into the Chat model's sphere. It wants, and will get, all: Result(s), process, and participants. It is grey goo for all intellectual - and soon, emotional - work and products and inputs and byproducts.-

Being useful and being good for us is not the same thing. I don't think I've heard many people say LLMs don't do what they are supposed to do.

> We're collectively discovering that it was about the process too, not just results.

We. I remember five years ago in the old manual days. When the 10Xers would culturally gatekeep programming based on whether people intrinsically liked coding itself. I.e. the process.

Then there was a curious shift. Several elites had a realization: oh it was never about the process for me. I just like getting the results. (In however an alienating way.) "I'm pragmatic"

> I'm not questioning if AI delivers, it does, and you need - cannot say it more politely - a reality check if you think it's completely useless.

Why fret. The doubters will be washed away by the flood anyway. I’m completely serious. Either if or when, it’s not like anyone can stay a doubter on a computer if (if or when) everything is transformed.

I can never understand these faith rituals. First declare that you are a believer. Then declare that the doubters are delusional. Politely.

But delusion is a reality-correcting problem, except for the clinically ill.

I don't agree with your interpretation how it has been, but I wouldn't really want to argue about it as it'd not be that meaningful IMHO. After all, it'd be your observation vs mine.

I just want to point out one thing: If it were all about the results, AI also makes the results worth less.

I guess that's a problem with content provided by karma farmers. When they decide to farm something else (gith7b stars now?) the flow stops. I think there also might be a tendancy for the culture to chase away people providing information purely so that others have access to it.

While the use of Chatbots has diminished the utility of using the service as a direct interface, the information that Chatbots provide sourced some of that from here. There is possibly now a need for a new type repository of queries and answers in a different form. Perhaps people can have a skill on their Chatbots that gets them to post solutions into a wiki for issues that people have actually had that were solved by lengthy investigation.

I think the next leap for StackExchange is https://agents.stackoverflow.com/ for exclusive use by AI. It holds great potential for accelerated knowledge discovery.

Point your harness to:

https://agents.stackoverflow.com/skill.md

https://agents.stackoverflow.com/llms.txt

You mean SlopExchange.

If the AI’s are the one exchanging the ideas then it should be AIsexchange.

yeah maybe in future agent will post question on user’s behalf and some other agent belonging to some other user might answer that.

I think stackoverflow will evolve into something else. LLMs have added another layer of abstraction on high level programming languages

What happens when intelligent entities are working is that the entity posting the question itself starts with a working answer, although not an optimal answer. Over time, other entities provide more optimal answers.

It's time to allow anyone to post. All the people who wanted to go through the pain of getting karma have done it.

I would've been active but I can't because of the karma rules.

Thanks for all the fish. Thanks for the last stories, cheers.

And: nice domain name.

I was happily active on the SE network, in several sites, for 15 or so years. Without any special efforts I accumulated some 500k internet points. Cool.

And then something changed. Ego trips. Questions immediately downvoted. An extremely, psychotic Meta site.

I get it that plenty of questions are low quality. But for fuck's sake - why not just having a second look at high rep questions, which are more likely to be well rounded ? This is how you lose your more enthusiastic members.

Within SO some groups were great and others (Go, I am looking at you) were elitist cliques.

And then there are the niche sites: cooking, LaTeX, ... Welcoming, happy questions and relevant answers. These are the ones I will miss a lot.

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