A couple of major ramifications from its decline:
#1 (the bigger one): The decline of Stack Overflow-like sites will (imo) degrade or cap the quality of ChatGPT tools themselves on questions pertaining to code post-2022. I doubt that advances like "reasoning" or other AI breakthroughs are going to fully make up for the oncoming draught of quality training data. Sites like SO were a crutch that companies who underinvested in documentation leaned on (their attitude essentially being: "we've done enough, let the coders figure it out amongst themselves, b/c it works"). I doubt companies are going to suddenly realize they need to invest more in solid docs (for both the developers and AI companies). -- While many initially saw this coming (AI killing the web it trained on), now we have pretty dramatic data show that has happened.
#2: questions about new technologies and their shortcomings will be asked in the dark, giving AI companies valuable data that used to otherwise exist in public forums. Among other things, this will make it harder for tech-builders to know what to improve, therefore preventing it from improving as quickly, and keeping people more reliant on AI tools for troubleshooting. This seems to be another example of AI companies _creating_ problems that they are best positioned to "solve".
paxys•8mo ago
znpy•8mo ago
Its moderation policies (in particular allowing mods to rewrite your replies) were absolutely not okay.
zahlman•8mo ago
You write answers, not "replies", and everyone is allowed to propose edits (and people above a certain reputation threshold can do it unilaterally).
The reason for this is that when you use Stack Overflow, you are not using a forum. The point is not to "reply" to the person asking a question; the point is to answer a question in a way that is useful to everyone, not just the person who asks.
The curation policies are extremely well thought out and have been carefully refined over multiple years through extensive discussion.
They absolutely are okay. Just not for the purposes you want them to serve.
You are not the one who gets to decide what purpose the site should serve.
The site was already designed and intended to serve a specific purpose before you got there. You were the one responsible for understanding this.
znpy•8mo ago
meaningless correction
> (and people above a certain reputation threshold can do it unilaterally)
and that's a problem
> They absolutely are okay. Just not for the purposes you want them to serve.
I never told you my purposes and there's no way for you to derive that from my writing. You're making stuff up.
> You are not the one who gets to decide what purpose the site should serve.
Absolutely, but I wrote something completely different though. But you weren't keen on reading and understanding, just regurgitating some pre-approved narrative.
> The site was already designed and intended to serve a specific purpose before you got there. You were the one responsible for understanding this.
At this point it's irrelevant, StackOverflow is dying and we'll ask stuff to ChatGPT and similar, so problem solved anyway.