They're not regurgitating the top Stack Overflow answer. They've scraped the entire Stack Overflow page, including context in additional answers, and they've also been trained on the same question from countless other parts of the internet.
Anyway, I didn't say anything about which is preferable to use, I merely commented on where the information comes from, so your response is non sequitur. If sources like SO go away, it will affect the quality of LLM responses. "the same question from countless other parts of the internet" is a figment of your imagination when it comes to the kind of content SO accumulated. I've been in this industry for a very long time (my name appears in RFC #57) and I know what it was like to try to get answers to technical questions before SO showed up.
The most-being-wrong applies very reliably for any API, library, or language that isn't stable through time. You probably work C, or similar, where backwards breaking changes, or shifts in "the correct way", are rare. I'm jealous!
The answer being wrong at any point in time is probably < 10%, in my experience.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79831192/multi-line-titl...
edit: thought I'd try to check that belief but the process for getting SO to show me any information involves enough layers of question boxes and captions that I've kind of got the confirmation by giving up in annoyance.
> I asked chatgpt how do I do X. Chatgpt replied with the accepted answer from stack overflow, thus saving me 1 second. In theory. In practice, what Chatgpt did NOT tell me was that the top voted comment on that accepted answer said "Do not do this, doing X in this way creates a security vulnerability of type Y because of Z"
The Ubuntu people seem to have recently pushed to users a new version of the CUPS printer scheduler that doesn't like the syntax of some old cupsd.conf files. This breaks all printing on affected machines.
So where are the bug reports? Stack Exchange. Nobody over there is going to fix it. This needs to be discussed on Ubuntu Forums, where the maintainers might read it. For now, I posted similar discussions on the CUPS forum and Ubuntu's own forum, and linked them to each other. There's a finger-pointing problem coming up - is this a CUPS bug or a Ubuntu bug? (What writes the cupsd.conf file anyway? Ubuntu Settings?) I don't want to file a bug report until the finger-pointing phase has commentary from people who actually know the innards of Linux printing, or I'll get shot down by one side blaming the other. Let those guys fight it out.
If you want it to be read by a maintainer, submit it to their bug tracker?!
I work on an open source project at $DAYJOB, and as a team it's much easier dealing with a forum or bug report than tracking SO questions.
You can't set up email notifications for watched tags [1] as SO doesn't take that use case seriously. There's no way to see read or unread questions, or e.g. mark them as read (personally or as a team).
To make matters worse, SO tags are often wrongly applied leading to seeing lots of unrelated or low quality questions briefly. These get removed eventually but still show up initially.
And lastly, I think SO has said that generally they don't want to devolve into a vendor support forum. Which is understandable, given that most companies just post boilerplate answers and aren't really helpful. As a company it makes things harder because moderation is completely out of your control.
[1] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/25224/email-notific...
I'm quite sure I had that set up at some point, already many years ago. The thread you're linking to is over 15 years old.
If you don't like breaking changes then you might consider using an Ubuntu LTS and then adding your own changes as required.
I've been using CUPS for roughly 20 years and since I ditched HPLIP and the like some years ago and went all in on IPP Anywhere, its been rock solid for me at home and at work and for quite a few customers.
So, which version of Ubuntu do you rock and can we have some links to discussions please? Or some idea of the issues involved.
[1] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/cant-print-cups-printing-daem...
It was also heavily downvoted, because it did not directly answer the user's question. (The user had already selected a winning answer, so this was in some sense unnecessary.)
It struck me that a single scalar for quality was inappropriate here. It was the best post I'd read in a long time, but by the site's rules indeed "deserved" the downvotes.
I had to wonder if a multidimensional system (tags like "answers question" and "general context" etc.) would work better. You know... the stuff every social media site figured out twenty years ago? ;)
---
Tangential but the more I think about it, the more I think we had the web basically right twenty years ago...
You subscribed to what you wanted to see.. and then sometimes you'd find really cool new things through mentions or the comments section.
I was thinking about signal to noise ratio and taste recently and realized I'd reinvented RSS from first principles...
Same for HN. You're supposed to vote based on "contributes to the discussion" but if someone posts something that's false, that can be a common misconception that others will have as well and is explained in replies. Does it need to be downvoted for a honest mistake? You know people will.
There's a bunch of dimensions you could vote for but something close to "I disagree with this" is what people mostly use. If that were a separate metric from "contributes to the conversation", they could each affect ranking/grayness appropriately
Another forum I'm on lets you classify posts from "troll" (-1) through "irrelevant" to "fine", "good", and "exceptional" (+3). It then takes the median value of all votes, biasing/tie-breaking towards "fine". There is no limit on how many posts you're allowed to mark as exceptionally good, but if you abuse it, your voting rights are taken away. It's far from perfect (if you have behind-the-scenes knowledge of something, you can see where the hive mind goes wrong) but I like it better than what HN does, also because it's public and you can filter for the exceptionally good replies. They're most often by people who post additional sources and information that the article could/should have had. On HN, the only time we get to see vote count is when something gets grayed out for being super bad...
Well, not the majority, obviously, but some real gems do get lost in there.
I guess an "I am psychologically unprepared to confront the implications of this post" button wouldn't get much use though ;)
The downvotes are so funny though. I posted a bad joke yesterday (it was very on the nose) and got my deserved downvotes. Then I posted the same thing in Latin and got a bunch of upvotes. Form over function...
This is a fair take, I will say as someone who benefited greatly from SO and contributed to it way more than I should have (on paid time) the problem was that people asking question were always new to the site and rules, and so their questions would be shot down in service to high quality content.
Whats happening now is anyone who is asking questions there is even less in tune with the practices of the site and likely with tech in general. It has been consumed by every coding llm, (i don't condone it but it's a fact). So it begs the question, if you have a truly new and novel problem that hasn't yet been solved by Jon Skeet, where do you ask ?
As an ex hardcore user, I don't know the answer anymore but bikeshedding things with an LLM is ironically sometimes more insightful for me personally.
It's just unsustainable depending on the goodwill of users, especially when SO score means very little these days.
Edit : It might be very doable by AI.. But they would have to sacrifice their "no ai answer" policy. (maybe they have already)
On SO, it's often best if questions are somewhat version agnostic, and different answers address different questions.
Yep, this is their 'way' but what I think @fragmede is getting at is, how can you know your question will be redundant next week. I prefer the 'duplicate' idea, where the user actually links the old question and says "hey this didn't work because X Y Z", then (in most cases) people will engage with the question as it demonstrates a level of effort.
Internal Stack Exchanfes are (were? I’m not sure whether they discontinued it…my old company had one but new one doesn’t) is really good at converting chat style communication into a permanent easily searchable record that can also be easily updated.
You can also avoid many of the pitfalls with stack overflow around over aggressive moderation (not really needed since the volume of questions won’t be as high), or inappropriate commenting of any sort (reach out to the individual directly or even to their manager), etc.
I’d be curious to hear what the common solutions to that are.
Maybe it can be used as a limbo to gather FAQs that get crystallized into the real docs and then deleted.
I even pondered adding a bot that would create ticket out of oldest not-updated article for someone to go thru and verify it's still current/relevant
I launched to lukewarm reception, actually applied to YC with it and didn't get much of a look, nor an interview :-) and after a bit of (though certainly far too little) further hustle gave up on it due to circumstances leading me on another path.
Anyway, I was a tiny bit vindicated when about a year later I noticed Stack exchange themselves did a similar product, but as far as I know, it never really hit. They would advertise it in the side banner for quite a few years but it eventually seemed to go away.
It's weird that it didn't work, it always did seem like an incredibly good idea to me - just so good, it's obvious. If such a thing existed, it'd add so much to any company onboarding experience at a minimum, and would also have obvious ongoing value.
And it just seemed like a great strategy to get useful and up to date documentation: to gamify it. There's just an inherent incentive to become the 'Jon Skeet' of your organisation as it were, rather than making documentation this largely anonymous, thankless afterthought it often becomes in practice despite best intentions.
companies don't always reward answering questions...
Closed duplicate of <something that is totally different>
I hardly use the site and it's happened to me multiple times. I'm sure people that rely more heavily on it see it all the time. I suppose it depends on the sorts of topics you're looking for help with, much like wikipedia or subreddits, a lot of the little niches are seemingly ran by assholes that would rather delete stuff than actually help people find information.
As far as I can tell, the author of this blog post had their StackOverflow question deleted for some reason, it made them angry, and now they want us all to delete our StackOverflow accounts and moved to Discord, Slack, Matrix, a forum they acknowledge is actually pretty mean to new users, and a lot of other alternatives?
The deleted question (linked twice, once mislabeled as "mailing list" for some reason) is of the form "Where in my IDE is the option to do X?". While questions about IDEs are not entirely off-topic on SO, they face an uphill battle, and this particular question didn't even have any code.
The question might have become a good fit for SO if the asker had bothered to follow the "edit this question to add ..." instructions ... or if anybody who follows the tag had done it either. Note that deletion only happens after a question is closed for 30 days with a negative score and no answers, and is essential to keep search meaningful.
I think this confirms my suspicions: Someone didn't read the SO rules, posted a trivial question, encountered moderation, and has taken it so personally that they're on a crusade against the entire website.
Stack Overflow is not without problems, but I don't think this blog post captures any of those. It's just someone with a grudge about having their low-effort question moderated out.
The use of "toxic" to describe online behavior like this is perfect. Reddit actually and its ilk leave you feeling bad in every way.
Then all of the OG engineers left (I hope Nick Craver is doing well, his blog posts were incredible), an investment company took over, and whatever good will and vibe that was left melted away.
I’ll still occasionally find a good answer there. But it has zero future of making answers available for future good questions.
They took the fun away.
I distinctly remember the number one fantastic thing about StackOverflow in the beginning was that their incentives were so much better than all the alternatives.
The way SO gave you points for answering questions and gave you more for being the best answer etc etc meant the answers you got there were so much better than anywhere else. This is why the site grew so rapidly and so quickly became the best place to get a great answer.
All SO points should slowly degrade, if an answer is still the best 15 years later it will continue to be upvoted but if newer, better solutions come along, the original solution will eventually fall in karma points and the newer, better solution will overtake it.
That's how the site should have been designed, IMO.
I suppose the questions on SO are probably very varied in terms of the traffic they receive, attention they get etc. But there must be some parameters to make it work.
What is so bad about SO?
All platforms with any moderation system can be subverted by bad actors - IDK that much about SO's mechanisms but it strikes me as leaving the "community" far more leverage for getting around entrenched bad actors than discord, reddit, etc.
And what's more... it's software purpose-built for technical Q&A. Some of my SO answers have been updated by others as they became outdated. Not that I have some particular fondness for SO, but what a cool collective intelligence feature.
I have a feeling this was written for an in-group and broke containment, but the straight forward answer here seems to me to be "SO should have a report system for dealing with bad actors," not "boycott the forum I don't like so people use the one I do"
1) This is a people problem, not a site problem. Technology professionals do not have a good track record of being socialized and generally well-adjusted, and for every singular tech professional who is, there are a dozen horrid maladjusted ones who are unfortunately successful and find themselves with power they aren't mature enough to have.
2) StackOverflow is still a treasure trove of information and a place anyone can go and ask questions about even niche and deprecated technology. Just recently asked a question about InnoSetup on StackOverflow and got a great response from possibly the expert fellow on InnoSetup.
Having an "invested community" requires an inordinate amount of effort from a tiny handful of founders for uncertain reward.
Eh, this a pretty stigmatising boring old stereotype that's only vaguely based in reality at best. I've worked in a bunch of different industries over the decades, and there are unsocial and unadjusted people everywhere.
Having to join a separate mailing list, forum, or chat server for every "community" you might have technical questions about, then keeping track of those is incredibly inconvenient. And in some cases it may not be clear which one to ask a question on.
That's not to say that such places for community discussion isn't valuable, but stackoverflow serves a different purpose.
Then the site itself should have http output for the discoverability.
I also decided to build my website from scratch in Go, because this way I can allow people to download, share, and reuse content more easily. If my website goes down, I can offer a peer to peer client. If my wiki goes down, I can offer a prepared ZIM package.
(And yes, I'm also building my own ZIM search client/server hybrid because I don't like the way ZIM's search works)
In my case I had to do a bunch of things before, e.g. writing a Go WebASM bindings framework, fixing the webview/webview bindings, and rewriting my website so it can be hosted locally and in parts, too.
I separated the website, weblog, wiki and (markdown) editor on purpose, so that I can split up the wiki if need be.
The only thing I regret is having invested so much in social media to share knowledge. That time would've been better spent on just persisting it in a wiki.
Also I think LLMs are great tools for discovery and learning, if they would respect the given boundaries, and if the owners of said LLMs would pay for the caused traffic bandwidth. Which leads back to the point of why I'm creating a ZIM server that also has MCP support.
I hate what SO became. It is true that they get heaps of junk, but a carefully crafted question from a high rep user that gets downvoted almost systematically is a problem. With me or with the massive egos of the readers.
It used to be nice and friendly. Today it is not and Meta is full of inbread psychopaths. If you want to see a brain under cocaine go there.
In contrast there are wonderful sites in SE at large. Cooking, Tex, Law, Travel, even Academia -- you get good, terse, sensible answers there.
As an atheist I love to read the Jewish SE. The amount of effort Jews are putting into making their life a jungle is popcorn worthy (I am thinking about everything not directly related to god, but rather the innumerable rules for everyday life). And yet everyone is fine, friendly, people are not trying to downvote or close as of it was a competition.
Nobody gets credit for their high rep in Cooking. People use SO for work or to show off - maybe the problem is in this dichotomy.
cadamsdotcom•2mo ago
- "nothing about the new thing is worse"
and
- "some things are better".
Any migration must also defeat social network effects ("I'll wait for everyone else before I migrate")
Still it is exciting to see energy for this.
Would be great to know what (if any) alternatives exist with a similar UI to Stack Overflow - open source or other.
jchw•2mo ago
That is definitely not true. There is some complex set of coefficients that play into when people are willing to mass migrate, but needless to say the road to where we are today with platforms was not a linear slope upward. In many cases, like the move from forums to social media platforms, there were obvious problems basically the entire time, but one of those things is surgically good at consuming your attention and one is not.
cadamsdotcom•2mo ago
“I’ll go where the community is” / “I’ll go where my friends are”
cellio•2mo ago
When I left Stack Exchange I joined the Codidact project, which is FLOSS and run by a non-profit foundation (disclosure: I'm on the board). We still have lots of things we want to improve (we're a very small team), but probably our biggest challenge is adoption -- attracting enough people who want to do Q&A and related knowledge-sharing somewhere that puts communities and people first and isn't driven by revenue goals. We've got communities for software development, Linux, and others, and I'd love to see them grow.