Thread

1. kstenerud · 1790488076 · focus · HN ↗

   Maybe I'm remembering a different Stack Overflow.

   Yes, there were genuinely helpful people there. I strove to be helpful as well. But my most common experience there was:

   - People asking why you're doing that (without answering the question).

   - People telling you that you shouldn't do that (without answering the question or providing an alternative).

   - People closing your question as off-topic or duplicate without actually reading and understanding what you wrote.

   - People editing your question and changing the meaning (leading others to innocently conclude off-topic or duplicate). Or removing actually important details.

   - People giving just plain wrong answers that get upvoted, with comments from more senior people begging them to change or remove it.

   Or in the words of Brick Top: "If I throw a dog a bone, I don't want to know if it tastes good or not."

   And yes, every so often a golden answer by an amazing person.

   Now I can just ask a few LLMs, comparing and contrasting their answers. Even better: I can interrogate them on their answer.

   Stack Overflow had a community of sorts, but it wasn't anywhere near like a physical community.

   We may work online, but we exist in the flesh.

   1. YZF · 1790490277 · focus · HN ↗

      This was probably a bit later. And those LLMs are trained on SO presumably...

      In the earlier days SO was more of a community. I guess the life-cycle of the Internet. I answered a few question back in the day. Asked a few. All in all positive experience. I still look fondly at some of my better accepted answers...

      1. joe_the_user · 1790492900 · focus · HN ↗

         I definitely enjoyed SO at the start. But the site was "gamified" from the start - initially, it was gamified so with some skill and effort you could progress. Gradually the gamification reached the point that any progression required constant effort.

         Unfortunately, it's hard to see the Internet having cycles overall. It's been more like a spiral over the last 35 years or so.

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