[llbeansandrice]

Am I the only one that sees this as a hellscape?

No longer interacting with your peers but an LLM instead? The knowledge centralized via telemetry and spying on every user’s every interaction and only available thru a enshitified subscription to a model that’s been trained on this stolen data?

[cornel_io]

Asking questions on SO was an exercise in frustration, not "interacting with peers". I've never once had a productive interaction there, everything I've ever asked was either closed for dumb reasons or not answered at all. The library of past answers was more useful, but fell off hard for more recent tech, I assume because people all were having the same frustrations as I was and just stopped going there to ask anything.

I have plenty of real peers I interact with, I do not need that noise when I just need a quick answer to a technical question. LLMs are fantastic for this use case.

[gfody]

this right here, not just overmoderated but the mods were wrong-headed from the start believing that it was more important to protect some sacred archive than for users to have good experiences.

SO was so elite it basically committed suicide rather than let the influx of noobs and their noob questions and noob answers kill the site

this nails it: https://www.tiktok.com/@techroastshow/video/7518116912623045...

[foobarbecue]

I had the opposite experience. I learned so much from the helpful people on StackExchange sites, in computer science, programming, geology, and biology.

[martin-t]

Y'know how "users" of modern tech are the product? And how the developers were completely fine with creating such systems?

Well, turns out developers are now the product too. Good job everyone.

[llbeansandrice]

Replying to my own comment surprised that everyone is latching on to just poor moderation on a single site and ignoring the wealth of other options for communication and problem solving like slack communities, Reddit, blog posts, running a site like SO but with a better/different moderation policy, the list goes on and on.

I’ve seen this trend a number of times on HN that feels strawman-y. Taking the worst possible example of the status quo but also yada-yadaing or outright ignoring the massive risks of the tech du jour.

The comment I’m replying to hand waves over “legal issues” and totally ignores the fact that this hypothetical (and idealized) version of AI fundamentally destroys core aspects of community problem solving and centralizes the existing knowledge into a black box subscription all for the benefit of a clunky UX and underlying product that has yet to be proven effective enough to justify all the negative externalities.

[QuesnayJr]

I actively hated interacting with the power users on SO, and I feel nothing about an LLM, so it's a definite improvement in QoL for me.

[CamperBob2]

The "human touch" on StackOverflow?! I'll take the "robot touch," thanks very much.

[fragmede]

Right? The "human touch" is "you fucking moron, why would you ask such a stupid question!"

[stackghost]

The UX sounds better than Stack Overflow.

[ambicapter]

The part where you don't talk to anyone else, just a robot intermediary which is simulating the way humans talk, is part of UX. Sounds like pretty horrifying UX.

[llbeansandrice]

One UX experience that was clearly replaced by other services and spaces before the widespread use of AI doesn’t sound very compelling to me.

Be more creative than AI.

[casey2]

How is it much different than trading say a bar for livestream? For any org if you can remove the human meatware you should otherwise you are just making a bunch of busywork to exlude people from using your service.

Just through the act of existing meatware prevents other humans from joining. The reasons may be shallow or well thought out. 95+% of answers on stack overflow are written by men so for most women stack overflow is already a hellscape.

If companies did more work on bias (or at least not be so offensive to various identities) that benefit, of distributing knowledge/advice/RTFM, could be even greater.

[derektank]

Uh, livestreams are awful for developing shared communities relative to bars and other physical social spaces. Much of human communication is sub-verbal, and that kind of communication is necessary for forming trusted long term bonds.

Also, excluding people is nowhere near the worst sin in social spaces. Excluding people who don’t share common interests or cultural context often improves the quality of socializing. Hanging out with my friends that I’ve known for 20 years produces much more fruitful conversations than hanging out with my friends plus a dozen strangers competing for my attention.