Re:The Fall of Stack Overflow
by renewiltord on Monday July 31, 2023 @06:06PM
(#36949530)
It's unfortunate because the people who most want to answer SO questions often are completely obsoleted by LLMs because they just don't have unique skills. Usually, they try to bucket into questions they know the answer to. Sadly, this means that an actually hard question will just result in their not knowing the answer and confusing it for an easy question they know the answer to.
The "why don't you use a getter?" question is an example of this at a trivial point.
I'm not sure why the community became like this. Perhaps a natural consequence of Goodhart's Law applied to someone else. You can make someone else's thing awful by making a measure based on their thing into a target for your guys. Hacktober / SO / everything.
Still, I have always liked SO because they set out to do things right:
- prioritize questions which have clear answers
- gated functionality
- CC licensing
- data dumps
I don't know how to fix it, but I hope they manage something.
The "why don't you use a getter?" question is an example of this at a trivial point.
I'm not sure why the community became like this. Perhaps a natural consequence of Goodhart's Law applied to someone else. You can make someone else's thing awful by making a measure based on their thing into a target for your guys. Hacktober / SO / everything.
Still, I have always liked SO because they set out to do things right:
- prioritize questions which have clear answers
- gated functionality
- CC licensing
- data dumps
I don't know how to fix it, but I hope they manage something.