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A comment on What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph. Parent comment

Re:What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph by nottorp on Saturday July 18, 2026 @10:58AM (#48958721)
> making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants

I used to look for questions to answer on my morning coffee. Then two things happened:

1. Rep chasers that rushed to answer anything with a copy/pasta from manuals (or at best semi related tutorials) showed up so there was no point or time in typing a complex answer.

2. Those long time users started downmodding "teach the man how to fish" answers and favoring "here's stuff ready to copy/paste" answers.

This was long before LLMs.

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Re:What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph by suzzer99 on Saturday July 18, 2026 @11:08AM (#48958811)
At least 50% of the time on SO, the best answer is 3rd or worse, and I'm always thinking, "Why is this not the top answer?"
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Re:What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph by puchatek on Saturday July 18, 2026 @11:18AM (#48958918)
I might even find an upside in that if it wasn't for the fact that this stolen crowd sourced knowledge will be used to make some billionaires even richer.
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Re:What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph by nottorp on Saturday July 18, 2026 @12:23PM (#48959504)
Because the person who asked the question has accepted the first answer that looked decent enough and moved on.

Usually the most superficial, not that it's always a bad thing.

Oh, also on SO there's this kind of exchange:

Q: "I want to do X because of this and that - or because I simply fucking want to".

A: You should never do X, do Y or Z instead.

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Re:What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph by badc0ffee on Saturday July 18, 2026 @02:05PM (#48960539)
The "that's a XY problem" guys always seem to think they're the smartest in the room.
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Re:What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph by blt on Saturday July 18, 2026 @09:14PM (#48964099)
imo this was the single worst problem with SO, people always searching for the XY problem in every question instead of taking it at face value
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Re:What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph by nottorp on Tuesday July 21, 2026 @08:50AM (#48991672)
Mostly I'd say their downfall was that they encouraged copypasta material and actively discouraged any kind of behaviour that would have built a community.
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