Crossposted from https://lemmy.world/post/48595579
cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/62340497
🤔 Interesting
cross-posted from: https://feddit.online/c/mildlyinfuriating/p/1784290/interesting
cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/62340497
🤔 Interesting
cross-posted from: https://feddit.online/c/mildlyinfuriating/p/1784290/interesting
Might apply to places like Stack Overflow specifically, where the hostility of human interaction made people quite eager to leap to AI instead.
I never ever had to interact on SO and similar sites, I use them solely for searching for solutions, and for that they’re perfect - and probably provide a significant amount of data for answering questions on ChatGPT etc.
It’s not like the internet didn’t work as an answering machine before AI. Often you can enter the exact same prompt into a search engine instead and get better answers. But oh no, you have to click on a website and maybe even scroll down a little!
Was SO really all that hostile? I didn’t think so.
It was more that the owners had a very different idea of the site to what most people wanted to use it for, they wanted to create something akin to Wikipedia of code while most people wanted their programming questions answered. I definitely think a lot of the community had an attitude problem, but the wider problem is more that the users and owners were talking about totally different sites for the most part.
I don’t think their ideal was ever realistic to be honest, the main problem I had with SO was less the reflexive rudeness and power-tripping and more that the community seemed a bit delusional about the basic passage of time and the evolution of industry practice. You’d often see a comically obsolete answer as the canonically accepted one, and if you had a question about something even tangentially related to that canonical answer some smarmy little goblin would come along to close it as a duplicate. It wasn’t very good at what it purported to be, much less what most users thought it was for.
Yes it was, I couldn’t post a question that didn’t get downvoted and/or ridiculed for how stupid I was for asking the question in the first place.
Then I was always told my question isn’t broad enough to even bother asking, so I might as well not ask.
I got told to kill myself and quit programming for asking a beginner question as a kid. Didn’t even get my question answered.
It has its ups and downs and back when I added a shit ton of responses I always tried to keep being friendly and helpful. But even back then there were dicks on the platform, and not too little of them. At some point, it shifted and the dicks started to overwhelm everything.