Maybe Stack Overflow (by far the worst of the network) is about to become more useful…
On one hand I’m kinda in agreement about banning AI generated content, but is it bad that I kinda also want to ban most of the useless human Internet janitors that spend all day closing useful discussions too? Is that wrong? 
(Don’t they have real jobs to do anyway?)
Just found out about this:
(And yes I realize one of the founders of that site also started this very forum software.)
Stack Overflow was purchased by Prosus, wasn’t it? I would not be surprised if the Moderators are feeling underappreciated - it seems that is the name of the game today for social sites.
As for drama in the tech space, Watching Reddit burn down it’s userbase is quite entertaining. Tasty Tasty drama - basically like what happened when Digg imploded way back when.
I wonder if L1T forums is going to get a surge of users leaving that space?
Oh yeah, I forgot about that random purchase by some no-name (I think?) out of the blue! Yeah I’m not suprised that’s causing some conflicts.
Reddit’s doing something like this too huh? Funny stuff.
Maybe we should “advertise”… in a non-obvious way. lol
(I don’t have a Reddit account though, there’s some useful stuff there sometimes but it’s always felt a little cringe and disorganized to me.)
I have not used StackOverflow for quite some time, but I do think there was value in the focus on answers rather than discussion, which was heavily enforced by moderation back then. Keeping posts focused on only answering the question kept the site’s signal-to-noise ratio substantially higher than most forums.
Regarding AI generated answers, maybe it could be helpful to always have a ChatGPT generated answer, maybe collapsed by default. If nothing else, it could be a useful reference to compare questionable posts against, teaching users what to look out for.
I used to care about this place, naively presuming it is about the sharing of knowledge and helping each other learn, but then it turned out to be a playground for narcissists and a sleazy for profit company behind pushing social doctrines of acceptable behavior.
So now I simply don’t care. Wouldn’t piss on SO if it was on fire.
But if I did care, between management and moderator, I’d have a real hard time picking which side to root against.
And honestly, what are they even protesting about, 99% of the content is regurgitated mediocrity, which is what “AI” does as well, just a lot lot faster. So seems like a natural progression more than anything.
I guess we’ll have to disagree on the moderation stuff. I think it’s easily the worst aspect of the site, and it’s no wonder it has become the punch line of a joke now. Specifically the closing down of discussions and locking of questions part.
The “poll” or requests for subjective advice stuff is easily avoided if you want to skip it (most people get there via search engine anyway). Moderation should only be needed for truly useless stuff.
What they should do is tag/categorize subjective content, and then leave it be. The Internet won’t fall into disarray because some people ask for opinions about the best tool to use for such and such, so they can make an informed decision.
I lost track of how many popular questions (hundreds of upvotes) are “closed” because they “aren’t a good fit”. The answers on some of those old questions are great, but are now outdated. Who are these control freaks who feel they should jump into a request for help that they aren’t contributing towards, and bring it to a halt?
IMO what made the site popular isn’t moderation. The site was bootstrapped with the “gamification” point system stuff, but the size is the main asset now. You can quickly get a lot of eyes on something if you’re desperate enough to post.
I can only imagine what the goals are; it’s sure not to simply help devs solve problems or make informed decisions.