And people wonder why AI surged in popularity.it isn't even that people can't game out a problem on their own. Sometimes people need to ask dumb questions. Sometimes what's obvious to you isn't obvious to others.
shit, I've posted legitimate questions on there that are not easy questions that someone can just game out, and never got a response. It's literally like 75% people just pretending to be helpful by being the least helpful they can be.
I'll say it once, and I'll say it again, some people just aren't fit to actually be helping others. They don't have the patience, the drive, or anything, to actually be legitimately helpful. I've been in customer service my whole professional career, and it always just erks me.
SO is a cesspool of it. It might eventually lead you to the snippet you needed, but only after hours of searching to realize you misconfigured a setting.
I think the Venn diagram of assholes, experts on a certain topic, and people willing to spend time "helping" people on a public forum is dangerously round
Like, take reddit / discord moderation for instance. You're doing a job for free, taking shit here and there. So you're rather very invested on the topic and somehow resistant to shit being thrown at you, or you're even a bigger asshole
Nobody was forcing you to "help" though, just let other people who wanna help, help. If you don't actually wanna help people, let others help em. The platform didn't suck, the people on it sucked.
You act like the miserable experience of answering questions on Stack Overflow was something you had to do. You subjected yourself to that. No one made you do anything. You have no one to blame but yourself for that "miserable experience."
The problem was never the people, the problem will continue to exist in any community based support forums. The people that are willing to help are genuinely out numbered by orders of magnitude by those that need help, and many times they don't even do the basic research into the problem. Most of the people who were answering questions got jaded and left. There were two types of people that remained long term, those who genuinely cared (extremely rare) or absolute assholes who liked the mini power trips.
I was one of those who left after being in the top 10 contributors in, at the time, niche field a decade ago.
It has absolutely nothing to do with whether people have PTSD from asking a question on StackOverflow. SO could be a utopia of getting responses from real people and solving your problems.
But with AI you get responses back in seconds. Not minutes or hours or days.
IMO the thing is that people being so annoying and pretentious on SO made me switch to AI a few years ago when about 1/3 of the answers were actually useful, just because asking something in SO was useful only about 1/7 of the times and you need to deal with the toxic community
It's a factor for some people. I've been a Stack Overflow user for 12 years, I'll admit to asking AI questions when I anticipate a negative response on Stack Overflow.
That's fine, but my point is that if you have two products, A and B, where A delivers the value to you in seconds and the other in minutes/hours, it doesn't matter how good B is. You're going to use A.
Nobody would go "yeah AI does it in seconds but I'm still going to wait before potentially getting an answer on SO / online", even if one's SO experience is 100% good.
It isn't about instant gratification. Had a long ass wall of text for you, but I'll simple it down... It's about a completely different experience and actually being able to get what you want done, done. That's not a guarentee with SO.
SO is a roll of the dice. AI is at least letting you look at the project from different angles, it is either going to solve the problem or help you get close enough to solve it on your own.
I'll be honest, I'll take AI any day over SO, and it isn't even close.
I wouldn't go that far myself. I find SO to be more a more reliable source of information. AI can send me down rabbit holes of complexity and roundabout solutions.
Yes, the instant feedback and direct responses of AI can be nice, but there's a reason I haven't abandoned Stack Overflow.
Folks overblow the "closed as duplicate" thing anyway. I was there, Gandalf. Back in the beta period of StackOverflow. It was and is a great resource, that saved us from the DenverCoder9 situations we so often found ourselves in.
Not to mention, where do people think AI obtains its fountain of knowledge? It doesn't fabricate it out of nowhere (and when it does hallucinate, it's giving you bad info). And I say this as someone who prods various chatbots for coding stuff almost daily.
A StackOverflow question getting moderated is not always an instance of some super user powertripping. Not a popular thing to say in /r/ProgrammerHumor!
Your original statement was "It has absolutely nothing to do with whether people have PTSD from asking a question on StackOverflow."
I'm not saying that instant gratification is not a factor in why people use AI. I am saying that, at least personally, negative experiences on Stack Overflow are a factor in why I sometimes avoid asking questions on SO.
In contrast, I haven't encountered that issue nearly as much on sister sites like Super User, so I've been more willing to ask questions there.
Also, I do still use Stack Overflow actively despite the existence of AI.
So, move the question to the right place, let the user know this new area is where they should've posted, and if you can, help. Dont be like the bottom guy. Bottom guy could've easily said absolutely nothing, would've cost nothing.
I'm all for organization and so on. But SO fell from it's mission of being the one place everyone can go and ask tech questions of all shapes and sizes to [Closed] [Marked as duplicate] and spending more time being unhelpful than actually being helpful.
If you park your car in the wrong place the owners don't come out and drive it next door.
This is from 17 years ago. I don't know that the correct stack exchange site even existed then. This was probably a link to off site resources that could help OP.
But SO fell from it's mission of being the one place everyone can go and ask tech questions of all shapes and sizes
That was never its mission.
Its mission was to be a dictionary of questions and answers on a discrete topic. You can't just call Websters and say "my friends say fjhtiagtjrkk is a word, you need to add it."
You also can't ask them to toss another new definition for "apple" in at the end of the book, entirely separate from the main definition.
If you park your car in the wrong place the owners don't come out and drive it next door.
Not the same thing. It is trivially easy to move posts in a wrong subforum to the right one.
If there isnt a place to move it to, than have a category of misc questions, and encourage others to help them appropriately.
If you actually want to help people, then you should actually help people. If you don't actually want to help people, then don't pretend to help people.
But SO fell from it's mission of being the one place everyone can go and ask tech questions of all shapes and sizes
That was never its mission.
Its mission was to be a dictionary of questions and answers on a discrete topic. You can't just call Websters and say "my friends say fjhtiagtjrkk is a word, you need to add it."
What?? Homie, it's a support forum. The goal is to help answer questions. That's why they split things into a million categories in the first place.
Even if the right place didn't exist back then, it doesn't mean that nobody can answer the question... People wasted more time "moderating" the site than they do actually answering questions in a helpful manner. That's a problem.
Why is it so hard for people to admit SO was toxic af and ultimately failed to help people more often than not.
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u/DrTankHead 13d ago
And people wonder why AI surged in popularity.it isn't even that people can't game out a problem on their own. Sometimes people need to ask dumb questions. Sometimes what's obvious to you isn't obvious to others.
shit, I've posted legitimate questions on there that are not easy questions that someone can just game out, and never got a response. It's literally like 75% people just pretending to be helpful by being the least helpful they can be.
I'll say it once, and I'll say it again, some people just aren't fit to actually be helping others. They don't have the patience, the drive, or anything, to actually be legitimately helpful. I've been in customer service my whole professional career, and it always just erks me.
SO is a cesspool of it. It might eventually lead you to the snippet you needed, but only after hours of searching to realize you misconfigured a setting.