Mastodawn

Rob van Bakel Jan 14

Emil Jacobs - Collectifission

The rise and fall of Stack Overflow is a case in point of the parasitic nature of LLMs. LLMs feed their models on places like Stack Overflow to be useful to users, so users flock to them to avoid the eternal snarky comments and just get an answer to their problem right away. But this is a dead end. No new answers will be generated if no one uses Stack Overflow or similar places.

What goes for Stack Overflow goes essentially for the whole internet. Like a mold growing on food, consuming it, and dying once the food is gone - LLMs will kill large parts of the 'old' internet before long.

nicole4fox -> GPN Jan 14

@collectifission a culture change could have saved it maybe. Places with a good culture can still have vivid exchange but average users dont like to only read replies such as "this is offtopic" or "youre basically stupid because..."

Gravement bête Jan 14

@nicole4fox @collectifission or "duplicate of [question which has one word in common]" or "you received -10 reputation for this question without any fucking explanation" or "now that you gained reputation, provide us with free work and do questions triage for us"...

Zdeněk Doležal Jan 15

@nicole4fox @collectifission zdravej člověk to unese!☝️😁

Flaming Cheeto Jan 14

@collectifission like if there were a better interface to query
Yelp or Trip Advisor that generated no income for those sites (ignore the hallucinated restaurant problem). Eventually, no more reviews are written and the info base is out of date. New destinations are excluded and closed ones are still recommended.

@collectifission
And I think LLMs killing large parts of the 'old' internet is what needs to happen. Firstly, because sometimes you just need to lose stuff to realize you need it. And secondly, the faster LLMs are driven to a dead end the better.

At some point LLMs will become unable to produce correct answers (if they can do that even now) to questions relevant at that time, and it will turn into a great demand for human experts.

Joel Truher Jan 14

@collectifission I agree that this is the whole problem. There is a platform opportunity here to develop healthy communities of interest, with diversity of expertise, where the most knowledgeable and skilled folk see the community benefit of teaching, and the more junior folk see the benefit in diligence, and the platform helps both ends of the spectrum to flourish. That platform is not LLM strip-mined text synthesis.

Shafik Yaghmour Jan 14

@collectifission

LLMs provide for frictionless relationships but anything meaningful requires friction. You don't learn w/o friction both knowledge wise and in terms of relationships.

This should raising alarm bells for LLMs companies b/c w/o sites like this they won't have the data they need. Experts were already fleeing open spaces to share the knowledge b/c it was being stolen but this is just devastating for all.

@collectifission how was the data for this graph collected and from where exactly? The cited source is... kinda vague 🤣

Mark Stosberg Jan 14

@collectifission The chart above shows StackOverflow was in steep decline before ChatGPT was even introduced.

Meanwhile, at the peak of StackOverflow back around 2014, one of the co-founders took what they learned about what worked and didn't work about building communities online and created Discourse. Here's the popularity of Discourse in Github Stars since launch.

Discourse remains popular today and does not have the reputation for toxicity that SO developed.

adamrice Jan 14

@collectifission Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange also started partnering with LLM companies about 20 months ago. I had been very active on one SE community, and quit right about then.

Yet another Josh

@collectifission

Please. Its easy to blame LLMs.

But the problem was the actual users. They'd kill your post, or your post would be modified by some know-nothing.

Why should I care when my contributions are shit upon?

Thats right, you dont.

@[email protected] has moved Jan 14

@collectifission maybe Stack Overflow might stop publishing snarky comments?

Christian Kent 𝘊𝘒 :＼﹥Jan 15

@collectifission Oddly it would be a piece of cake for OpenAI etc to sponsor Stack Overflow and give it some promotion

Remember Google Answers? It had paid rewards, auctions for researchers.

A. Sebastian Dietzel 😎🥳Jan 15

@collectifission
I agree, but
stackoverflow was an extremely toxic place to begin with.

Tim Ward ⭐🇪🇺🔶 #FBPE Jan 16

@collectifission I pretty well never asked a question on Stack Overflow. Not primarily because of the sarky answers - mostly because what I wanted to know had already been asked so the answer was there waiting.