Mastodawn

I don’t know what was worse, Stack Overflow’s moderation system, which many IT communities find annoying, or AI killing the site 🤔 Both extremes seem bad for the open web…. I still think that we don’t need three chatbots controlling everything. I fear Wikipedia might be next. This is not good for the Internet

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Rémy 1d ago

@nixCraft I don't agree with that narrative. ChatGPT didn't kill Stackoverflow : managers of SO did.

After ChatGPT launched, SO team decided that from now on, every question and answer on the site were going to be used to train a local LLM model. Everybody was angry at this, and everybody left. Including me.

I posted questions and answers on SO for more than ten years. After that decision from the team, I just logged out for the first time in years and never came back.

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Rob Napier 19h ago

@rusty @nixCraft Similar story. I joined in 2009, wrote over 5,700 answers, received over 300k reputation, currently (still) ranked #215 on the site.

I haven't answered a single question since 2024, and it was because of how the team treated contributors.

It might be true that AI killed SO. Maybe nothing could have saved it. The way people are treated when they ask questions is terrible.

But the reason *I* left was because of how SO leaders reacted to AI, not because AI replaced it.

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Rob Napier

@rusty @nixCraft The funny thing is that the actual, specific thing that caused me to leave wasn't directly about AI. They were desperate to do *something* and kept messing with the UI, moving things around and "experimenting" till I couldn't find interesting questions any more. It broke my habit of going to the site every time I had a few minutes to kill. And breaking my habits made me rethink whether I even wanted to be there.

Folks should remember that when they feel they must A/B something.