YSK: In addition to Reddit, StackOverflow is on Strike
meta.stackoverflow.com
Why you should know: StackOverflow is facing a mod strike in a similar way as Reddit's mod strike. They are doing this in response to StackOverflow's failure to address it's promises and provide moderation tools
Unlike Reddit, Stack Overflow would probably be better without moderators.
In fact, you could easily replace Stack Overflow mods with a script that goes into every new question, comments "USE THE FUCKING SEARCH BAR" and locks the thread.
I don't think so: Stack Overflow requires much more moderation for the comments and answers to actually stay on topic and be somewhat professional. Especially the "don't just link somewhere, explain the thing" rule might require a lot of moderation.
Moderation will probably be done by AI in the future. It's probably just a bit too expensive still.
Why is this being downvoted? This dystopian nightmare future is very likely going to happen.
People on stack overflow explain things?
Replace them with a script that goes into every comment and put "duplicate of existing post".
Even if there is no existing post.
Or there is but it was ages ago, had no decent answers and all information in it has become outdated.
There is at least one existing post for each post.
Thank you for posting this. I had no idea this was going on. What are companies thinking when they implement policies that hamper volunteers? You'd think they'd want to engage, and keep happy, these people that give their time.
Companies don't even care beyond bare minimum for the labor that they pay why would they care about the labor they don't lol
"What are companies thinking"
It turns out I actually have the ability to convert thoughts to text for any company CEO or Board Member. So allow me to post an excerpt of what I've found:
"moneymoneymoneymoneymoneymoneymoneyiwishepsteinwerestillheremoneymoneymoneymoneymoneymoneymoneymoney"
"Money!"
Duplicated, here's a link to a totally unrelated question made 10 years ago that didn't got any answer anyway.
OMG these responses drive me bananas. I'm searching for a code solution and I keep landing on "Duplicated" dead ends with dead end links posted as the solution. Why do they leave it just sitting there?? WHY????
The answer is to use jQuery. Always jQuery.
What's jQuery? I tried googling it and skimmed the Wikipedia, but I don't get it.
jQuery is a JavaScript* library that played a really important role in adding interactivity to websites and doing so in a way that works across browsers. Its capabilities were fantastic for its day, but newer iterations of JavaScript and subsequent frameworks and libraries (such as Angular, Vue, Svelte, and React) generally provide the same capabilities in a form that is easier to work with. Most new sites use those newer tools, but jQuery was one of the key technologies behind the kind of interactive websites from the mid-2000s until the mid-2010s (essentially the heyday of Web 2.0 (RIP)), and is still used in websites from that era that haven't needed huge overhauls since then.
Unpopular opinion: for a beginner, ChatGPT gives way better answers than stackoverflow users. The advantage of ChatGPT is that I can command it to dumb it down. Stackoverflow users are used to answer in a language that resembles the language in documentations. They are dry, abstract, lack good examples to the point that the "foobar" shit triggers an immediate defensive reaction in my brain and are phrased for people who already understood a concept but need to refresh their knowledge. Their core problem, as is tradition in any IT field, is that they lack the empathy to understand the viewpoint of someone who understands less of something than they do. It's like asking someone to teach you reading and getting a poem with the advice to just read it as an answer.
I can circumvent that via ChatGPT by asking it to ELI5. Also, I get an answer instantly, am not discouraged to ask further questions and not advised to read a link where a solution is offered in an equally difficult language.
People are saying that using ChatGPT doesn't give accurate information and fails to convey important concepts, but I feel it's actually the other way around. Since there is ChatGPT, I'm making way more progress than before.
I understand that users don't want AI answers, but I also don't get why anyone would want that on this platform. You can just, you know, use AI directly.
That's not unpopular. But there is a problem. ChatGPT can answer your questions mostly because it was trained on the posts and answers of sites like StackOverflow.
If people abandon SO and similar forums then the quality of ChatGPTs answers will go down too.
Especially with something like programming. It's always changing. Next year there will be new versions of C++ and python. There will be new JS frameworks as always. It doesn't stand still.
And without new discussions about new problems, there's nowhere for ChatGPT to learn about them.
Haven't though about that, you're right.
I think that one issue with using AI to help you solve programming problems is that sometimes it will wholesale make things up. Of course, people can do that too, which is why communities of coders can vote on the best answer. I say, more power to you, using the tools that work for you. Just be cautious.
I wish my students would care about the concepts and try to understand the answers instead of just blindly copying and pasting ill-fitting code (and then wondering why it only kinda works...).
As a former student now practicing engineer this habit never gets broken. All of us accept cargo cult computing to one extent or another. It sucks.
Usually the engineers with the least tolerance for it do better but only in the long run. In the short run they are yelled at for holding back projects.
I think that one issue with using AI to help you solve programming problems is that sometimes it will wholesale make things up. Of course, people can do that too, which is why communities of coders can vote on the best answer. I say, more power to you, using the tools that work for you. Just be cautious.
ChatGPT is incredible for middle ground developers like myself. I understand the goal I'm trying to achieve, and I understand the general process of how to do it. I can ask very granular, specific questions to ChatGPT and it will spit out some code that will get me close to what I need.
If I was a complete novice, I think ChatGPT would make me too dependent on using it for answers.
That seems like a totally valid use case. I occasionally will outline some very specific requirements and have AI generate the code, which just saves a lot of time typing, versus it generating it entirely on its own. And I still go through all the code and verify that it's good. It's just a tool that can be used to make your job easier.
Totally. The other day I had to test a csv/xls upload tool. I wanted to make sure that no matter what configuration an asshole user had for phone numbers, it would strip everything out so it would be a valid integer for my database.
I told chatgpt to make me a csv with 20 rows, 6 columns with xyz headers, and to give me an assortment of different phone number formats. Took 10 seconds.
You're storing phone numbers as integers?
Here to echo the same. I thought using AI to assist me in coding would just make me lazy and learn nothing, but turns out I actually learn more than ever since it's much faster, more polite and patient, and the semantics are usually more catered to my needs and self explanatory than the average answers I find elsewhere.
It's great for writing snippets and creating basic frameworks. However, it definitely makes a lot of mistakes which I doubt a total beginner can spot, especially if the error lies in logic and not syntax.
Works great only as a tool for now, but chances are AI will probably surpass human coders sooner than we think.
I've yet to get a useful answer out of chatgpt for a technical question. It's good for fluffing up emails, but I haven't been super impressed with any use case I've tried for it.
When I’ve used it for decently complex programming questions I’ve found it often likes to make up functions and libraries. It’ll be like just use this reasonable sounding function from this library, and I look it up and the library does not have that functionality at all. Over and over!
Well it's a large language model that generates text probabilistically. It's trained on vast amounts of data, so it's expert at sounding like a skilled programmer, but there's absolutely no reason at all for the results to be useful code. It will sound like useful code and look like useful code, and it will be on the right topic, and that might well be enough, but it might not.
I played around with ChatGPT for programming for a few hours a while back.
It is far better at explaining code in plain language than pretty much any human I've seen, atleast online. It's absolute dogshit st writing anything but the most basic of code, but it does do a good job explaining.
Programmers are shit at communicating.
I've found that it gives me a decent skeleton of something that I can then apply to my actual problem, but not much more, and it usually comes with some pretty big mistakes. I was trying to learn Z80 assembly and it gave me a good idea of how my code should generally look, but I did end up having to rewrite a whole bunch of it before I could actually execute anything.
I think there's a sweet spot for how many other resources are out there. JavaScript GPT answers are pretty good. But when you get to a less popular language like Elixir not so much
Thankfully SO is better than Reddit: the frontend is actually decent and even though they're pausing data dumps, everything posted is technically CC-SA
I really hope protesting social media/websites owner's BS becomes a regular practice
I agree, but on the other hand if we moved to decentralized platforms no strikes would be necessary. People only do this, because a company is holding their content as a hostage.
Striking will just be replaced with defederation. For example lemmy.world has been defederated by a bunch of instances because it allows anyone to sign up for an account.
If stackoverflow was a Lemmy instance, I think people would just host a new one and move there?
Some people might do that. But lemmy.world is a very well run community that has never done anything offensive, and yet it's still defederated by some of the biggest lemmy instances.
That proves defederation is for more than just spam/illegal content/harassment. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's pretty disruptive. Like a strike.
I thought only beehaw.org defederated it?
Yeah, they're the one that makes you answer 3 vague open end questions and then manually approve it.
If you don't write enough, or write something they dont agree with... You dont get denied, it's just like it's still pending indefinitely.
Lemmy.world requires a valid email instead (something beehaw doesn't).
There's no right or wrong way to go about it. Which is the biggest benefit of Lemmy. Somewhere out there, there's an instance being ran like how you want, if not, just make your own.
Youtube needs a lot of creator strikes to get back to the way it used to be!
While I agree, I think this is unlikely because unlike Reddit and StackOverflow modding, YouTube content creators rely on YouTube for their livelihoods.
That should give them more incentive to want to move to the fediverse. I'm sure many youtubers can afford to host their own PeerTube instance.
Me: Good for them, that's great hope they get want they want.
Me, to myself, in bed at night: Oh god how will I code
At least we have readily available AI tools to help
Trained on old stack overflow answers, so newer things could be a problem.
The new Copilot for Docs beta aims to solve that problem by providing the AI context about the libraries you're using, new or old. It'll have all the information from the documentation, so it will know all the functions, parameters, outputs, etc.
good for them. Organizing and taking action is the only way to get capitalists to listen
Instead of hoping that the corporation will change, they should just move to the fediverse.
Fun fact: the stack exchange for research mathematics, MathOverflow, is a separate 501(c)(3) nonprofit which at any time can pack up their stuff and migrate, including their domain name and all of their data, per the agreement they made when they joined the stack exchange network in 2013, originally operating the site themselves since 2009.
https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/969/who-owns-mathoverflow/970#970
If they don't like how the site is being run, they can leave. Food for thought. If all communities on the internet were so careful and prescient to plan an exit strategy in advance, to make clear that you just operate our site and we can leave for a competitor, we'd not be in this mess.
That's why God invented the GPL.
Saint IGNUcius of the Church of Emacs.
If only /r/AskHistorians were this prescient.
Stack overflow has mods?
Closed: This question has already been answered 5 years ago here <link to completely unrelated question>
Better yet: "this question has been answered here <link to old question, answer does not work/doesnt apply or work anymore>"
Found that out today too
Dammit it's AI again. What can I say. It's been causing more destruction of things I care about, and all I see from AI is scams and impersonations.
This actually reminds me of a book by Charles Stross called Accelerando. Human explorers during a time in which people upload their minds to computer systems travel to (and this part is fuzzy in my memory), a world orbiting a brown dwarf. The world is just a giant computer and it's inhabited almost entirely by superintelligent banking scams and viruses. It turns out that almost all "life" in the universe is like this, just parasitic AI that serves no real purpose other than to fuck over other people for short-term gains. Anyway, I've been thinking about that book more and more in recent years.
Check out Codidact for a community run alternative!
Entire programming industry is about to panic!
Betcha some people lose their jobs when management notices how much less productive they are without Reddit and StackOverflow.
At least school's out for summer.
The quality of programming-related content on Reddit is absolutely terrible. The major lanuage-related subreddits are almost nothing but people self-promoting their latest Medium blogspam or thousands of people patting someone on the back for sharing their first "Hello world" program. Anyone going there for any sort of advice surely didn't gain any sort of productivity boost.
Is there a FOSS alternative to stackexchange yet?
All open source forum software pretty much
Yeah, before StackOverflow took over everything my web searches for programming problems would usually lead to forum threads. The quality of information would usually be better there, too.
https://codidact.com/
https://www.codidact.com/ was started in response to the previous round of exactly the same shitty behaviour from the stack exchange management a few years ago.
Following
Seems like Lemmy has a starring functionality.
Someone should work on a LemmyOverflow UI for Lemmy
Damn, nowhere to find coding help anymore I guess
Not exactly sure how to link federated stuff properly but here goes?
@snippets
!snippets@kbin.social ?
Edit:// gah I don't know how to post federated links either :(
github isssues.
Once you have a basic level of coding your problem is with a certain package/library
So...was the strike because they put a 100-strike limit on moderators marking normal questions as Duplicate/Opinionated/Unclear? Or, because all of the normal users left and it's just spam trolls left behind?
Ahhh, it's because of divisions of opinion on AI. No doubt, it'd be easy to tell ChatGPT "ChatGPT, can you come up with excuses to lock all the questions on the front page so my query about Scala stays up top?"
I'm constantly baffled by my coding professor suggesting stackoverflow to students for asking questions because of the experience I am seeing others have there. The new ones are always downvoted and the only reply usually just calls the person stupid. I'd just kinda accepted that this was the culture I was going to matriculate into when I graduate.
I once handed in a citation from an answer to my Stack Overflow question.
Something along the lines of... "After hitting a roadblock the community at Stack Overflow was consulted, as suggested in the lecture, and deemed the task not feasible [1]."
The answer I put in the reference was one of the many variants of "Who in their right mind would do this in Matlab? Use Python instead."
I passed lol.
It was good when it was relatively new. The culture quickly turned toxic, as you're seeing, and it's been getting steadily worse for years now. There is a lot of useful information, and often the only thing online with code examples for a certain programming issue. but it is also increasingly outdated, in part due to the 'no repeat questions' thing. I have a couple popular answers about PHP and JavaScript from over 12 years ago, and they still get upvoted. Some people comment and say "this is answer is incorrect!" and... yeah, it's from 2009.
I hate the libertarian implications of the "join or die" snake, but I feel like this strikes my current sentiment:
https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxlVDdu1Isl_H_QchRuNGe1MaX0nS_DUXk
I never got any help asking questions there anyways. Answers I got back we’re trollish. When I provide and answer it can’t be the answer as it’s based on your own reputation score which you can’t get but answering questions. It seems like a flawed system. Didn’t know they had mods either. Never really got any solutions either from stack overflow, unless you read every comment for the right answer.
I want to strike. Anybody want to strike with me?
A Lucky Strike?
You can go march in solidarity with anyone who might be striking in your region! You don't have to be an employee to join the picket line. I went and picketed with some of my fellow nurses in Massachusetts a couple years ago even though I wasn't personally on strike.
To be fair, did anyone ever actually like Stack?
I liked it the hundreds of times it was an accurate first hit for my Google queries