My perspective: Stack Overflow was started to be a documentation site, but was implemented as a Q/A site. And that doomed it from the start.
If someone wants to get help, and they end up on Stack Overflow, the structure looks like a Q/A site, and they treat it that way. The people "in the know" then accuse them of being "bad" for posting a question to a documentation site. Combine that with the gamification, and it had to turn into the toxic mess that it did.
When I first heard of the gamification method of moderation, I thought it was a really good idea. But, over the years, it has proven to be a means to enforce an echo chamber, rather than a way to filter out bad posts. I have yet to find a site (HN included), where that isn't true.
@rambleraptor, I haven't actually tried to do anything with your solution. It looks like you've put a good amount of work into it, enough that it works for you and you're willing to share. That's more than I can say about my similar ideas. So don't take the following as anything negative. It's actually more a self-critique than anything else...
Ok, so, how many of us see something like this, and instantly just want to do it ourselves in our own way? I've seen at least 5 different versions of a "self-hosting platform" make their way on HN, sometimes more than once, but every time I really look at them, they just don't fit quite right, and often end up abandoned a while later. I've tried to make my own, and never have gotten anywhere worth sharing, and the couple times I've tried what others have made, I haven't been able to do what I want.
I mean the idea is really good. Make it easy to host apps for yourself and your family. But it seems like we're all more interested in building the platform than actually picking one, or two, platforms and turning them into something sustainable...
Anyway, what would it take for you to actually use something like this that someone else built?
Or am I just dealing with a bad case of not-invented-here?
How hard would it be to adjust for different CCG's? I tried a while back to play a CCG with my brother and nephew via zoom. Didn't work very well. This sounds like a really good way to do it. :)
I wondered if anyone else noticed that. I upvoted. Hopefully more people will as well to balance out the bias.
To those of you downvoting, please articulate why you think something deserves a downvote. As it is, I can only assume rather hypocritical double standards. Someone saying something anti-Trump is ok, but someone saying something anti-Leftist (or Clinton) is not?
(For the record, I 100% am on the side of the guy who was jailed. Just as I am on for the guy who retweeted that meme in 2016. Abusing government power is unacceptable no matter who it benefits.)
In one case, the meme was accurate - the photo, the quote, and its attribution were all accurate, and the cops knew that. It never made it to trial, for obvious reasons.
In the other, it was false information, a grand jury indicted, and a jury convicted. The appeal rested on the government struggling to demonstrate a) anyone actively fell for the information and b) the conspiracy element. (https://ww3.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/OPN/23-7577_opn.pdf)
In both cases the reason someone was persecuted was they offended someone in power. And the system eventually ruled in their favor. That is the similarity.
If you view one of those cases as a bad result, then chances are you are biased.
That said, if you downvote because you have looked into the cases enough to think that that similarity is not valid, and then you can articulate it (like the person I'm replying too did) then I'd consider that fine. (Assuming they downvoted, they may not have.) I may still think there's some bias there, but it's not uninformed bias.
If you can't articulate a reason you want to downvote, then it's bias and emotion fueling your downvote. Which, I don't consider to be a valid reason to downvote.
As a side note, I think we all need to be aware of how similar the things we hear about the "bad" side are. The comments I see about Trump weaponizing the Department of Justice to oppress people is pretty much exactly what I saw said about Biden weaponizing the Department of Justice to oppress people during his administration. I also have seen MANY comments where if you replace "Biden" or "Trump" with the other name, you end up with a comment the other side would make. I think that should trigger some self-reflection. I know I'm still trying to figure out what to think about it.
Name all the times Biden fired someone from his administration for failing to obtain a conviction of a political opponent, and I'll take this false equivalence seriously.
It proves nothing because Biden generally didn't fire anybody. Name all the times Biden fired ANYONE from his cabinet. Below the cabinet, compared to any other president, he just didn't fire people to any degree.
> In both cases the reason someone was persecuted was they offended someone in power.
Sure, if you ignore all the other elements of each case.
> If you view one of those cases as a bad result, then chances are you are biased.
I think it's worse to spread deliberately false information about an election than it is to accurately quote the President of the United States.
> The comments I see about Trump weaponizing the Department of Justice to oppress people is pretty much exactly what I saw said about Biden weaponizing the Department of Justice to oppress people during his administration.
Hitler said nasty things about Jews, and Jews say similarly nasty things about Hitler. Does this make them equal?
I voted for Trump. I fail to see how the meme here is a threat. And I also think that telling Democrats they can vote by text message is an attempt to undermine the election.
Look up the Ritter Houge, or something like that. I think it's a less (maybe) expensive version of the griptilian from the same designer. I think. Could be wrong.
Houge's the brand. RSK-Mk1 is the model (Ritter Survival Knife). Sold exclusively at https://knifeworks.com/dr/
Benchmade used to make a variant of their Griptilian that he designed (the "Ritter Grip", and when they discontinued it, Hogue stepped up (proceeds go to support Ritter's https://kniferights.org/ organization)
Here's a parametric search for other knives that are made in the USA out of the same materials. They're all expensive. Fortunately, there are very good pocket knives for under a third the price from brands like Civivi, Vosteed, and CJRB if those specific points aren't critical.
> Almost everyone who comes to SO, in my experience, has a fundamentally wrong idea about how the site is intended to work.
True. I quit trying to do anything there once I realized that SO was fundamentally not useful to me. It advertised as a gamified Q&A platform, but was actually a knowledge base psudeo wiki thing structured in way that didn't lend itself to answering the questions I needed answered.
So, I think a lot of the negative reactions are deserved, because SO looks like something it isn't.
People want a place to get help. SO looks like a place to get help. But SO is a place to ask for help only if your problem fits a specific set of requirements. And since most problems will never meet said requirements, most people can never actually get help on SO.
I post this in part because I'm still saltly about how much time I wasted trying to get help only to get downvoted, but also because if SO actually wants to do what they say, they really need to restructure into something that actually looks like what they want to be.
My suggestion would be to have two sites, one that is actually a general Q&A site like what everyone is after, the other is the kind of knowledge repository that SO wants to be. Then you just promote the really good questions from the Q&A site into the other site.
I'd also recommend ending the whole "downvote" idea. I have yet to see it not result in cliques and in discriminating against viewpoints the people with downvote permissions don't like. Let a lack of upvotes cause poor content to drop to the bottom.
We would love to change how SO gets advertised. But we aren't in control of it, and the truth seems to be counterproductive to having a site that makes money from ad revenue.
I recommend looking for alternatives, because this problem can't really be fixed and the site owners seem intent on making it worse. I personally use and recommend (and am a moderator at, full disclosure) Codidact Software: https://software.codidact.com/ . But at Codidact we're still fundamentally using the same "Q&A site" (I don't think this means the same thing you appear to think it means) model . We just have proper community involvement (the site is owned by a non-profit foundation and committed to community sovereignty; see https://codidact.org/), new site software, and newly conceived site scope.
> My suggestion would be to have two sites, one that is actually a general Q&A site like what everyone is after, the other is the kind of knowledge repository that SO wants to be.
The problem is that there are already countless sites "like what everyone is after". If you try to split a Q&A site like Stack Overflow that way without changing the actual UI, the problem just repeats itself: people try to use the knowledge repository part as if it were yet another traditional forum.
And it turns out, people often think they're after that model, then get fed up with it over time.
I think an idea like yours can be done, but it would require radically different site software. (In early 2023 - I think - I kept myself busy with contemplating a design for exactly this, but I didn't really write anything down.)
Honestly, this is one of the few places where I agree with this sentiment. I have roughly the same trust in an LLM answer as in a SO answer anyway, so it's not like I'm buying any particular additional verification cost - I have to treat the response as only vaguely trustworthy in either case, and the LLM experience is certainly nicer.
I'm all over this thread explaining how Stack Overflow is supposed to work, and how almost everyone who comes to it has broad misconceptions, and about how we're very deliberately gatekeeping in a specific way for a specific purpose, and why I think that purpose is legitimate.
I've also expressed quite a bit of AI skepticism on HN before.
And I absolutely agree with you - assuming that by "use Stack Overflow" you mean "post a new question".
Most questions are fundamentally simple, even if they're tedious. If you're implementing something "complex", usually it really just involves following a straightforward series of steps, and it just takes a little bit of experience to see what the steps are. That breakdown is probably not useful to anyone else, and is hard to turn into a searchable artifact for others. If you're tearing out your hair troubleshooting something, most of the time one of the "standard" fixes really will work, and you just need to be talked through them.
If you like reading professional/academic sounding prose extensively trained to be inoffensive (even if it isn't always to the point), you have much better odds now with an LLM than with a random person who happens to be an expert on whatever it is you're trying to do.
If you're trying to figure out a thorny problem and it would benefit you to have a back-and-forth communication - or ask multiple questions on a theme and get all the responses from the same place - Stack Overflow can't do that for you. In fact, traditional forums can't, either, except accidentally (because they're too small to expose you to more voices). But the Stack Exchange Q&A model is explicitly about preventing back-and-forth communication, because it degrades the experience for third parties.
If you take downvotes personally (they aren't meant personally) or expect that your questions should be answered simply because you ask them, then of course you should prefer a system that doesn't rate what you say (unless you explicitly ask) and is directly tasked with responding (even if you prompt with complete nonsense).
And if you want a system that tries to adapt code to your personal circumstances and minimize the editing you need to do, then you obviously shouldn't use one that specifically tries to show demonstration code relevant to everyone with the same problem.
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But the LLM is trained in part on Stack Overflow content. And if everyone using Stack Overflow used it as intended (and as took years to properly figure out, and is taking much longer to communicate), the LLM would be trained on much better Stack Overflow content. And would also not need the LLM a lot of the time, because a traditional search engine would find you high-quality Stack Overflow content directly.
(Actually, despite everything that's gone wrong, traditional search engines still do a reasonable job a lot of the time. Granted, it's extremely frustrating when they fail. I know because I've experienced this failure when trying to find a good target to close an obvious duplicate.)
And sometimes the LLM will be wrong; and it will be absolutely abysmal at introspecting whether it's wrong.
Gentoo was the first distro I got working with internet access because it supported the little phone line based network my family had, so I could share dial-up via the parents windows computer. And, yes, I also printed off the install guide.
Makes me wonder what it would take for governments to actually hit Microsoft hard enough for it to hurt. I remember when they were hit with anti-trust fines here in the USA due to how they were bundling Internet Explorer as the default browser. I mean, did they ever stop? I can't recall ever turning on a new Windows install in the past couple decades and not having IE or Edge as the default.
It also makes me wonder what it would take for IT people to finally stop gritting their teeth about having to use, or having to let others use, Windows and start just dealing with the learning curve of switching to some Linux distro. I mean, Windows Recall is spyware. If it didn't come from Microsoft, Windows Defender would be sure to mark it as malicious... What's the name for a screenshot based keylogger I wonder...
I used to just figure that Windows was just all some people could use. And if that was the best tool for them, then ok. But now? I can't say that anymore. It's out and out malware at this point.
In all seriousness, if you are sticking with Windows at this point, why? Is it just the fact your other software doesn't work on another OS? Or is there something good about Windows that you like?
Things seem more complicated due to Visual Studio Code being cross-platform, and the fact that there's some extremely rudimentary support for consoles in Jetbrains tools, but there's no debugging support at all.
> In all seriousness, if you are sticking with Windows at this point, why? Is it just the fact your other software doesn't work on another OS?
That’s not really a minor point. It’s a big deal for people who do things other than use a browser, text editor, and terminal.
Even for certain CAD software I use that has Mac and Windows versions, the Windows version feels so much more performant and responsive. I’ll switch to Windows for anything serious.
Also, YMMV, but in the past 5 or so years my Windows workstation has felt less buggy and more stable than my Macs. I’ve dealt with a lot of annoying quirks on the Mac over the years where the only solution is to wait for the next update and hope it’s fixed. Even today, accessing network file shares is incredibly buggy on Mac in certain cases.
I daily drive Linux for everything except games, and gaming on Linux has come far enough that I'll be switching over soon. My 60+ father also uses Linux for most of what he does.
And, yes, software working on your OS is not a minor point. That's the whole reason I used to go with the "best tool for the job" approach. Windows Recall is what changed that for me. I can't see using an OS with spyware built in as a "feature".
In my opinion, Apple is no more trustworthy than Microsoft, so...
> It’s a big deal for people who do things other than use a browser, text editor, and terminal.
So, the number of video editing, photo editing, CAD, gaming, and so on tools that work on Linux has grown a LOT. It's not just for basic stuff. You can do almost anything you need to on Desktop Linux. Yes, a lot of things are rough around the edges, but they're that way because people haven't invested in them, not because they're bad tools.
If someone wants to get help, and they end up on Stack Overflow, the structure looks like a Q/A site, and they treat it that way. The people "in the know" then accuse them of being "bad" for posting a question to a documentation site. Combine that with the gamification, and it had to turn into the toxic mess that it did.
When I first heard of the gamification method of moderation, I thought it was a really good idea. But, over the years, it has proven to be a means to enforce an echo chamber, rather than a way to filter out bad posts. I have yet to find a site (HN included), where that isn't true.