@mcc So developers will stop sharing information on #StackOverflow and future #Copilot and friends will be forever stuck in the past, answering questions about historically relevant frameworks and languages. #LLM#StuckOverflow
Have you seen the Stack Overflow Developer Survey results for 2023?
Of the 83,830 folks surveyed, Matrix is the #1 chat tool in terms of current users' satisfaction. It's also rated as the most desirable among the open source tools listed, but there is a lot of room for improvement in awareness there.
I was interested by the crackdown described here and decided to see what would happen if I deleted a few old questions. We’re talking four questions, 10+ years old, of questionable current relevance. Some I could not delete and so I recommended them for closing on the basis of their age. Sure enough, I got a 24-hour ban with a nasty message from the site, and got the dunce cap “Disciplined” added to my profile.
I was never a power user on #stackoverflow in the first place, and nobody was looking to me for advice, but this was enough to prompt me to delete my account. I’m not interested in having my name associated with this kind of organization. Frankly, I’m also not a strong enough #rstats programmer to take the risk of getting coding advice from AI: if it’s badly wrong, which tends to happen at least in other domains — rarely enough that people let down their guard, but often enough to be nonignorable — I might not know. So the value proposition of using their site is not what it was before, and there’s really no reason for me to stay.
It's hard to imagine #StackOverflow made their decision without considering the fate #Twitter and #Reddit suffered. That they willingly chose to burn the remaining goodwill they had with their users is bewildering.
As of today, June 5th, 2023, a large number of moderators, curators, contributors, and users from around Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network are initiating a general moderation strike.
The company running the most important resource for people working in tech consistently went against the wishes and needs of the community actually providing useful knowledge for each other.
This is not just about the reversal of Stack Overflow Inc's decision against AI generated content on the platform and the recent promotion of their own new AI based tools. This is about the central resource for sharing knowledge about so many things - far more than code or software - being in private hands. No one should be surprised about their decisions, their short-term bottom line will always be more important.
The moderators and contributors organizing themselves against the corporation they work for - even if they do so unpaid - is a huge step. And it is not just happening with #StackOverflow
The fall of #StackOverflow : it has lost around 50% of its traffic.
Answering #programming questions is easier nowadays with the help of #AI tools as #chatgpt and this not only attracts fewer people to visit SO, but also increases the presence of #AIbots on the platform that clearly discourage real users from attending it.
If you've ever checked a Python question on Stack Overflow, there's a good chance the answer was written by Martijn Pieters, who has 1.1 million reputation points, the 5th highest on the whole site!
The #StackOverflow#AI deal, and their reaction to the backlash shows, once again, that corps will gladly take people's good impulses (in this case, the impulse to help our fellow humans without expecting anything back in return), monetise them, and then act like the good impulse was meant to make them money, and that helping others was just incidental.
I'm not ok with this because I gave my answers on StackOverflow under a Creative Commons license to help as many folks as possible—I wasn't compensated for that labor except through Stack Overflow building and maintaining a nice effective repository for knowledge.
Today, "helping as many coders as possible" means giving my Q&A contributions to folks training LLMs. Stack Overflow charging for that feels like rent seeking.
If there was a way for me to mark my answers as "OK for LLM training", I'd do that—for example, re-release my contribution under Public Domain (i.e., "CC0" instead of the Creative Commons with Attribution and Sharealike license that Stack Overflow contributions default to).
I don't expect this to be controversial. I can see folks upset that LLMs are trained on your open-source code (I personally have released all my open source software into the public domain, but I'm incredibly privileged to not need funding from open source). But Q&A content seems different—the intention was to provide uncompensated help to the person asking the question and future visitors.
Article from The Verge on the state of big tech in 2023 (it's crap!)
"Google is trying to kill the 10 blue links. Twitter is being abandoned to bots and blue ticks. There’s the junkification of Amazon and the enshittification of TikTok. Layoffs are gutting online media. A job posting looking for an 'AI editor' expects 'output of 200 to 250 articles per week.' ChatGPT is being used to generate whole spam sites. Etsy is flooded with 'AI-generated junk.' Chatbots cite one another in a misinformation ouroboros. LinkedIn is using AI to stimulate tired users. Snapchat and Instagram hope bots will talk to you when your friends don’t. Redditors are staging blackouts. Stack Overflow mods are on strike. The Internet Archive is fighting off data scrapers, and 'AI is tearing Wikipedia apart.'" https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/26/23773914/ai-large-language-models-data-scraping-generation-remaking-web
#TIL that @JasonPunyon curated and compiled a whopping archive of answers from #StackOverflow and assorted #StackExchange Q&A sites in a minimal sqlite format, where they can be downloaded and analyzed offline:
Amazing effort and great idea. Reminded me of the archives that #Kiwix kept of it (alongside Wikipedia and similar projects), but more streamlined and cross-platform. Nice.
Zawsze, ale to zawsze jak wchodzi z finansowaniem VC (Vencure Capital) to serwisy, nawet zakładane przez zaufane osoby ze społeczności dają d... wróć, dają ciała...
Czy można wiedzę IT zbieraną przez społeczność od 2008 roku sprzedać, nie będąc jej właścicielem?
Jak jest się białym chłopem z krzemowej doliny, to pewnie, że można :/
This is what you get when you try to delete your content from #StackOverflow: they treat you like a criminal defacing their site, rather than as a human being with privacy rights.
Will be saving this conversation and sharing publicly. Your move, Stack Overflow…
Moderation strike: Stack Overflow, Inc. cannot consistently ignore, mistreat, and malign its volunteers (meta.stackexchange.com)
As of today, June 5th, 2023, a large number of moderators, curators, contributors, and users from around Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network are initiating a general moderation strike.