YSK: In addition to Reddit, StackOverflow is on Strike
YSK: In addition to Reddit, StackOverflow is on Strike
Note: as part of the strike organization, this post is a mirror of a post on MSE Introduction As of today, June 5th, 2023, a large number of moderators, curators, contributors, and users from around
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
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.
"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"
What are companies thinking when they implement policies that hamper volunteers?
"Money!"
Correction
VC money
they are thinking "oh crap we have no idea how to survive in this market we are going to die, thrash and do anything to survive"
Siding with the community is one thing. I couldn't understand the core demand of the community, though.
Apparently, the community wants to ban AI-generated answers. But it's unrealistic to filter AI-generated text, and I thought the quality control has been done through user votes anyway.
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.
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Or there is but it was ages ago, had no decent answers and all information in it has become outdated.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.
if this aint the god damn truth lol
NGL - I lolled
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????
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.
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
While the MathOverflow site is operated by Stack Exchange, Inc., the domain and the MathOverflow name are owned by the MathOverflow corporation. The MathOverflow corporation is completely independent from Stack Exchange and its mission is to ensure the continued operation of the site in a manner that meets the needs and expectations of the community.
Subject to Section 8, should MathOverflow wish to migrate its data outside of the Stack Exchange network, Stack Exchange shall, within thirty (30) days of receipt of a written request from MathOverflow, provide MathOverflow with a complete and current database that contains all the data necessary to recreate MathOverflow on MathOverflow's own servers and software. Following such transfer, Stack Exchange will cease all use of the MathOverflow database.
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.
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.
It is sad that programmers rely on a proprietary, centralized website to get access to programming knowledge. And instead of leaving the platform to create something better, they go on a strike...
If only /r/AskHistorians were this prescient.
Leave it to the mathematicians to be rigorous.
I didn't even know that site existed, I've always seen math.stackexchange.com instead. But it seems MO is indeed also for research-level math.
Entire programming industry is about to panic!
For real. It might not always give me the answer, but it usually gets me a step closer to at least asking the right question.
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.
Um, I would say that stackoverflow contributes to productivity, but reddit is likely mostly detrimental. Never used Reddit for work, not even programming subreddits, but StackOverflow all the time.
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
Is there a FOSS alternative to stackexchange yet?
This looks awesome. Thanks for the recommendation.
Is it decentralized and federated?
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.
OSQA (question & answer) used to be the one that you could host locally
Just found out this relevant Wikipedia list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q%26A_software#Comparison_of_Q&A_software
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.
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.
The key with ChatGPT for me has been taken use it as an augmentation, not a gap fill. There's some prerequisite knowledge required on my part. It's a much more useful tool when it's helping flesh out something I know, but have forgotten, or am familiar with, but not proficient. That means I find mistakes faster, and am less prone to having it loop or hallucinate. If I need to ask a question about something where I know very little or nothing at all, I'll peek at a Wikipedia page or something first if I can.
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.
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.
People are saying that using ChatGPT doesn’t give accurate information and fails to convey important concepts
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'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.
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 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
While I have no issues with the use of ChatGPT as an asist, from my understanding of the system as well as from some examples of using it, I would be very hesitant to say a beginner should use ChatGPT. While ChatGPT has given me some great starting points in a couple projects, I have also encountered a few instances where the code output was... not totally optimal at best, or wrong at worst. It also varies in quality from language to language (usually based on that languages over all popularity at the time the model was trained).
I suppose all of the above could hold true when it comes to getting your info from SO or any other social media source, but I would still highly suggest not relying on ChatGPT or AI systems until one has a intermediate or better grasp of the language.
Totally my opinion, though.
good for them. Organizing and taking action is the only way to get capitalists to listen
Always surprised by companies outsourcing all their moderation to unpaid volunteers and then act shocked when they’re ready to pause their work.
Check out Codidact for a community run alternative!
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
Fuuuuuuuuuuck. Welp. That's it. The internet is closed for business. Thanks for stopping by
The new corporate internet is slowly dying, seems like. About time to go back the the more grassroots internet if possible. The rich won't save us.
If even the elitist programmers at stack overflow that know everything and discourage questions from users that treat it as some sort of question and answers site can be effected by companies taking from the communities, it can happen to anyone.
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.
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 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.
I hate to say this with the current situation but Reddit was a really good place to ask. I'm not sure about digging up old answers in the same way though.
Damn, nowhere to find coding help anymore I guess
github isssues.
Once you have a basic level of coding your problem is with a certain package/libraryNot exactly sure how to link federated stuff properly but here goes?
Edit:// gah I don't know how to post federated links either :(
You can still ask it here /m/stackoverflow 🤣
There's Codidact Software Development.
Instead of hoping that the corporation will change, they should just move to the fediverse.
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’ve gotten tons of help that’s there but especially on MathOverflow and CrossValidated over the years.
MathOverflow and CrossValidated are communities unlike anything else on the internet.
Ohh thanku i def didnt know. I was just on there to fix something (kinda long story but its ok now i think) i didnt really notice bc i dont usually go on there unless i have a specific thingy i need to do.
What will be the "social" response on the 1st of july? People don't really change their behavior in significant ways until the heat of a situation is very real (in this case, when the third party apps actually close) even if they are certain that something adverse will happen. Will we see a bump of anger once they physically tap on their app by sheer habit and it just doesn't load reddit?
I want to strike. Anybody want to strike with me?
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.
Solidarity ✊ An ouchie to one is an ouchie to all
Hell yeah, a few people are on board! First things first: why are we striking?
A Lucky Strike?
Someone should work on a LemmyOverflow UI for Lemmy
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
Same, it's one of the most useful programming tools I know of!
I don't like it, but I begrudgingly accept that it is kind of useful. There are a lot of people there who are unnecessarily rude af, especially to newbies.
Some people can only find meaning in life by holding their own intellect so high, because the bottom of the bottle in their hand is so fucken low.
It can be a great resource if you put time into writing really good questions. I've gotten dozens of fantastic answers over the years, and thousands of times I've found the question I wanted to ask already answered.
When someone complains about StackOverflow, I always ask to see their question. What I observe is:
- The vast majority of the time, they just didn't provide nearly enough information to answer the question.
- A lot of the time people got upset because of perceived rudeness, even though they got an answer to their question. StackOverflow tends to be direct / blunt, which isn't necessarily rude, though it's definitely not friendly
- People got upset that a question was marked as a duplicate, when it clearly was a duplicate to me, they just didn't understand how the duplicate applied to their case
However, 10% of the time, the answer really was wrong.
Many years ago I liked the idea of it and thought it would turn out great. It never happened.
While every now and then I do get something useful out of it, most times a Google result puts me there the answers are either wrong, outdated or filled with broken links.
That was a disappointing read.
While I tentatively agree with their stance on “AI”, I expected this to be a protest to change the toxic culture over at SO.
Which includes, but is not exclusive to, the whole “this is a duplicate of <insert question from a decade ago about a completely irrelevant thing and that has become irrelevant even within its respective topic>”, the whole karma based politics and other toxic behavior.
But I guess that’s like expecting congressmen to vote against insider trading by congressmen.
I mean good for them, because platforms these days are exploiting free labor and then completely disregarding the people that provide value to the platform, but also, guys you’ve got some serious other issues that are holding back the quality of the community.
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