I will say, moderation is a valuable thing on websites that intend to be useful for people. Wikipedia being another example. Ynews also has moderation.
Sites like Quora don't have good moderation (nor social media sites) and they become less useful for "how do I do X" questions.
LLMs do the moderation of the underlying source and just give you the answer.
Does it matter? A site and community that refuses to allow or accommodate anyone to grow and learn as a new user will quickly run out of users. The gatekeeping on SO is a blockade, not a teaching mechanism.
How else do you help people learn if not by giving feedback? As an avid helper in a programming related discord channel I need you to understand that a lot of the people who come to these places for help are incredibly stupid. It's not uncommon to have to converse with a person for 15+ minutes just to get them to give you enough information to understand what their problem is. Like they will just paste an error message or a big incomplete block of code and say "help". What are you trying to do? What isn't working? How is it not working?
They don't understand that we need information to help them. They will get offended when you ask them to elaborate. They won't understand the answer no matter how much you simplify it. They just want their problem solved with the least possible amount of effort on their part.
Here’s an example: my account on StackOveflow has enough reputation to answer questions on SO, but on other StackExchange sites that are very related I can’t do that just because I spent more time on StackOverflow.
The whole setup is basically repelling you from engaging by design. The site should already know from my SO reputation that I’m trustworthy enough to answer stuff on the other similar tech related stackexchange sites.
It was built for a time when you actually needed to filter out low quality questions and answers, but now that the users have abandoned the ecosystem the bouncer at the door makes a whole lot less sense.
I relate to sfn42. That *is* the stack overflow experience. That is the average programming forum experience when you frequent it for more than just to get your problems solved.
This is why people use AI so heavily. Because no matter how bad or ill formed a question is, it wo answer it the most "caring" way possible, and never berate you for it being a stupid question, common sense, etc (as long as it is about some forbidden topic of course)
If SO wants to be good, it will encourage a back-and-forth: "are you trying X?" but it doesn't want to be good. Private equity doesn't understand going concerns.
I think I’d like to see a site where people posted their chat results that ended in a successful resolution. Just for isolated bugs or library use questions. Would not be useful for a lot of the internal work I do but maybe saving those internally would be useful inside a company
-5 points, closed as not related to software development. It’s not a particularly great question, but clearly a bunch of people were more interested in keeping their garden tidy than in helping someone learn.
The answer according to way too many SO mods is that a question should primarily be to contribute to the SO knowledge base. Asking simply to get an answer is selfish.
I wish SO had not been killed by chatbots, because I was looking forward to seeing it die by the gamified hands of its mob of mods.
Considering they basically own and operate the uniparty and its media apparatus, they have enormous influence over the entire electoral process and peoples' thoughts to a degree that makes any notions of 'democracy' illusory at best.
It was bad for decades, and then corporation-controlled social media brought the corruption to new heights.
I think the main problem is that this will not survive very long once implemented.
Politician A will promise "no VAT on bread" to get elected. The next guy will promise "no VAT on essentials". The next guy will promise "no UBI for the rich". And so on.
And you end up with the next politician dismantling the whole system as unfair.
What will happen will be 'no vat on rice, flour and vegetables', which in my mind is very ok. Maybe if a demographic crisis happens, vat on baby care will be removed.
But VAT is a dumb tax anyway. Anybody with high enough wealth can evade it, you just have to found a company that will pay for your computer, car and probably other stuff. I'm pretty sure I could pay for a 3d printer without paying any VAT. If I was devious, I would start a 'sailing course' company and buy my wings/sails/foil through it, while teaching once a year or so.
If exemmptions need to be made, the tax isn't taxing the essence purely. With the 'no VAT on bread' example, we need to work out why. How can we quantify why bread shouldn't be taxed?
I'm guessing eventually we'll work out that 'fresh food' shouldn't be taxed, and the processed food should be. It's here we can work out that certain chemicals, processes, facilities, etc, are actually what should be taxed at source, and through doing so, we can save the world billions in accountancy bills.
So what you're saying is basically we should stop implementing reasonable measures as a government because there will always be a Ronald Reagan or Maggie Thatcher who will dismantle it out of spite, greed, or both? Surely if we never do anything right or good the baddies will stand no chance of being what they're best at, namely being worse than everybody else. This for sure is a wise plan to stop bad people in their tracks.
Sort of but that's actually ideal, I don't think it will be completely scrapped if implemented, some parts will remain. Those being the ones that make the most sense to the most people.
10 years ago i wrote a php web chat in 2 hours or so. I pretty much never look at it but the tinestamps suggest it always worked.
I could add more features to it and those will also work.
A friend once worked on an application with a huge team. He often pointed out the window at a large costuction site with a comparable number of people working. He made countless jokes about real work, a real system, real organisation etc Then one day the building was finished and their application kept crashing in production.
It's part of a constantly evolving ecosystem. It's a stable product because reliability engineers make it so and software engineers get the integrations right.
When I was at Facebook they decided to re-write Messenger in C. There were people who thought it was a waste of time. There were people who thought it was a great idea. It was a lot of work, took a while, and I wouldn't be suprised if by now it's been re-written to something else.
It's not that hard to make up work, and there's people whose whole job is pretty much just that.
You can napkin-math this. How many different team-sized components do you think go into it? If the code were on GitHub, and all they had to do was just update dependencies below them in the stack, and bump the version number for components above them,how many Dependabot PRs would be opened per week for software that's "done"
Sites like Quora don't have good moderation (nor social media sites) and they become less useful for "how do I do X" questions.
LLMs do the moderation of the underlying source and just give you the answer.