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123 points eterm | 5 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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palata ◴[] No.43925550[source]
I used to be very active on StackOverflow, it was a great platform.

After a while, I stopped having to post questions about "common frameworks", either because I could do with the official docs of because there was already a StackOverflow answer for my question.

What was becoming more common was that I would have a question similar to an existing unanswered one. Or that my question would never receive an answer (presumably because my questions were becoming more tricky/niche). So what I started doing was answering my own question (or answering those existing unanswered ones) after solving it on my own. Still, it was fine and I was contributing.

And for some reason, a few years ago my questions started being closed for no apparent reason other than "those who reviewed it have no clue and think that it is invalid". Many times they closed even though I had posted both the question and the answer at the same time (as a way to help others)! The first few times, I fought to get my question reopened and guess what? They all got a few tens of votes in the following year. Not so useless, eh?

Still, that toxic moderation hasn't changed. If anything, it has gotten worse. So I stopped contributing to StackOverflow entirely. If I find information there, that's great, if not, I won't go and add it once I find a solution for myself. I am usually better off opening an issue or discussion directly with the upstream project, bypassing StackOverflow's moderation.

I heard people mentioning that LLMs were hurting StackOverflow badly. I'm here to say that what pushed me away was the toxic moderation, not LLMs.

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trollbridge ◴[] No.43925672[source]
And the irony here is that much of what LLMs know is from training on StackOverflow.
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eru ◴[] No.43925838[source]
StackOverflow's content is contributed by regular folks under an open source license.
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trollbridge ◴[] No.43926027[source]
It is; however, I doubt most contributors would put in effort if they knew the main purpose of what they were typing out and researching would be grist for a for-profit (let's not kid ourselves) AI business.
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1. shagie ◴[] No.43927642[source]
It's always been typed out to further a for profit business. The AI part is new. Stack Overflow has never been shy about the fact that they're trying to make money.

If the AI changes things, then one should ask why the individual was contributing when Stack Overflow Inc was the business reaping the financial rewards of community contributions.

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2. eru ◴[] No.43932404[source]
Yes. And even Wikipedia was always open to be used for-profit.
3. int_19h ◴[] No.43933914[source]
The contributions are under CC-BY-SA, so while the company can legitimately profit from it, the ShareAlike part requires that derivative works are also distributed under the same license. This is the part that LLMs infringe upon, in my opinion. So, all I want is for OpenAI, Meta etc to release their model weights under CC-BY-SA, and then we're square.
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4. eru ◴[] No.43936576[source]
Well, that's unless their derivative works fall under fair use?
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5. int_19h ◴[] No.43943148{3}[source]
I'm sure that's the legislation they will lobby through if the courts don't play ball. But from a purely ethical standpoint I find it repugnant when people like Sam Altman take something that is offered for free specifically with the intent that it benefits the commons, and make a commercial enterprise out of it.