←back to thread

123 points eterm | 8 comments | | HN request time: 0.213s | source | bottom
1. hakunin ◴[] No.43929104[source]
My most recent (nearly 3 years ago) StackOverflow story:

I posted a question[1]. Got some answers, but not quite complete. Then someone came along and provided a good detailed answer. A couple of upvotes later, that answer got deleted by Community Bot. I voted to undelete it, but it still needs another vote to undelete. So I ended up copying it into my own notes blog[2].

I'm not sure why the best answer was deleted. It would've been a loss if it wasn't preserved somewhere I think.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/q/73954228/155351

[2]: https://notes.max.engineer/creating-common-interfaces-in-gol...

replies(4): >>43931573 #>>43931875 #>>43932048 #>>43932270 #
2. ayhanfuat ◴[] No.43931573[source]
That user was using AI to autogenerate answers. Most of his answers posted in a certain period were deleted in bulk. If you think this was not something AI generated then you can raise a flag for it to be undeleted https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/430072
replies(1): >>43932619 #
3. zahlman ◴[] No.43931875[source]
For reference: almost all deletion on Stack Overflow is "soft", and deleted Q&A can be viewed by users with at least 10,000 reputation. These users can vote for undeletion, and the author can edit and submit for undeletion.

It looks like the answer you're talking about is now undeleted, with yours among the three necessary votes. (It also looks like you accepted, and awarded a bounty to, a different answer back when you asked, and the answer you're now calling "best" was posted months later. So it goes.)

The explanation for the original deletion is exactly as ayhanfuat says. LLM and other GenAI content is forbidden on Stack Overflow (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/), since before that answer was posted, and the author (one of the site's most prolific contributors) got in trouble for a flood of such answers. (It took quite a while for the problem to be noticed and acted upon, in large part because of a moderation strike in June 2023 which ended up creating a large backlog of flags for AI content, and in part because custom flags are required to report this. The strike, in turn, was largely about the company/staff trying to interfere with moderators attempting to detect AI content, with the site owners being unwilling to accept false positives because it would be "unfriendly". So it goes.)

replies(1): >>43932728 #
4. eYrKEC2 ◴[] No.43932048[source]
I've found the _real_ answer in deleted answers multiple times.

Thank goodness I can see it because I have enough reputation.

5. ◴[] No.43932270[source]
6. hakunin ◴[] No.43932619[source]
Yeah, looking at it today I do smell the AI. Nearly 2.5 years ago I had no experience to suspect it. I'm less annoyed with it getting deleted now, but it was still a useful and relevant explanation at the time.
7. hakunin ◴[] No.43932728[source]
Makes sense, I recognize the LLM output now. In fact as I was posting the story here, it kinda dawned on me. Problem is, this happened before ChatGPT went mainstream, so I wasn't 100%. Definitely sympathetic to the hard decision made here, in light of this.
replies(1): >>43933134 #
8. zahlman ◴[] No.43933134{3}[source]
To be fair, it's nowhere near as blatant as a lot of the LLM spam we got in the early days of ChatGPT.