I never understood the move to synchronous communication for asynchronous questions. The ephemeral nature of discord is really a PITA. It’s like using IRC for a FAQ.
It makes sense if the issues being discussed are time-sensitive. Sometimes people need a solution now, not to open a bug report and hope that it will get a response an unspecified amount of time later.
It's purely because of how easy it is to create and manage a community. Imagine if there were a way to make a Lemmy instance without any fees or knowledge of selfhosting, it would be an instant success.
Pretty soon search engines won't be able to return anything anymore. At which point we might be looking for communities where live people can help with our issue. And if that happens Discord won't look that out of place anymore.
If you can go somewhere and have your problem solved do you really care that some schmuck later won't be able to find the solution written somewhere and will have to go through the same process?
Support is moving to discord which sucks massive ass.
It sucks but can you blame them? It's a natural response when people see that the old method (public posting and indexing) is being corrupted and grows increasingly irrelevant.
We're going to see more and more knowledge becoming insular and/or gated behind manual curation.
This doesn't necessarily have to mean Discord, can be private forums of any kind but private nonetheless. Discord may be the wrong tool but the problem it's being applied to is real.
Not to mention the people answering the questions are liable to just start accusing you of being an idiot if you make any less progress with their solution than "it's been fixed so hard that it gained five new functions I didn't even write into it!" I wrote a 3Js project once and ISTG the people on that discord had all the patience of a three year old who suddenly has to go to the bathroom the red second you've merged onto the highway.
I just got a ping the other day from a Discord server that said they'd finished moving their support onto a forum on their website specifically because Discord's forum feature is terrible.
The period when dejanews just started to index newsgroups was a golden age for finding answers on the internet, IMO, and there's a strong similarity to the fediverse. All we need is for it to be searchable... OK, I see your point now.
I support the take over. People thinking that they can pick and choose who makes money and how are fooling themselves. The developer who wants all his IP protected so he can make money is upset that a larger entity is also making money is honestly tough fucking shit. Either go back to the origins of the internet napster days or shut the fuck up and live with what we created. There isn't any middle ground. Its only going to get worse unless you make this place hostile to people building walls and stealing all the data for themselves.
It won't. Some people will scream bloody murder, most people will ignore it.
SO was in decline anyway. Most answers you'll find are several years old and outdated, because some idiot thought the new ones are duplicates.
So now a few people will leave, the spamming idiots will keep spamming the platform with low effort nonsensical answers and its relevance will dwindle just a bit faster.
Look at Reddit. Last year there was a huge outrage and today it's pretty much the same as before.
Most people don't care. Most people feel so powerless, that they'll accept every privacy scandal, every exploitive business strategy, every sellout of their platform.
Is Reddit pretty much the same? From my limited perspective, a lot of the genuine contributors left, quietly or otherwise. I've found it much more difficult to have an interesting discussion on there since the API debacle. Most of Reddit was already lurkers and bots, so all it took was a significant proportion of the tiny minority of quality contributors to take their time elsewhere for reddit to become a complete dumpster fire.
This is something I have tried to convey since I came here when people are fantasising about the death of Reddit, I just couldn’t put it as eloquent as yourself.
I take the approach that me not using Reddit, or Amazon or whatever else is a choice I make so I can live with myself, and not that I believe it will have an impact.
I have alluded to this in previous comments in the past, that many of the choices I make actually negatively impact me more than the company I’m avoiding. Example: Not using WhatsApp means I can’t join group chats with friends as they won’t use signal as the things I care about, are meaningless to them. Or that I can’t find some items to buy except from on Amazon so I just won’t buy them etc.
All we can do is stick to our own morals and let others do as they will as it’s futile to make people care about the things we think they should.
SO was in decline anyway. Most answers you'll find are several years old and outdated, because some idiot thought the new ones are duplicates.
There's been a new thing (for the past two years anyways) where some power tripping user would edit the highest rated answer, causing new users to fail to get recognition.
So a new user answers a old question with the latest way to do something based on new language specs... And they'd get 1-2 votes.
Do you mean federated? And what would federation solve?
The only way you're separating humans from LLM will be by asking for government ID but that would eliminate anonymity. And even so people could sneak in LLMs under their credentials.
I’m a software developer but I don’t know too much about working with de-federated services, but I would be interested in working on a Stack for us, if it was feasible and maybe we got a few more devs on board.
That actually sounds like a good idea. Like Lemmy you have communities of common or popular languages like java or python which you can join and everyone there assists with questions. As it grows you might see a node for spring or flask get created for more niche discussions.
I guess I've moved to the part of my career where Stack Overflow isn't that helpful, but I've found a lot of utility in searching issues on GitHub and Reddit posts.
But are they losing the first positions because they're losing relevance, or is it due to other sites abusing seo and search engines abusing from advertising results?
Many queries don't find relevant questions, and the relevant questions are often not answered properly. I often find the exact same problem I'm having, but the answers are just a bunch of those CV padders that post completely irrelevant answers based on a buzzword they saw while skimming the question.
Stack Overflow, technically a neutral term. Idk though whether the name in such a context would violate any trademark laws even if it's a non-profit platform.
Need to make sure the diff is small enough. A tiny change that creates a bug or makes the answer effectively useless is much worse than sweeping changes
I did on Friday and within 5 mins they suspended me and reverted them all. I knew they would so I didn't care - I just did it so they'd see as many unhappy users as possible.
I then deleted my account of over 10 years with over 50k reputation. Fuck stackoverflow.
I don't understand why you and others are so mad about this. Stackoverflow is a great resource that takes significant time and money to maintain. I don't have a problem with the maintainers making money by selling access to train AI on the data.
Having Stackoverflow as an alternative to reddit is important so that people aren't stuck using reddit.
Same reason for me. Take some of their time and say fuck you to them. But I will do crippling edits by single characters in one month time. I have time.
Lately it's been companies using liberal licenses to build their product up really fast and then doing a rig pull bcz "oh no we can't have competition!".
But it's also from the user perspective...
Freedom to not pay a lonely dev that's been coding on the project for "fun" or "for the community" for 15 years.
I love free software, but if y:all want it to succeed you need to support the devs!
Because it's original work they contributed for free. Lending others that kind of expertise and time, just that it get's used by a machine learning algorithm, which aims to reproduce this, without giving it back to them or the community in a similar free manner, feels violating.
Apart from that, creators feel ownership over their content and it feels wrong not to be asked what happens to it. (Although those probably wouldn't – or shouldn't – use SO anyway, as their content gets commercialised anyway by giving it SO for free.)
It gives worse answers and hallucinates a lot, problems specific to the model's design and not how much training data it gets. Even if it did work, it would be taking jobs away from actual programmers. It's a total net negative, users have nothing to benefit from this. Plus, since this is a community of programmers, they're all very much aware of these limitations and the lack of ethics of OpenAI.
Well, when good documentation is available it isn't necessary but good documentation is not always available. And it can still be helpful with niche issues 🤷