Stack overflow was one of the best ways to learn and mature as an engineer “back in the day”. The meme is that devs would copy and paste and hope it worked. The reality was more like you had an obscure bug, you wrote a detailed and cohesive question, and you connected with people who were more knowledgable and would help you.

It also sharpened your writing and thinking. By responding to questions you solidified your understanding of topics.

It got a lot of hate for the moderation but I think that was mainly in huge communities where literally “dumb” questions got bombarded every minute. Smaller tech like Docker when it first arrived on the scene had communities that learned together.

Spent a lot of time there when I was a few years out of school and still trying to figure out what it meant to be a software eng. It’s sad to see it become a ghost town and I think it’s a net negative for young engineers to have an all knowing entity spit out every answer.

Maybe I'm remembering a different Stack Overflow.

Yes, there were genuinely helpful people there. I strove to be helpful as well. But my most common experience there was:

- People asking why you're doing that (without answering the question).

- People telling you that you shouldn't do that (without answering the question or providing an alternative).

- People closing your question as off-topic or duplicate without actually reading and understanding what you wrote.

- People editing your question and changing the meaning (leading others to innocently conclude off-topic or duplicate). Or removing actually important details.

- People giving just plain wrong answers that get upvoted, with comments from more senior people begging them to change or remove it.

Or in the words of Brick Top: "If I throw a dog a bone, I don't want to know if it tastes good or not."

And yes, every so often a golden answer by an amazing person.

Now I can just ask a few LLMs, comparing and contrasting their answers. Even better: I can interrogate them on their answer.

Stack Overflow had a community of sorts, but it wasn't anywhere near like a physical community.

We may work online, but we exist in the flesh.

On the GrapheneOS forum, I enjoy answering the questions in a post of user who just set up their phone.

AI does not have as good knowledge of the OS as frequent forum contributors. I'm sure plenty of people get by with AI help for their questions and there's likely little questions that hasn't been already discussed, but I love to see new people using the OS and it doesn't take long to give them an exact answer. The Flarum software that the forum runs is very fast, as well.

We had better have even more time to help each other as a result of LLMs, or what are we even doing here?

I realize that everything seems to be about increasing the pace of life, but this is another "chance" for humanity to figure things out.

the sense of community on the internet from 1995 to 2010 was incredible. industry devs running into tricky situations and just asking for help on irc, newsgroups like comp.lang.*, then forums, places like expert-sexchange and gamedev.net - the people that helped were like heroes and mentors and the urge to pay it forward was real and strong. stackoverflow was cool when it first launched - then something happened to it, like someone unleashed a hundred thousand pent up devs from an underground cave where they had been torturing them with mind games where they're forced to sabotage each other and stuff like collaboration and encouragement was punished - all rushed in at once like a lethal injection and the sense of community was soon dead

I suspect that a lot of the stuff everyone recognizes as AI-isms/writing tics - is actually just the way genX'ers sounded when they were explaining things to strangers on the internet

What a post. On Stack Overflow without karma you couldn't even comment on wrong answers, fix them or anything. I would spend time on there looking for questions I could answer in hope I could get enough karma, but I didn't.

Deleted my account after a while and never looked back. Also toxic community in general.

So glad now I can just spar with AI to troubleshoot stuff.

I became a good engineer by answering questions on StackOverflow, and I'm upset that this form of mentorship evaporating.

- I learned to communicate answers crisply to others

- I saw what made software hard to grok which helped me write better software

- I intentionally answered questions I did not know the answer to from the outset to push me to learn

I grew tremendously by helping others, and things look pretty bleak if we all become glued to token streams instead.

To me HN is that community.

I don't even agree with most of you (I'm a feminist, liberal, progressive that puts the social good above personal liberty), but I still respect this community.

>> we should make an extra effort to cultivate relationships with each other and form communities online – communities that belong to us, not some billionaire.

The assumption here is that, people as a crowd, have some discretion, will, thouhht, intention, agentic control and act to change something.

Mostly they don't. Especially on the matters that don't affect their survival drastically.Things might be going down-hill, but if is a slide with mild ramp, no one even notices it. They might even enjoy the ride and going-down is normalized.

Just like Romans might have done when the Rome declined over a prolonged period. No one noticed it.

People are just subjects without own descretion on all matters that are not survival related. They go with crowd. Theat's precisely why we have billionaires owning people's communities.

If even half of the toxic communities go away to LLMs, maybe AI will be a net positive after all.

This really hits me, as someone building tools that utilize LLMs to help people deepen their faith.

My app tries to help people read the Bible more.

I’m asking myself.. What constitutes better? And is it worth pursuing?

Is better always better?

Humans are social animals. It's true that not all of these interactions re positive, but so much of what drives us is not even related to acclaim or flattery, but merely interaction in a general sense. In a sense this is one of the true perils of LLM-style interaction (going back to Eliza, I guess) -- that we can not only potentially satisfy that drive mechanically, but do so in a way that's structurally produced by a commercial entity. Do you think that the models talking to you have your best interests at heart? They don't have any interest in you at all.

Every scope of help commoditised. Help for late night drop. Uber ! Need for friendly food door dash !

I agree about the value of community. I also think that coding with AI assistance is very useful and possibly going to become the dominant form of software development.

These principles can coexist, but there are forces working against it. The problem is when people post antagonistic comments in response to good faith attempts to make something useful because they used, or were imagined to have used AI.

We have mass produced AI garbage that is filling the domain that Spam used to occupy. We also have people sincerely wanting to make things and being dismissed as making slop. These behaviours should not be met with equivalent responses, and they should not be. AI is removing the barriers for some to develop, of course their first attempts are not going to be very good. Hurling abuse at them is neither a good way to help them improve, nor is it a thing that a good human being does.

Instead of dismissing something that another person has worked on as slop, consider if the person is likely to accept constructive feedback about what it is that their thing is lacking. Maybe if that occurs their next thing might be less sloppy.

I don’t fully agree or disagree. Perhaps the honest truth is that nobody really knows how to proceed. That is why I truly appreciate a constructive, open public discussion like this, where people voice their opinions within the bounds of civility. Take that away, and are we any different from animals in the wild?

As a side note, Stack Overflow did embody this better than any other popular online platform. X has become the opposite cesspool with floating gold nuggets here and there. I digress..

> Perhaps the LLMs are a reminder that we should make an extra effort to cultivate relationships with each other and form communities online – communities that belong to us, not some billionaire.

Time to look up who owns Stack Overflow, Reddit and Hacker News if you had some romantic ideas about them not being owned by billionaires.

> I reached out for help. The standard response from everyone fell between ignoring me or telling me I need to "do it myself".

> You know who did help me? Random strangers on Stack Overflow. People who had nothing to gain from helping me other than just trying to help someone in need.

This part makes the entire post sound like a parody. Maybe Jeff Atwood has a wicked, self-deprecating sense of humor?

Yeah no, ask for help on Stack Overflow and you were were more likely to be met with castigation and snide remarks. It was such a breath of fresh air when ChatGPT let us not have to deal with that community anymore.

SO people were one of the most stuck idiots I have ever seen. I found the opposite thing, for easy questions they'd upvote and answer very soon but for harder questions they'd downvote it because they didn't know the solution.

I'm very happy SO is done and dusted with.

Thing is Quora which was supposed to be a forum of people with real credentials also went down the drain because it succumbed to low quality questions and answers. I guess we need a LinkedIn like place where people with real credentials and experience can contribute to deep discussions. Discord won't cut it since it's not index-able.

Community activists have been saying his for millennia but it’s not possible. Like literally every “prophet” as said almost exactly this since pahotep (https://kemendo.com/WOPFirstPrint.pdf)

I’ve personally started a half dozen different communities over the last 20 years. some last longer than others but almost none last beyond the moment leaders stop putting effort into them, which is the fate of every community.

As a serial community organizer I can tell you definitively that there are no long lasting communities drums eventually turn into an obvious scam on someone or finding increasingly unhinged people willing to stick to a mythology.

I would love for not this to be true but I’ve yet to find an example otherwise

Pick a group: shriners, elks, masons, religious groups, cults, wellness groups, drug user communities, veterans, long distance runners, gardeners etc…

It literally doesn’t matter, none of them last unless there’s some kind of expectation that either you’re going to get some financial or opportunity to improve your social standing or access to resources unavailable to “those people out there.”

It’s a shame really, but that’s the limits of human society it seems.

> Perhaps the LLMs are a reminder that we should make an extra effort to cultivate relationships with each other and form communities online – communities that belong to us, not some billionaire

Quick, remove this from HN before the investors see it!

Seriously though, there's so many posts "about AI" that amount to "is AI going to ruin humanity?" and I find it so tiresome. It's just a tool, people. Tools don't stop people from being people. If anything the problem is it makes people more peopley. The telephone didn't end in-person socialization, and neither did books, television, VHS, video games, the internet, etc. These are technologies that, despite allowing you to distance yourself from people and get information without talking to a person, actually brought people together more. Six million years of evolution doesn't go away because you made a robot. There will still be communities. People are still gonna people.

What we should be doing is not focusing so much on the technology, and focus more on how we are constantly being manipulated by the rich, corporations, and government, so that our socialization is to their benefit and our detriment. If your problem is connecting to people, and someone's answer is "I have a business idea", run away from that person.

At some point LLM users and proponents have to come to terms with the fact that this has all been a massive theft of labor, including donated labor and mutual aid in forums such as Stack Overflow.

Such a massive theft of labor will have negative consequences that we all have to live with.

> An LLM would have done exactly what I wanted back then. But would it have given me what I needed? At the time, I needed to know somebody cared enough to help me.

Were StackOverflow, Google, and LLMs not all created by people who cared enough to help you?

There are much better places on the internet to find personal connection than StackOverflow ever was.