this post was submitted on 12 May 2024
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I feel so bad for the long term contributors :/
The only good thing I could think off, is that someone is going to create a defederated stackoverflow alternative?
Or something similar, to bring back real human interaction...
If this wasn't enough, This will probably raise war against corporated AI.
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 Most answers you'll find are several years old and outdated, because some idiot thought the new ones are duplicates.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.
Anecdotally, pretty much every time I'm searching for information on reddit a number of comments are redacted or even the op is deleted. The only reason I didn't purge my comments is in case someone might find them helpful.
I have all my deleted comments in a csv (with context links), which I plan on fine-tuning an LLM with just for fun. I guess if there's a platform that'll accept it, I'd be happy to upload it. Mostly I wanted to make sure the info remains free for everyone, including AI researchers.
Hugging Face is the usual platform for sharing datasets and models.
Subs that I go on that used to get hundreds or thousands of comments now are lucky to reach 50 or so.
Reddit is still pretty useful, but it will become less and less relevant as contributors leave, just like StackOverflow did. Side note: are contributors actually leaving Reddit? People keep saying that's happening, but I don't really see it...maybe it's very slow? Might depend heavily on the subreddit too.
I don't have numbers, but I did. Took Redact 9 hours to overwrite & delete the 17,000 comments on my 17-year-old account. But watching them scroll by, most weren't really worth keeping. I saw several 15+ year-old active accounts do the same before I left.
Wait, how can it find all your past comments? I thought Reddit only have you a list of the most recent 1000 or something like that?
Through the API - well, it was through the API before they changed it. No idea if that's possible now.
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.
I feel this. I'm well aware that if my partner wasn't on Facebook, we wouldn't have a social life. I HATE that fact, but that, sadly, is where people put their events. I don't think I'd join if she left, but I can't deny that I benefit from her being on the platform.
She won't leave until everybody else does, and they won't leave until everybody else does, and so nobody leaves. It's dystopian.
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.
Why even contribute then?
To help others? That's why I did it. Someone editing that into the highest upvoted answer is good because more people will see it.
Unless you care about karma, how is this bad?
I've read of someone making an alternative to stackexchange federated. ~~Let me lookup for it and add a link here.~~
Here it is:
https://lemmy.ml/post/15471686
Interesting.
Someone there mentioned Codidact, which is available today.
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.
God I would love that. But as simple as the UI is, it would be some real work.
What do you think the hardest challenge would be?
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.
I'm working on a P2P Reddit alternative, but Reddit is basically a more complicated StackExchange. Here's the mapping:
The missing bits:
Maybe I'll consider forking my project once it's ready and turn it into a QA site. The hardest part will be useful search due to its distributed nature.
Thanks for this. I’m intrigued by your P2P Reddit too. Do you have a public GitHub where I can follow?
Not yet, but I'll post it somewhere here soon. I want to make sure the basics work properly first so people have a good experience on the first try. It's pretty rough right now.
I honestly wouldn't know where to begin. Hardest to start would be learning enough of the problem space to identify p problems, but that's just what's in front of me
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.
Maybe someone should create Lemmy. Oh wait....
Why need another federated protocol, Lemmy should be more than plenty
why would they want to move to a defederated SO, it's going to be public anyways too.