Unlike Reddit, Stack Overflow would probably be better without moderators.
In fact, you could easily replace Stack Overflow mods with a script that goes into every new question, comments "USE THE FUCKING SEARCH BAR" and locks the thread.
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
270 points (98.6% liked)
You Should Know
33116 readers
286 users here now
YSK - for all the things that can make your life easier!
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with YSK.
All posts must begin with YSK. If you're a Mastodon user, then include YSK after @youshouldknow. This is a community to share tips and tricks that will help you improve your life.
Rule 2- Your post body text must include the reason "Why" YSK:
**In your post's text body, you must include the reason "Why" YSK: It’s helpful for readability, and informs readers about the importance of the content. **
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-YSK posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-YSK posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
If you are a member, sympathizer or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- The majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities:
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
Credits
Our icon(masterpiece) was made by @clen15!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Replace them with a script that goes into every comment and put "duplicate of existing post".
Even if there is no existing post.
Or there is but it was ages ago, had no decent answers and all information in it has become outdated.
load more comments
(1 replies)
I don't think so: Stack Overflow requires much more moderation for the comments and answers to actually stay on topic and be somewhat professional. Especially the "don't just link somewhere, explain the thing" rule might require a lot of moderation.
Moderation will probably be done by AI in the future. It's probably just a bit too expensive still.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Thank you for posting this. I had no idea this was going on. What are companies thinking when they implement policies that hamper volunteers? You'd think they'd want to engage, and keep happy, these people that give their time.
Companies don't even care beyond bare minimum for the labor that they pay why would they care about the labor they don't lol
"What are companies thinking"
It turns out I actually have the ability to convert thoughts to text for any company CEO or Board Member. So allow me to post an excerpt of what I've found:
"moneymoneymoneymoneymoneymoneymoneyiwishepsteinwerestillheremoneymoneymoneymoneymoneymoneymoneymoney"
What are companies thinking when they implement policies that hamper volunteers?
"Money!"
Duplicated, here's a link to a totally unrelated question made 10 years ago that didn't got any answer anyway.
OMG these responses drive me bananas. I'm searching for a code solution and I keep landing on "Duplicated" dead ends with dead end links posted as the solution. Why do they leave it just sitting there?? WHY????
load more comments
(3 replies)
I really hope protesting social media/websites owner's BS becomes a regular practice
I agree, but on the other hand if we moved to decentralized platforms no strikes would be necessary. People only do this, because a company is holding their content as a hostage.
Striking will just be replaced with defederation. For example lemmy.world has been defederated by a bunch of instances because it allows anyone to sign up for an account.
If stackoverflow was a Lemmy instance, I think people would just host a new one and move there?
Some people might do that. But lemmy.world is a very well run community that has never done anything offensive, and yet it's still defederated by some of the biggest lemmy instances.
That proves defederation is for more than just spam/illegal content/harassment. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's pretty disruptive. Like a strike.
I thought only beehaw.org defederated it?
Yeah, they're the one that makes you answer 3 vague open end questions and then manually approve it.
If you don't write enough, or write something they dont agree with... You dont get denied, it's just like it's still pending indefinitely.
Lemmy.world requires a valid email instead (something beehaw doesn't).
There's no right or wrong way to go about it. Which is the biggest benefit of Lemmy. Somewhere out there, there's an instance being ran like how you want, if not, just make your own.
load more comments
(4 replies)
Thankfully SO is better than Reddit: the frontend is actually decent and even though they're pausing data dumps, everything posted is technically CC-SA
Unpopular opinion: for a beginner, ChatGPT gives way better answers than stackoverflow users. The advantage of ChatGPT is that I can command it to dumb it down. Stackoverflow users are used to answer in a language that resembles the language in documentations. They are dry, abstract, lack good examples to the point that the "foobar" shit triggers an immediate defensive reaction in my brain and are phrased for people who already understood a concept but need to refresh their knowledge. Their core problem, as is tradition in any IT field, is that they lack the empathy to understand the viewpoint of someone who understands less of something than they do. It's like asking someone to teach you reading and getting a poem with the advice to just read it as an answer.
I can circumvent that via ChatGPT by asking it to ELI5. Also, I get an answer instantly, am not discouraged to ask further questions and not advised to read a link where a solution is offered in an equally difficult language.
People are saying that using ChatGPT doesn't give accurate information and fails to convey important concepts, but I feel it's actually the other way around. Since there is ChatGPT, I'm making way more progress than before.
I understand that users don't want AI answers, but I also don't get why anyone would want that on this platform. You can just, you know, use AI directly.
That's not unpopular. But there is a problem. ChatGPT can answer your questions mostly because it was trained on the posts and answers of sites like StackOverflow.
If people abandon SO and similar forums then the quality of ChatGPTs answers will go down too.
Especially with something like programming. It's always changing. Next year there will be new versions of C++ and python. There will be new JS frameworks as always. It doesn't stand still.
And without new discussions about new problems, there's nowhere for ChatGPT to learn about them.
Haven't though about that, you're right.
People are saying that using ChatGPT doesn’t give accurate information and fails to convey important concepts
I wish my students would care about the concepts and try to understand the answers instead of just blindly copying and pasting ill-fitting code (and then wondering why it only kinda works...).
As a former student now practicing engineer this habit never gets broken. All of us accept cargo cult computing to one extent or another. It sucks.
Usually the engineers with the least tolerance for it do better but only in the long run. In the short run they are yelled at for holding back projects.
Here to echo the same. I thought using AI to assist me in coding would just make me lazy and learn nothing, but turns out I actually learn more than ever since it's much faster, more polite and patient, and the semantics are usually more catered to my needs and self explanatory than the average answers I find elsewhere.
It's great for writing snippets and creating basic frameworks. However, it definitely makes a lot of mistakes which I doubt a total beginner can spot, especially if the error lies in logic and not syntax.
Works great only as a tool for now, but chances are AI will probably surpass human coders sooner than we think.
load more comments
(14 replies)
good for them. Organizing and taking action is the only way to get capitalists to listen
Fun fact: the stack exchange for research mathematics, MathOverflow, is a separate 501(c)(3) nonprofit which at any time can pack up their stuff and migrate, including their domain name and all of their data, per the agreement they made when they joined the stack exchange network in 2013, originally operating the site themselves since 2009.
https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/969/who-owns-mathoverflow/970#970
While the MathOverflow site is operated by Stack Exchange, Inc., the domain and the MathOverflow name are owned by the MathOverflow corporation. The MathOverflow corporation is completely independent from Stack Exchange and its mission is to ensure the continued operation of the site in a manner that meets the needs and expectations of the community.
Subject to Section 8, should MathOverflow wish to migrate its data outside of the Stack Exchange network, Stack Exchange shall, within thirty (30) days of receipt of a written request from MathOverflow, provide MathOverflow with a complete and current database that contains all the data necessary to recreate MathOverflow on MathOverflow's own servers and software. Following such transfer, Stack Exchange will cease all use of the MathOverflow database.
If they don't like how the site is being run, they can leave. Food for thought. If all communities on the internet were so careful and prescient to plan an exit strategy in advance, to make clear that you just operate our site and we can leave for a competitor, we'd not be in this mess.
If all communities on the internet were so careful and prescient to plan an exit strategy in advance, to make clear that you just operate our site and we can leave for a competitor, we’d not be in this mess.
That's why God invented the GPL.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Stack overflow has mods?
Closed: This question has already been answered 5 years ago here <link to completely unrelated question>
Better yet: "this question has been answered here <link to old question, answer does not work/doesnt apply or work anymore>"
Found that out today too
Instead of hoping that the corporation will change, they should just move to the fediverse.
Me: Good for them, that's great hope they get want they want.
Me, to myself, in bed at night: Oh god how will I code
load more comments
(3 replies)
Dammit it's AI again. What can I say. It's been causing more destruction of things I care about, and all I see from AI is scams and impersonations.
This actually reminds me of a book by Charles Stross called Accelerando. Human explorers during a time in which people upload their minds to computer systems travel to (and this part is fuzzy in my memory), a world orbiting a brown dwarf. The world is just a giant computer and it's inhabited almost entirely by superintelligent banking scams and viruses. It turns out that almost all "life" in the universe is like this, just parasitic AI that serves no real purpose other than to fuck over other people for short-term gains. Anyway, I've been thinking about that book more and more in recent years.
view more: next ›