alt Hacker NewsStack Overflow would still have a vibrant community if it weren't for the toxic community.
Imagine a non-toxic Stack Overflow replacement that operated as an LLM + Wiki (CC-licensed) with a community to curate it. That seems like the sublime optimal solution that combines both AI and expertise. Use LLMs to get public-facing answers, and the community can fix things up.
No over-moderation for "duplicates" or other SO heavy-handed moderation memes.
Someone could ask a question, an LLM could take a first stab at an answer. The author could correct it or ask further questions, and then the community could fill in when it goes off the rails or can't answer.
You would be able to see which questions were too long-tail or difficult for the AI to answer, and humans could jump in to patch things up. This could be gamified with points.
This would serve as fantastic LLM training material for local LLMs. The authors of the site could put in a clause saying that "training is allowed as long as you publish your weights + model".
Someone please build this.
Edit: Removed "LLMs did not kill Stack Overflow." first sentence as suggested. Perhaps that wasn't entirely accurate, and the rest of the argument stands better on its own legs.
Replies
Fixing loads of LLM-generated content is neither easy nor fun. You'll have a very hard time getting people to do that.
The community is not "toxic". The community is overwhelmed by newcomers believing that they should be the ones who get to decide how the site works (more charitably: assuming that they should be able to use the site the same way as other sites, which are not actually at all the same and have entirely different goals).
I don't know why you put "duplicates" in quotation marks. Closing a duplicate question is doing the OP (and future searchers) a service, by directly associating the question with an existing answer.
> Someone could ask a question, an LLM could take a first stab at an answer. The author could correct it or ask further questions, and then the community could fill in when it goes off the rails or can't answer.
Isn't this how Quora is supposed to operate?
Absolutely 100% this. I've used them on and off throughout the years. The community became toxic, so I took my question to other platforms like Reddit (they became toxic as well) and elsewhere.
Mind you, while I'm a relative nobody in terms of open source, I've written everything from emulators and game engines in C++ to enterprise apps in PHP, Java, Ruby, etc.
The consistent issues I've encountered are holes in documentation, specifically related to undocumented behavior, and in the few cases I've asked about this on SO, I received either no response and downvotes, or negative responses dismissing my questions and downvotes. Early on I thought it was me. What I found out was that it wasn't. Due to the toxic responses, I wasn't about to contribute back, so I just stopped contributing, and only clicked on an SO result if it popped up on Google, and hit the back button if folks were super negative and didn't answer the question.
Later on, most of my answers actually have come from Github,and 95% of the time, my issues were legitimate ones that would've been mentioned if a decent number of folks used the framework, library, or language in question.
I think the tl;dr of this is this: If you can't provide a positive contribution on ANY social media platform like Stack Overflow, Reddit, Github, etc. Don't speak. Don't vote. Ignore the question. If you happen to know, help out! Contribute! Write documentation! I've done so on more than one occasion (I even built a website around it and made money in the process due to ignorance elsewhere, until I shut it down due to nearly dying), and in every instance I did so, folks were thankful, and it made me thankful that I was able to help them. (the money wasn't a factor in the website I built, I just wanted to help folks that got stuck in the documentation hole I mentioned)
EDIT: because I know a bunch of you folks read Ars Technica and certain other sites. I'll help you out: If you find yourself saying that you are being "pedantic", you are the problem, not the solution. Nitpicking doesn't solve problems, it just dilutes the problem and makes it bigger. If you can't help, think 3 times and also again don't say anything if your advice isn't helpful.
The fact that they basically stopped the ability to ask 'soft' questions without a definite answer made it very frustrating. There's no definitive answer to a question about best practices, but you can't ask people to share their experiences or recommendations.