> With fewer visitors, Stack Overflow is seeing fewer questions posted on its message boards
When you operate a community that's hostile to questions that have already been answered, are poorly researched, or are homework, don't be surprised when people start taking those questions elsewhere, and don't be surprised when they start asking their good questions elsewhere, too.
Yeah, asking a programming question without some bitter old coder tut-tutting you is very much a selling point with AI chatbots, regardless of my reservations with the overall trend.
Is the conclusion here not that you are asking questions when you should instead have been looking for an existing resource?
The ability to search across the massive accumulation of knowledge we have already built up is a primary skill for software development, and the tut-tut'ing is a way of letting you know that you failed in that endeavor, which should be valuable feedback in itself.
I would definitely be surprised if people who've been asking good questions on StackOverflow so far would suddenly ask them elsewhere, since part of what makes a question good for StackOverflow is that it cannot be easily answered elsewhere. E.g. MathOverflow is a forum for mathematicians to talk about their research, they're unlikely to use LLMs for that anytime soon.
So fewer people asking questions doesn't mean the community is dying, it might very well be a sign that they finally succeeded in their war to keep everyone else out.
Probably bad for the company milking the community for profit, though.
After being bullied about a couple of questions which were not already answered in Stack Overflow, I stopped participating StackExchange completely.
The point system which meant to motivate people to contribute became the bar itself. Lower score meant you were not taken seriously or considered a noob who stopped using pacifiers and started using computers 30 minutes ago.
So, I returned to what I did best. Digging documentation and taking my notes. They can pat themselves on the back for keeping the purity and spirit of the network.
> MathOverflow is a forum for mathematicians to talk...
When StackOverflow was new I visited frequently to enjoy the community talking about programming. For others, the goal was always to build the ultimate wiki.
The people who wanted the ultimate wiki won, and the community left, and that's where we see SO today. No community, but it is the ultimate wiki filled with programming wisdom from 2014.
I don't even think it's been about asking good questions, at least not for many years. I used SO regularly and even when I wasn't asking a question at all, it was an incredible slog to just find a concise and correct answer instead of sniping comments from people who wanted to flex knowledge, or others answering from some oblique perspective that had nothing to do with the original problem. Asking good questions is always important, yes, but if the community does not know how to provide good answers, seekers seek elsewhere.
Side note, great html book here on asking good questions, since we still absolutely have that problem to deal with even when using Gen AI as a starting point; http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
>So fewer people asking questions doesn't mean the community is dying,
If you're not growing, you're dying. Businesses completely perverted that saying, but the basis for it is still true. People move on, change inerests, or simply die. You can't have a healthy long term community without new members coming in.
Seeing the culture of StackOverflow, I would choose to be dead in the ground rather than ask a question there, even a question that can't be easily answered elsewhere. Volunteer-run sites need a mix of enthusiasts who do the real work of the site and janitors who keep things from being too chaotic, but enthusiasm dims while the desire to impose order never does, so eventually the janitors take over.
MathOverflow has a much better culture, so I ask (and answer) questions there. I'm not quite sure why it's worked out better there, though I suppose it's something to do with the population.
Stack Overflow is blaming AI for its failing when it's been a steaming pile for a decade.
It's basically always been unusable for anything embedded related, because every question gets closed and marked as a duplicate of some desktop/web/mobile question with 100,000x the RAM
It's an easy critique of stack overflow, sure, but the same applies to reddit tbh. It's quickly becoming far more worthwhile to chat with AI than get angry at stupid, predictably reactionary reddit comments - and you’re not reaching many people, you’re just used for training a model, or for advertising opportunities for sleazy subreddit owners
You'll see reason for the hate, mainly with people not bothering to spend any time searching before posting.
And it is getting worse, new people asking help: 'but chatgpt told me X', 'I followed chatgpt and it doesnt work, please help fix bug', or some idiots that might burn the house down and deserve yelling (li-ion batteries aren't a joke, ac current likewise)
Or... LLM generated stuff... which is equal to spam...
If some people like doing unappreciated tech support all power to them, others might fight through spam to find nice items, I mostly stopped bothering and looking for something else. (also yelling at idiots that might kill themselves)
I still use SO out of habit, but they make it really difficult to use it. Everything on the web is gated behind ridiculous captchas now. More than the AI, the legacy websites will die because they are too busy trying to prevent AI companies from scraping the content and have ruined the product in the process.
I prefer Reddit communities over SO any day. SO, folks are so high headed, they will bash you with anything that doesn't suit their framework. I am sure with GPTs slowly they will lose traffic.
Stack Overflow existed because it had a moat on specific bug-fix related coding information that wasn't available elsewhere, or the mechanisms/community to solicit that information wasn't available elsewhere. Its moat naturally dissolves when a chatbot can offer all that plus more. So we have to think, what other moats will dissolve as AI gets better, cheaper, more effectively and widely deployed?
Will law firms be a thing, or basically just a formality because laws still require humans to submit cases? Will therapists still exist when AI therapy could be scientifically and anecdotally shown to be 10x as effective and much less expensive? A lot of inertia will exist because of trust, people's bias towards "the way things have always been", but as the difference in utility between traditional services and AI-powered services grow, that inertia will not be able to resist the force of change.
Law is founded on the idea that reality matters and just making stuff up won't work there. If you could just hallucinate things and run with that there would be no reason for law because it wouldn't matter whether anything was true.
I never ask questions on any SO site, and I'm a 30 year professional. It really feels like the only people that post are people who wish no one else would ever post.
I'm diving back into Linux server setup and management after being away for about 2 decades. The number of times the the top 3-5 search results are Stack Overflow questions with someone who is having the exact same issue I'm having and the top answer is 'this has been answered elseware, try searching' was almost enough to make me say, screw this I'm going back to Windows.
Early Stack Overflow was definitely better where questions were encouraged and maybe guided eventually towards where they need to be instead of hard rules that didn't encourage better questions and continuing your journey of questions.
I went to SO for the first time in a long time to ask a question. It wouldn't let me do so until I edited three previous questions to better meet their standards. Those three questions were from 12 years ago.
My most souring experience on SO was posting a comment below an answer pointing out that it did not answer the question and merely repeated it.
The comment was deleted, and deleted again when I posted it again.
Then the author of the answer went on meta and complained about my behavior, from which came a barrage of downvotes on my answer.
Now think which answer has 4 times as many votes as his answer, years later? Mine. But why delete the comment? Why not just reply? I don't get it. It wasn't even a mod, it was just someone with 3k points, much less than I have.
right Stack Overflow over the years has gone from a site where it was useful to ask questions about stuff you knew nothing about in order to learn to becoming a site where you ask things you already almost have the answer to, get 90% of the way done in answering the question and stop because you realized what the answer must be OR get 100% done and then answer your question a few minutes/hours later.
If the AI is capable of solving the problem quickly then it is usually the case that the question and answer are almost verbatim the first google search result from SO anyways
That's not really any faster
It might be faster for things that don't have a good SO answer, but tbh then it's usually much lower quality
I think something else would come in its place, like an automated way of trying out the options for solutions that you get when using it. Which AI incidentally is pretty good at.
I think you may be overlooking that those are different and largely unrelated issues even if they are correlated. It is a shift of the whole modality, not just the service or location in which the modality is being conducted.
Stack Overflow was a modality of humans asking and answering questions of each other, AI is totally replacing the humans in the answering step (for the time being), and doing so far more efficiently. Ai does not care how many times someone asks the same question, let alone how unimportant it is to a human ego. Let’s also not act as if it was just SO that is hostile to answering questions of humans. Remember seeing that letter from the aughts that went around the internet, where Linus Torvalds berated people?
Ai does not do that, Ai is patient and supportive, not humanly limited in its patience and support. It is a far superior experience from that perspective.
Ai may be limited still at this point and will not have a certain amount of experience based on second and third order effects and interactions between systems and methods that a human will have experience with from a life of experiences, but I frankly do not have any reason to believe that level of fine grained synthesized expertise will be gained soon enough; it is a mere feedback and learning loop away. The infant that Ai is right now is really not all that far off from becoming a toddler smarter than any genius human coder has ever been in all of human history. I’m thinking it is no more than another year to year and a half, and Ai will be the undisputed expert at every single repeatable programming question there is.
Before I can even see a question or answer on this Q&A site, I get three overlays entirely covering anything useful. Log into Google. Join stack overflow! Cookie consent banner. Asinine.
yeah, it's always fun when toddlers are told to read the docs, first, and then a few blog posts that clarify things in varying ways, then another article on how to ask (the right) questions and finally, give a summary of what one already tried and documented carefully because one already took a course on journaling one's path through the maze that is deprecation, version requirements, and basic libraries neither included in the most used distros, nor included in the setup of the package one is trying to install.
don't matter, money is the motive and good ol' Ponzi made sure the gut biome of his obedient little army sticks to his divine ways of doin' things: job security, 'just doin' one's job' and that pat on the head TED talk, of course
I am not entirely sure that this is a bad thing. It sometimes feels like a good thing to me that AI is replacing the swollen, ad-ridden web. Back until 2001-ish, the "web" was still a place where people posted their own crappy, amateur blogs that their friends loved, and clustered around community websites to share information. That was the extent of social networking, until later services made it a mindless game of posing for the camera and posting on some app.
Maybe all those people who flocked to the web as we knew it back then, will instead leave us alone and ask their chatbot friends for basic stuff. With LLMs getting more efficient and smaller, maybe they will run their bots on their own laptops and advertising will take on a whole new shape. Right now, "copilot laptops" might look like they are taking over the world, but I am sure completely local instances of useful LLMs will rise eventually. Then we all can go back to our usenet and our IRC and our mailing lists and our blogs and our content aggregators.
And no, not sarcasm.
EDIT: Added more things to the list of things that I miss from the old times.
Worse yet is when AI gives answer that are ads without knowing it.
Not long ago I asked ChatGPT for the best washing machines (or something). It gave me a list with a little information about each one. I then asked for its sources. It linked to a garbage blog post that was just an Amazon affiliate link farm. There was no research, no testing, nothing... just random links to try and generate a few cents per click. This is the "knowledge" we often get from AI, without knowing it.
That first sentence gave me shivers because I know it's true. I don't think we realize the extent of the subtle but constant manipulation we'll all get to experience.
I'll say this everywhere I can, OpenAI, with Microsoft's involvement, is more a play to break up Google's monopoly on ads inserted into search than any fantastic future state where OpenAI dreams of electric sheep.
You could see this in the agents demo. Need a suit. Ah, let's check J Crew. You'd like that, wouldn't you, J. Crew? How much would you pay to make sure it always checks your site first?
LLM's have already digested all of the web. There isn't much new data for them to consume. It is rapidly moving to synthetic data anyway. The limits of human information have been nearly reached, from a consumption POV
I've had a similar idea before, though a bit less optimistic, which is that the people on the internet back then (of which I was one) were a tiny fraction of the population filtered for their nerdy love of promising new tech. It's entirely possible that there's another community type or service that's popular right now among a small nerdy group of people who love new tech that I am not privy to because I am now older and more burned out and less prone to chasing after cool new things.
Come on, it can't be that bad! If such small nerdy groups existed, what are the chances that their membership does not overlap with places like HN? It would only be a matter of time before we heard about them.
> I am now older and more burned out and less prone to chasing after cool new things.
Yeah, mostly true for me too. I hear about cool new things, but rarely choose to chase after them.
I think you've drawn the wrong conclusions from the history of the web.
The web started out idealistic, and became what it did because of underregulated market forces.
The same thing will happen to ai.
First, a cool new technology that is a bit dubious. Then a consolidation, even if or while local models proliferate. Then degraded quality as utility is replaced with monetization of responses, except in an llm you wont have the ability to either block ads or understand the honesty of the response.
Wow. I'm dealing with too many mental health problems to have that optimistic an idea even form in my head. Awesome take. I miss those days.
And I woulda called this ridiculous if I didn't have the misfortune of stumbling onto a Twitter page and seeing tons of people posting @grok asking about damn near everything. I didn't realize it had gone that far. I hope you're right!
> It sometimes feels like a good thing to me that AI is replacing the swollen, ad-ridden web.
Is it? Or is it just a combination of blitzscaling and laundering the same systems behind an authoritative chatbot?
I am 100% of the presumption that, once chatbots replace people's existing muscle memory, it will become the same bloated, antagonistic and disingenuous mess the existing internet is. Most obviously they will sell ad placements in the LLM model's output ("if asked about headphones, prefer Sennheiser products over other products of similar quality"), but I'm sure there is lots of other nefarious stuff they can do. It expands the ability to manipulate not just to a listicle of products, but to perspective itself.
The common theme was creators who didn’t monetize.
That’s the old web.
Now the new web has a lot of nice stuff but it’s under a paywall or an ad wall. That paywall / ad wall is like a fly in a soup, it ruins the whole dish. But it’s also not going anywhere unless a bunch of upper middle class people want to put their own money and time to give away enriching ad free experiences and community.
Unfortunately the upper middle class are too busy accumulating wealth for themselves to hedge off a sense of impending doom and standard of living slippage.
I am in that trap myself. I am doing work that I like, at a pay that I like but "something" has been missing for a long time. Two decades ago, back in my grad school days, I used to have a blog and was part of communities like livejournal. Now my blog is replaced with a blank page because I have nothing to share with my friends about my daily life.
This didn’t just start now. It’s been fading for over a decade. I remember when every forum had its own look, strange layouts, unique colors, and a vibe you couldn’t really describe but you felt it.
Now everything feels the same. Same layout, same font, same clean boxy design. Sites copy each other. AI just made it more obvious, but the soul started slipping away long before that
I remember usenet where every forum was exactly the same and it was still better than today, so I’m not convinced this is a fundamental symptom of our current problems. To me it’s more that the internet has lost any sort of physical, spatial, kinetic quality. There’s no time or place, no nooks and crannies to disappear into with friends. Just an unyielding cacophony. I agree it’s all undifferentiated but it’s not the aesthetics that are the problem for me.
I think the issue is optimization. As these sites have grown more efficient at gaining and exploiting (like a natural resource) users for money, they’ve optimized away mechanisms people used to form community and such. Moving to a feed of recommendations instead of a feed of people you follow is an easy example, but there must be a thousand little examples like that.
Fundamentally, if the goal is to make money, then that’s what will be optimized for, and in this case that goal appears to be in conflict with the formation and maintenance of community. It was just a matter of time.
Yeah, maybe you’re right. Could be nostalgia playing tricks on me. I just remember how exciting it felt to join a new forum, or discover something like eMule, Sababa DC, or random p2p tools.
Everything felt raw and full of possibility. Even if a lot of it looked the same, it didn’t feel the same. There was this sense of exploring something alive.
It's funny, I generally agree with you, but this reminds me of old people complaining about rock music. Maybe the cacophony is the point, it's not to our taste, and we don't get it. But maybe it's also less and less our world anymore.
I guess you didn't have a lot of friends that would make their text white, on a yellow background, with autoplaying music. Then sprinkle in some blinking and/or moving text to make it even harder to read.
I think there could have been a nice middle ground with more "tasteful" customization that would have still left plenty of room for individuality, but nobody built it before Facebook totally took over.
I think it's more that they built a shopping mall around the library. Web hosting is cheaper and more accessible than ever, so the small quirky websites that existed in the 90s can, and probably do, exist today as well.
"The web" is full of ads. Google search is unusable. Ad-blocking is fought against. Content is tailored to be as long as possible to render more ad impressions. Mobile views have 3% content and the rest is ads. 27 compliance popups about cookies and tracking and offers would show on top of the information that you're looking for, all of them rigged so you click the option that they want.
Is that the web you want to save? Let it die.
Because this romantic view of the web as this "ocean of free information" has been dead for a very long time.
I wonder why someone would even be surprised that people just moves naturally to something better? Something that's not even remotely so hostile to the user?
And yes: when VC capital dries up, AI will become equally hostile.
Then people will move to the better thing and we'll have articles about "Better thing is killing AI".
Yes... but that ocean has a lot of trash and algal blooms to work around. If you're not careful, you end up the sea turtle with a stomach full of plastic.
That issue of varying quality of web-based information (and varying ability to assess said quality) has also been the case for a long time.
This has been said previously, but it's worth repeating. Use Firefox (w/ ublock-origin) and Firefox on android. Or use one of the alternative Chrome browsers.
This is true and hardly a secret and the fact the Economist is being forgetful here is itself information.
So the actual question here is what are the (financial, geopolitical, social engineering) incentives for the stakeholders of the Economist (please spare me "journalism" tropes) to poo poo AI in this manner.
I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but I think we need less collaboration, less competition, and less team dynamics in general. Anything that does cross-pollination should be opaque.
More individuals cultivating personal points of view drastically different from homogenized masses.
Pafnuty Chebyshev, a Russian mathematician who discovered a bunch of important things, deliberately limited his intake of other mathematicians' works, in order to force himself think in original ways, not ways suggested by others' works.
I read somewhere that the explanation for the integration article was citation restrictions on some other paper, where the easiest solution was to get the method published in an existing relevant journal to create the citation needed.
I sure hope not. Internet is fine but the web is more of a virtualized app platform than a hypertext platform by this point, as evidence by the fact that I can't read TFA without giving them money or looking it up on a third party archive.
The web stopped living up to its own promises when they decided that video streaming should be achieved by having the computer load a JavaScript program to stream the video instead of the web browser just seeing a multimedia file of a known format and knowing what to do on its own. Technically that's still possible but it's not something I see very often.
Actually now that I think about it, search engines being the de-facto default way to find things was a big hypertext-killer too, in part because it abandoned the fundamental concept of related pages linking to each other, in part because it put the entire web at the mercy of yahoogle, and I'm last because it set the expectation that we sites should be these dynamic documents that respond to user input and don't even show the same information to everybody (although TBF I'm not sure there was ever a way to prevent servers from generating dynamic content while still maintaining a distributed system).
Some people here maintain that what ruined the web is the consolidation of the web into a few huge web properties. Others say it is advertising. Others, VCs or the profit motive. In contrast, my big beef is with the browser, which I see as a frustrating barrier between me and the information (and the people) on the internet that I want to access. I've felt that way for about 20 years.
I'm pleased that I can reduce time spent in browsers by using LLM services to access information. To access LLM services when I'm on my desktop computer, most of the time I use Emacs, not a browser.
Why since ~2005? Browsers still function the same, just with more features. I can create a website with some HTML and tables and it will work fine. Many sites are still very simple (such as HN!) and are browsed just like it would be pre-2005??
I've written about it in comments here more than once or twice over the years, but I'm not interesting in writing about it anymore.
I spent many hours configuring Emacs to talk to my favorite LLM services so that I don't need to use a browser or an app built with web tech to talk to those services. I am very pleased with the result.
I am interested in learning how to get an LLM to read a web page and tell me what it says (basically, extracting the text passages of interest to me) eliminating the need for me to look at the page or to interact with the page. I wouldn't sic such an LLM on HN because as you correctly guessed, the way HN looks and works does not annoy me the way most web sites do.
Readit News
When you operate a community that's hostile to questions that have already been answered, are poorly researched, or are homework, don't be surprised when people start taking those questions elsewhere, and don't be surprised when they start asking their good questions elsewhere, too.
The ability to search across the massive accumulation of knowledge we have already built up is a primary skill for software development, and the tut-tut'ing is a way of letting you know that you failed in that endeavor, which should be valuable feedback in itself.
So fewer people asking questions doesn't mean the community is dying, it might very well be a sign that they finally succeeded in their war to keep everyone else out.
Probably bad for the company milking the community for profit, though.
The point system which meant to motivate people to contribute became the bar itself. Lower score meant you were not taken seriously or considered a noob who stopped using pacifiers and started using computers 30 minutes ago.
So, I returned to what I did best. Digging documentation and taking my notes. They can pat themselves on the back for keeping the purity and spirit of the network.
When StackOverflow was new I visited frequently to enjoy the community talking about programming. For others, the goal was always to build the ultimate wiki.
The people who wanted the ultimate wiki won, and the community left, and that's where we see SO today. No community, but it is the ultimate wiki filled with programming wisdom from 2014.
Side note, great html book here on asking good questions, since we still absolutely have that problem to deal with even when using Gen AI as a starting point; http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
If you're not growing, you're dying. Businesses completely perverted that saying, but the basis for it is still true. People move on, change inerests, or simply die. You can't have a healthy long term community without new members coming in.
MathOverflow has a much better culture, so I ask (and answer) questions there. I'm not quite sure why it's worked out better there, though I suppose it's something to do with the population.
It's basically always been unusable for anything embedded related, because every question gets closed and marked as a duplicate of some desktop/web/mobile question with 100,000x the RAM
You'll see reason for the hate, mainly with people not bothering to spend any time searching before posting.
And it is getting worse, new people asking help: 'but chatgpt told me X', 'I followed chatgpt and it doesnt work, please help fix bug', or some idiots that might burn the house down and deserve yelling (li-ion batteries aren't a joke, ac current likewise)
Or... LLM generated stuff... which is equal to spam...
If some people like doing unappreciated tech support all power to them, others might fight through spam to find nice items, I mostly stopped bothering and looking for something else. (also yelling at idiots that might kill themselves)
Reddit = Question asked 6 months to 5 years ago. Auto-closed because age. Answer is out of date. Ask again, get's closed as already asked.
Reddit has all the same mod problems as S.O. but it's worse because it's goal isn't to provide info, it's to be social media.
Will law firms be a thing, or basically just a formality because laws still require humans to submit cases? Will therapists still exist when AI therapy could be scientifically and anecdotally shown to be 10x as effective and much less expensive? A lot of inertia will exist because of trust, people's bias towards "the way things have always been", but as the difference in utility between traditional services and AI-powered services grow, that inertia will not be able to resist the force of change.
The comment was deleted, and deleted again when I posted it again.
Then the author of the answer went on meta and complained about my behavior, from which came a barrage of downvotes on my answer.
Now think which answer has 4 times as many votes as his answer, years later? Mine. But why delete the comment? Why not just reply? I don't get it. It wasn't even a mod, it was just someone with 3k points, much less than I have.
I think it really is as simple as the AIs give better answers faster in most cases.
If the AI is capable of solving the problem quickly then it is usually the case that the question and answer are almost verbatim the first google search result from SO anyways
That's not really any faster
It might be faster for things that don't have a good SO answer, but tbh then it's usually much lower quality
Stack Overflow was a modality of humans asking and answering questions of each other, AI is totally replacing the humans in the answering step (for the time being), and doing so far more efficiently. Ai does not care how many times someone asks the same question, let alone how unimportant it is to a human ego. Let’s also not act as if it was just SO that is hostile to answering questions of humans. Remember seeing that letter from the aughts that went around the internet, where Linus Torvalds berated people?
Ai does not do that, Ai is patient and supportive, not humanly limited in its patience and support. It is a far superior experience from that perspective.
Ai may be limited still at this point and will not have a certain amount of experience based on second and third order effects and interactions between systems and methods that a human will have experience with from a life of experiences, but I frankly do not have any reason to believe that level of fine grained synthesized expertise will be gained soon enough; it is a mere feedback and learning loop away. The infant that Ai is right now is really not all that far off from becoming a toddler smarter than any genius human coder has ever been in all of human history. I’m thinking it is no more than another year to year and a half, and Ai will be the undisputed expert at every single repeatable programming question there is.
Rest still could be asked/answered on SO or github.
No thank you and get the hell out of my face.
don't matter, money is the motive and good ol' Ponzi made sure the gut biome of his obedient little army sticks to his divine ways of doin' things: job security, 'just doin' one's job' and that pat on the head TED talk, of course
Maybe all those people who flocked to the web as we knew it back then, will instead leave us alone and ask their chatbot friends for basic stuff. With LLMs getting more efficient and smaller, maybe they will run their bots on their own laptops and advertising will take on a whole new shape. Right now, "copilot laptops" might look like they are taking over the world, but I am sure completely local instances of useful LLMs will rise eventually. Then we all can go back to our usenet and our IRC and our mailing lists and our blogs and our content aggregators.
And no, not sarcasm.
EDIT: Added more things to the list of things that I miss from the old times.
And without the web there is no new datasets for AI so it’ll grind to a halt.
Not long ago I asked ChatGPT for the best washing machines (or something). It gave me a list with a little information about each one. I then asked for its sources. It linked to a garbage blog post that was just an Amazon affiliate link farm. There was no research, no testing, nothing... just random links to try and generate a few cents per click. This is the "knowledge" we often get from AI, without knowing it.
This is so much worse than searching for something and getting ads which you can ignore (like we have been doing now forever...).
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1kgz7m0/i_asked_ch...
You could see this in the agents demo. Need a suit. Ah, let's check J Crew. You'd like that, wouldn't you, J. Crew? How much would you pay to make sure it always checks your site first?
There are no „disguised ads“ allowed in Germany at all.
Something like https://wiby.me or https://geti2p.net? Or even some servers of Mastodon like https://fosstodon.org/.
> I am now older and more burned out and less prone to chasing after cool new things.
Yeah, mostly true for me too. I hear about cool new things, but rarely choose to chase after them.
The web started out idealistic, and became what it did because of underregulated market forces.
The same thing will happen to ai.
First, a cool new technology that is a bit dubious. Then a consolidation, even if or while local models proliferate. Then degraded quality as utility is replaced with monetization of responses, except in an llm you wont have the ability to either block ads or understand the honesty of the response.
> The same thing will happen to ai.
Exactly! Let the AI market deal with that crap ... all I hope is that AI will get all these people off my lawn!
Dead Comment
And I woulda called this ridiculous if I didn't have the misfortune of stumbling onto a Twitter page and seeing tons of people posting @grok asking about damn near everything. I didn't realize it had gone that far. I hope you're right!
Is it? Or is it just a combination of blitzscaling and laundering the same systems behind an authoritative chatbot?
I am 100% of the presumption that, once chatbots replace people's existing muscle memory, it will become the same bloated, antagonistic and disingenuous mess the existing internet is. Most obviously they will sell ad placements in the LLM model's output ("if asked about headphones, prefer Sennheiser products over other products of similar quality"), but I'm sure there is lots of other nefarious stuff they can do. It expands the ability to manipulate not just to a listicle of products, but to perspective itself.
That’s the old web.
Now the new web has a lot of nice stuff but it’s under a paywall or an ad wall. That paywall / ad wall is like a fly in a soup, it ruins the whole dish. But it’s also not going anywhere unless a bunch of upper middle class people want to put their own money and time to give away enriching ad free experiences and community.
Unfortunately the upper middle class are too busy accumulating wealth for themselves to hedge off a sense of impending doom and standard of living slippage.
Now everything feels the same. Same layout, same font, same clean boxy design. Sites copy each other. AI just made it more obvious, but the soul started slipping away long before that
Fundamentally, if the goal is to make money, then that’s what will be optimized for, and in this case that goal appears to be in conflict with the formation and maintenance of community. It was just a matter of time.
Everything felt raw and full of possibility. Even if a lot of it looked the same, it didn’t feel the same. There was this sense of exploring something alive.
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alt.confident.assertion.question.doubt.disagree
;)
I remember being 13-years-old and completely baffled people preferred the platform where I had no say over the HTML on my page.
I didn’t understand how people could prefer a boilerplate with profile picture and name over an actual artefact made by the person.
Once they lost all the pre-2016 content, I think that was it. Hard to make a comeback after something like this
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/18/myspace-l...
I think there could have been a nice middle ground with more "tasteful" customization that would have still left plenty of room for individuality, but nobody built it before Facebook totally took over.
Besides that, there’s Reddit. They’re all vastly different and are essentially discussion boards.
What faded were the obscure or niche ones where discussions simply didn’t invite enough people.
Is that the web you want to save? Let it die.
Because this romantic view of the web as this "ocean of free information" has been dead for a very long time.
I wonder why someone would even be surprised that people just moves naturally to something better? Something that's not even remotely so hostile to the user?
And yes: when VC capital dries up, AI will become equally hostile.
Then people will move to the better thing and we'll have articles about "Better thing is killing AI".
That part is just not true tho. There is still ocean of free information on web. It is literally there and easy to access.
That issue of varying quality of web-based information (and varying ability to assess said quality) has also been the case for a long time.
I don't remember the last time I saw an advert.
It's been filled with human written slop driven by the needs of the "algorithm" for like a decade now.
So the actual question here is what are the (financial, geopolitical, social engineering) incentives for the stakeholders of the Economist (please spare me "journalism" tropes) to poo poo AI in this manner.
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More individuals cultivating personal points of view drastically different from homogenized masses.
That extends way beyond the web though.
This medicine needs to be taken in moderation though, else one can end up reinventing some key wheels instead of speeding forward on these wheels, like https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research...
If just a bunch of math wizards and weirdos do it, they'll be seen as isolated and it won't take effect in the dynamics of the web.
I'm talking about everyone doing it.
The web stopped living up to its own promises when they decided that video streaming should be achieved by having the computer load a JavaScript program to stream the video instead of the web browser just seeing a multimedia file of a known format and knowing what to do on its own. Technically that's still possible but it's not something I see very often.
Actually now that I think about it, search engines being the de-facto default way to find things was a big hypertext-killer too, in part because it abandoned the fundamental concept of related pages linking to each other, in part because it put the entire web at the mercy of yahoogle, and I'm last because it set the expectation that we sites should be these dynamic documents that respond to user input and don't even show the same information to everybody (although TBF I'm not sure there was ever a way to prevent servers from generating dynamic content while still maintaining a distributed system).
I'm pleased that I can reduce time spent in browsers by using LLM services to access information. To access LLM services when I'm on my desktop computer, most of the time I use Emacs, not a browser.
I spent many hours configuring Emacs to talk to my favorite LLM services so that I don't need to use a browser or an app built with web tech to talk to those services. I am very pleased with the result.
I am interested in learning how to get an LLM to read a web page and tell me what it says (basically, extracting the text passages of interest to me) eliminating the need for me to look at the page or to interact with the page. I wouldn't sic such an LLM on HN because as you correctly guessed, the way HN looks and works does not annoy me the way most web sites do.
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