I don’t know what was worse, Stack Overflow’s moderation system, which many IT communities find annoying, or AI killing the site 🤔 Both extremes seem bad for the open web….
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@nixCraft I hated asking questions on SO. Every time I asked a question along the lines "How do I do X in Y without Z?" a bunch of smartarses would pile on saying "You should really do Z or Q instead".
I'll be happy to see it go. The brigading trolls can go moderate reddit or some other shithole.
Plus the block wardens downvoting within seconds of using wrong vocabulary which may remotely be interpreted as "off topic". And downvoted questions are mostly dead.
But this developed over the years.
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I don’t know what was worse, Stack Overflow’s moderation system, which many IT communities find annoying, or AI killing the site
Both extremes seem bad for the open web…. I still think that we don’t need three chatbots controlling everything. I fear Wikipedia might be next. This is not good for the Internet@nixCraft The Wayback machine is also under threat: https://blog.archive.org/2026/06/01/keep-the-news-in-the-wayback-machine/
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I don’t know what was worse, Stack Overflow’s moderation system, which many IT communities find annoying, or AI killing the site
Both extremes seem bad for the open web…. I still think that we don’t need three chatbots controlling everything. I fear Wikipedia might be next. This is not good for the Internet@nixCraft stack overflow ca. 2011 was an amazing upgrade from experts-exchange
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I don’t know what was worse, Stack Overflow’s moderation system, which many IT communities find annoying, or AI killing the site
Both extremes seem bad for the open web…. I still think that we don’t need three chatbots controlling everything. I fear Wikipedia might be next. This is not good for the Internet@nixCraft Idk the wack mod stuff came in once the questions got pretty niche. For years you could answer obvious questions and score huge rep, which, imo, helped drive the site’s actual growth — the growth of its knowledge base.
Then once the knowledge base was lain and questions became more user/use case-specific (or, yes, unf, also super simple ones that were often poorly written dupes, probably b/c there’s a correlation between bad search skills & bad composition), it felt like the good-natured, selflessly motivated answerers lost interest and moved on to more rewarding tasks.
TL;DR: It wasn’t the moderation that was killing SO before AI. It was SO’s natural conclusion.
(And, sure, b/c Joel & Co. sold the company, but don’t get me started on that disaster.)
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I don’t know what was worse, Stack Overflow’s moderation system, which many IT communities find annoying, or AI killing the site
Both extremes seem bad for the open web…. I still think that we don’t need three chatbots controlling everything. I fear Wikipedia might be next. This is not good for the Internet@nixCraft I deleted my account when a question of mine had the code heavily edited by a mod for no reason. I objected, reverted it and was the banned for a week and was given a self righteous justification for the edit and ban. After that I CBA’d with helping them with questions and answers.
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I don’t know what was worse, Stack Overflow’s moderation system, which many IT communities find annoying, or AI killing the site
Both extremes seem bad for the open web…. I still think that we don’t need three chatbots controlling everything. I fear Wikipedia might be next. This is not good for the Internet@nixCraft The terrible people policing Stack Exchange, especially on the physics board, are the reason SE sucks. They're arrogant, clueless (too many grad students), jerks who think they're God's gift to science when they're really failed souls desperately clinging to some semblance of petty power because it's all they have in their miserable meaningless lives. I long for the day the entire SE network goes away.
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I don’t know what was worse, Stack Overflow’s moderation system, which many IT communities find annoying, or AI killing the site
Both extremes seem bad for the open web…. I still think that we don’t need three chatbots controlling everything. I fear Wikipedia might be next. This is not good for the Internet@nixCraft I'm not sure Wikipedia relies on its users in the same way. Both predominately rely on a small group of unpaid editors for content generation. But Wikipedia's donation funding model means that if visits drop to zero it has no immediate effect on their ability to pay the bills. I've been donating monthly for years, and the amount hasn't changed.
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I don’t know what was worse, Stack Overflow’s moderation system, which many IT communities find annoying, or AI killing the site
Both extremes seem bad for the open web…. I still think that we don’t need three chatbots controlling everything. I fear Wikipedia might be next. This is not good for the Internet@nixCraft does the graph actually go to zero?
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I don’t know what was worse, Stack Overflow’s moderation system, which many IT communities find annoying, or AI killing the site
Both extremes seem bad for the open web…. I still think that we don’t need three chatbots controlling everything. I fear Wikipedia might be next. This is not good for the Internet@nixCraft this is going to back fire spectacularly or things will evolve.
Who knows. There's more accessible self hosting solutions than ever before. Maybe we just end up creating a more decentralized version of the web.
Imagine getting rid of having to pay for a registered domain and having a system of automated and endlessly federated domains.
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@nixCraft does the graph actually go to zero?
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I don’t know what was worse, Stack Overflow’s moderation system, which many IT communities find annoying, or AI killing the site
Both extremes seem bad for the open web…. I still think that we don’t need three chatbots controlling everything. I fear Wikipedia might be next. This is not good for the Internet@nixCraft I gave up after 4 attempts to get a question through the moderators, pre LLM
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@bazkie @nixCraft
Wikipedia offers free copies of all available content! Yes, you can legally download the entire Wikipedia in your language for offline usage here:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
Feed this to your local running LLM or use other free tools to make it conveniently usable.
@tjunker @bazkie @nixCraft and yet still the detachment between source and answer is real.
I know LLM are useful for this *BUT* i personally fear we will lose our sources when we separate where the source is edited/curated and where it is read.
Having a clear pointer to wikipedia and its edit button invites upkeep, addition and change. Without people will consume the knowledge but never feeding back -
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