Members of the software developer community have reported deleting or altering their posts to prevent them from being used by OpenAI.

  • madcaesar@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    People cheering on SOs demise don’t realize what we’re losing.

    Support is moving to discord which sucks massive ass. Asking the same question over and over, hoping somone is around to help.

    It sucks.

    • billwashere@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I never understood the move to synchronous communication for asynchronous questions. The ephemeral nature of discord is really a PITA. It’s like using IRC for a FAQ.

      • sunbeam60@lemmy.one
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        7 months ago

        Discord is honestly the most awful way to create a helpful community.

        It’s a great way to give the 20 most active members of the community someplace to trample on top of newbies trying to get questions answered.

      • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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        7 months ago

        It makes sense if the issues being discussed are time-sensitive. Sometimes people need a solution now, not to open a bug report and hope that it will get a response an unspecified amount of time later.

      • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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        7 months ago

        Pretty soon search engines won’t be able to return anything anymore. At which point we might be looking for communities where live people can help with our issue. And if that happens Discord won’t look that out of place anymore.

        If you can go somewhere and have your problem solved do you really care that some schmuck later won’t be able to find the solution written somewhere and will have to go through the same process?

        • Kraiden@kbin.run
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          7 months ago

          You’re forgetting about the schmuck on the other end of that equation that has to answer the same question a thousand times over.

          • Gestrid@lemmy.ca
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            7 months ago

            A server I’m in actually has a bot that, whenever a user types a command, will respond to a question with an answer.

            Simple example:

            @\Johnny: “Hey, my browser says 404, what does that mean?”

            @\Support: !\404 @\Johnny"

            @\Bot (using Discord’s reply feature to reply to Johnny’s post): “‘404’ is a common error message that can be caused by a variety of issues. Here are steps to resolve the most common issues:…”

            I didn’t feel like typing out steps to check if the website is down for everyone or to fix it if it’s just you, but you get the idea.

            The server I’m in doesn’t typically handle questions about that, either. They’re more specialized to something more specific that that, but, again, you get the idea.

          • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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            7 months ago

            Nah, that person can just ignore/block you.

            I didn’t say it was a perfect setup. 🙂

            And tbf there’s lots of people who don’t read the FAQ even if you shove their face in it.

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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      7 months ago

      Support is moving to discord which sucks massive ass.

      It sucks but can you blame them? It’s a natural response when people see that the old method (public posting and indexing) is being corrupted and grows increasingly irrelevant.

      We’re going to see more and more knowledge becoming insular and/or gated behind manual curation.

      This doesn’t necessarily have to mean Discord, can be private forums of any kind but private nonetheless. Discord may be the wrong tool but the problem it’s being applied to is real.

      • Simon Müller@sopuli.xyz
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        7 months ago

        it sucks but can you blame them?

        For picking discord I very much can blame them, I figure it won’t be long until that goes down the drain too.

        • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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          7 months ago

          Discord could solve this particular issue by simply adding a wiki.

          We’re going to see a lot of changes in online community tools and in the way people use those tools. Lemmy is not exactly revolutionary either, it’s modern but it’s still a forum at its core.

          • barryamelton@lemmy.ml
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            7 months ago

            Discord could solve this particular issue by simply adding a wiki.

            yeah, as Stack Overflow could. Discord is bound to the stakeholders, and is already getting enshittified.

            • Gestrid@lemmy.ca
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              7 months ago

              and is already getting enshittified.

              Not yet. They’re still trying to squeeze money out of people with their profile pic frames and stuff. They’ve yet to introduce ads into app (for now).

    • Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      Not to mention the people answering the questions are liable to just start accusing you of being an idiot if you make any less progress with their solution than “it’s been fixed so hard that it gained five new functions I didn’t even write into it!” I wrote a 3Js project once and ISTG the people on that discord had all the patience of a three year old who suddenly has to go to the bathroom the red second you’ve merged onto the highway.

    • kromem@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Once upon a time, they stepped forth from the forests of IRC, but back into those dark woods they then one day marched.

    • Meltrax@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I give it a few months before the Community tier servers’ data is dumped and sold to an AI model company.

    • Gestrid@lemmy.ca
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      7 months ago

      I just got a ping the other day from a Discord server that said they’d finished moving their support onto a forum on their website specifically because Discord’s forum feature is terrible.

    • Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I support the take over. People thinking that they can pick and choose who makes money and how are fooling themselves. The developer who wants all his IP protected so he can make money is upset that a larger entity is also making money is honestly tough fucking shit. Either go back to the origins of the internet napster days or shut the fuck up and live with what we created. There isn’t any middle ground. Its only going to get worse unless you make this place hostile to people building walls and stealing all the data for themselves.

    • mindlesscrollyparrot@discuss.tchncs.de
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      7 months ago

      The period when dejanews just started to index newsgroups was a golden age for finding answers on the internet, IMO, and there’s a strong similarity to the fediverse. All we need is for it to be searchable… OK, I see your point now.

  • Phen@lemmy.eco.br
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    7 months ago

    Stack overflow still have users? These days it rarely shows up on my search results and when it does the answers are always outdated by several years.

    • 9point6@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Interesting, I still see it pretty consistently in the first few results in my experience and usually with a pretty recent one too

    • magic_lobster_party@kbin.run
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      7 months ago

      What options are there to use instead? I think they’re still often having the best results, and are usually near the top.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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        7 months ago

        I guess I’ve moved to the part of my career where Stack Overflow isn’t that helpful, but I’ve found a lot of utility in searching issues on GitHub and Reddit posts.

        • fuzzzerd@programming.dev
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          7 months ago

          I’m right there with you. It’s nice to know it’s been there if I needed it. I don’t find myself there very often anymore and when I do it’s often to compare official docs to other ways to approach something or because the getting started section of the official docs felt weird or wrong.

    • nossaquesapao@lemmy.eco.br
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      7 months ago

      But are they losing the first positions because they’re losing relevance, or is it due to other sites abusing seo and search engines abusing from advertising results?

      • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
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        7 months ago

        I’d say the former.

        Many queries don’t find relevant questions, and the relevant questions are often not answered properly. I often find the exact same problem I’m having, but the answers are just a bunch of those CV padders that post completely irrelevant answers based on a buzzword they saw while skimming the question.

        • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          7 months ago

          When I do find relevant answers, lately they’re all so old that they no longer work, or rely on now deprecated functionality of a library or system.

          Finding code snippets for interfacing with Azure through PowerShell is a crapshoot because Microsoft keeps deprecating different PowerShell modules for it.

    • Shadowq8@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I bet its related to the continuous need to liquidate resources to support the proxy war effort. You can’t print money withour offering some value.

  • rimjob_rainer@discuss.tchncs.de
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    6 months ago

    It’s time for a federated version. How about “OutOfMemory”? It would fit because I always return to the same topics on StackOverflow.

    • Lath@kbin.earth
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      7 months ago

      This title doesn’t mention it, but it was reported earlier that users editing their past posts against this move get banned for it.

      • dust_accelerator@discuss.tchncs.de
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        7 months ago

        Need to make sure the diff is small enough. A tiny change that creates a bug or makes the answer effectively useless is much worse than sweeping changes

        • Plopp@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          But that leaves a lot of good code. The bad parts are very unlikely to appear in the AI results due to the amount of good code in the training set.

          • Kokesh@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            I got banned as expected. For a month. After I’m unbanned, I’ll edit a few characters every day. Not giving up. As unlawful it sounds, apparently you are not entitled to ask them to remove all your data.

    • reversebananimals@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I did on Friday and within 5 mins they suspended me and reverted them all. I knew they would so I didn’t care - I just did it so they’d see as many unhappy users as possible.

      I then deleted my account of over 10 years with over 50k reputation. Fuck stackoverflow.

      • Anon518@sh.itjust.works
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        7 months ago

        I don’t understand why you and others are so mad about this. Stackoverflow is a great resource that takes significant time and money to maintain. I don’t have a problem with the maintainers making money by selling access to train AI on the data.

        Having Stackoverflow as an alternative to reddit is important so that people aren’t stuck using reddit.

        • jaybone@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Yeah I don’t get this either. As long as they keep the main SO sites up and available, why should anyone care if they train AI on it? Deleting or defacing content is like cutting off your nose to spite your face.

      • Kokesh@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Same reason for me. Take some of their time and say fuck you to them. But I will do crippling edits by single characters in one month time. I have time.

  • Gestrid@lemmy.ca
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    7 months ago

    Oh, look, it’s Reddit all over again.

    (Yes, yes, different reason. Same user response, though.)

  • Roflmasterbigpimp@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Okay but why? It’s not like it’s personal Data or something. I don’t get why people are mad ._.

    EDIT: Ofcourse you can downvote me but I’d really like an answer, tho. The article is not very clear about this.

    • InternetPerson@lemmings.world
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      7 months ago

      Because it’s original work they contributed for free. Lending others that kind of expertise and time, just that it get’s used by a machine learning algorithm, which aims to reproduce this, without giving it back to them or the community in a similar free manner, feels violating.
      Apart from that, creators feel ownership over their content and it feels wrong not to be asked what happens to it. (Although those probably wouldn’t – or shouldn’t – use SO anyway, as their content gets commercialised anyway by giving it SO for free.)