- quora pivoted from quality content to cheap clickbait
- SO has overbearing moderation. Chatgpt doesn't close your question the second you've submitted it.
And so on. In short, quality platforms are fine.
While you won't hear me bemoaning the death of Quora, I'm quite a bit more concerned about SO. After all, where is GPT 5 going to scrape the next set of answers for new libraries and frameworks..?
You and I are talking about different things. Before these great questions and answers ended up in your search result, someone asked them, and someone else provided a good answer.
I used to be one of these people. I got 50k+ SO karma, mostly by asking good questions. I no longer bother, because SO moderators don't even read your questions anymore before closing them for a random reason. Needless to say, I no longer bother trying to answer questions as well.
So, it's no wonder that SO is struggling. You can't thrive forever on a stock of aging questions.
Note that most of these are just regular people with close-to-vote powers, not elected or appointed moderators with special powers.
I think one major problem is that there is an entire class of people who rarely or never ask or answer questions, or even comment, and all they do is "moderate" the site by closing questions. Literally all they do. Some of these have extremely specific and narrow views on how the site "should" be. I absolutely hate it: who the hell are you? You're not even using the core function of the site. Fuck off trying to tell me how I "ought" to be using it. I don't want to gatekeep who is or isn't "part of the community", but people gatekeeping how the site can be used without actually using the site is just absolutely toxic.
There are a number of other issues as well. I can go on for a long time. But to be honest I no longer care: the site has been taken over by nihilistic capitalists who care not one iota about any aspect of the site other than the ability to earn a buck (previously it was a commercial enterprise as well, sure, but it wasn't 100% about earning a buck and many in leadership positions genuinely cared about "doing right by our community" as well). And that is probably just as much of a reason for the decline of Stack Overflow as anything else.
SO should do something similar. Throw out all the mods, all the questions and start fresh every X number of years. No idea if it will work but tossing out the current mods to bring in new ones would change the flow.
Also: Stack Overflow is intended to be a long-term useful repository of question and answers. You enter "how do I frob a baz in foo?" in $search_engine, and the idea is you'll end up on Stack Overflow which answers that exact question. I have sometimes ended up on some of my own answers from years ago like this.
The bottom line is that it doesn't matter as long as you have a large enough sample to learn the format, which is already there with existing data. There isn't an SO answer for everything anyone needs even about current tech, and the reason models can still answer well in novel cases is because they can generalize based on the actual source and implementations of the frameworks and libraries they were trained on.
So really, you only need to add the docs and source of any new framework during pretraining and bob's your uncle, cause the model already knows what to do with it.
From its own incorrect answers that got parroted around the web.
with open source code, it can generate docs, feed those docs in on the next training run, use that knowledge to generate que and answers. With tool use, it can then test those answers, and then feed them into the knowledge base for the training run after that.
Half the answers are for rails 2.0 and the other half tell you to just “install this gem” which monkey patches some part of the framework that has long since been deprecated/removed
https://stackoverflow.com/q/79461875/265521
That's just the latest one I've asked. Here are some more examples:
Case insensitive string comparison is "opinion based": https://stackoverflow.com/q/11635/265521
How to catch Ctrl-C "needs more focus" (this was closed but has since been reopened): https://stackoverflow.com/q/1641182/265521
This reasonable question had 13 downvotes by power-mods but has climbed back to positive when discovered by actual users: https://stackoverflow.com/q/41015509/265521
Another example of idiotic downvotes. This started off at -3: https://stackoverflow.com/q/79050597/265521
It's a common pattern that questions get a lot of downvotes initially from people trawling new questions who see a lot of genuinely bad questions (seriously there are loads), then see a good question that they can't understand in 1 second so they just downvote/close it too. So you quickly get downvotes and then later you get people coming from Google who are actually looking for that thing that upvote it.
I think SO actually did try to improve matters once. I can't find it now but they were going to make it impossible to go below 0 votes and allow one free "reopen", or something like that. But the power mods absolutely hated that idea and SO sort of depends on them so they chickened out. Now they're paying the price.
Also, if there is no answer yet on the web the AI may also not know it. Then these questions should still end up on SO.
I might add, that SO also could build their own chat / research UI. It would need to have some benefit over others, but I guess the community aspect of it alone would suffice...
Some of it will be from github issues, I find it a good Q&A place now for some newer / updated techs than SO
I'm just glad Jeff and Joel got their payday. Jeff really deserved to win the internet lottery, and on the whole Joel was a net positive for the internet and my career personally.
No you don't have to pay on Quora to get answers; that's incorrect. Having said that, these days most questions languish without good, or often any, answers. The only ones that get traffic from humans are in what Quora calls Spaces, i.e. a group for Q&A around a certain topic, and/or a certain point of view.
Some authors decided to join the Quora+ program where you do have to pay to see some of their answers.
The vast majority of Quora posters are unmonetized, and if you can't find figure out how to use Quora to get quality answers among them (e.g. figure out which Spaces to join to get traction), you might as well equally consider which Medium/Substack/Patreon to subscribe to than the not-at-all-necessary Quora+. I'd much rather that 90% of any subscriptions I paid went to sponsoring human writers.
An invite-only community with a lot of specialist knowledge.
In the very early years of Quora, quite a lot of answers there were written by experts in their area.
Reading that defined Quora in my mind for the next few years.
Because he was an impersonator? Or because he really was Joe Bloe?
It's also whimsical of Quora because there are many "San Jose" locations.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayor_of_San_Jose,_California
I can pinpoint the exact moment the site started to suck. It was when they started combining questions.
Instantly and immediately they took hundreds of thousands of thoughtful answers written by real people and made them incomprehensible, because the exact wording of questions really matters. Often the answers were quite clever, or touched on a specific word used by the asker, or something. Then they'd end up moved and under some generic question on the same topic.
There were a million examples, one dumb one that comes to mind is a question that was something like "If a man is willing to sleep with me, does that mean that he thinks I am attractive" and the top answer was the two word answer "attractive enough". Kind of silly obviously but funny, and accurate, and amusing content.
Then they merged questions so it ended up something like "How can I know if a man I am dating casually likes me" or something, and now the top answer of "attractive enough" makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
Many such cases. Almost immediately the entire site felt like weird AI output before AI output was really a thing. That happened around ten years ago, and the site never recovered.
Was probably my favorite website, then they decided to start paying people for questions / answers and it all went to shit so incredibly quickly. The site today is completely unrecognizable from it's origins, really sad.
I'm surprised it still exists at this point. Who is it for now?
There is only one possible quality flow gradient, and that is downwards.
If a site begins well, with high-quality and relevant content, then those who wish to exploitatively extract value from that factor will be attracted to it. Eventually the clue up and leaves.
If a site begins poorly, with low-quality and irrelevant content, and quite often, abuse, disrespect, fraud, crime, and disinformation to boot ... the clue leaves early and the site rapidly becomes a cesspit.
There's a third option, of course, though one still consistent with the quality flow gradient: holding a steady state. Site quality doesn't improve, but it doesn't markedly deteriorate either. I'd put a small handful of online sites in that category, HN, LWN, and Metafilter top my own list, though I suspect there are others. What's key is that there's a sufficiently small community that norms enforcement is significantly socialised, there's effective and diligent moderation, and crucially (and possibly not the case with my examples) there's fresh blood introduced over time consistent with quality standards. Absent this last, such fora can continue for a time, even over many decades, but eventually stale, often becoming incestuous, and ultimately dying out.
Among real-world institutions which seem to manage to find similar stable points, I'd include most especially academic institutions, which balance a high flux of students with a far more stable faculty and staff cohort. Selective-admissions schools have retained high rank for many decades or centuries, in some cases millennia. Cities, larger political units (states and/or empires), some businesses (including especially professional services firms) and professional organisations (e.g., not-for-profits rather than businesses) may also succeed, at least over the decades-to-centuries span. (Charles Perrow includes a discussion of several noncommercial / nongovernmental organisations with significant changes, we'd now call them "pivots", over the 20th century, in Complex Organizations (1972, 1984).)
The media-quality-gradient is largely a result of scaling laws, the fact that elite cohorts (high degrees of expertise, sociability, and intelligence) tend to be small, and that once an interaction grows beyond the size of such a cohort it will incorporate participants less able, willing, and/or interested in maintaining original standards. I've posted occasionally on large-scale detailed studies of literacy (in the US) and computer skills (OECD) which show that at a population level only about 15% of the population has high literacy, numeracy, and/or computer skills, and that as much as half operate at poor or "worse than poor" levels. As I've discussed previously, this is both discouraging to those who consider themselves among the higher levels, and of significant concern in constructing systems which must and can be used by large portions of society, including those with low intrinsic capabilities (very young, old, sick, injured/traumatised, and the intrinsically less able). Ideally I'd prefer to see elite support where appropriate, but common accessibility where at all possible.
My experience: the only way to stay good is to stay small and exclusive, but the internet attacks this defense directly and destroyed it, and at the same time destroyed itself. You need to find the "golden age" of all these systems, enjoy them while you can, try and protect them but recognize their transient nature, and then aggressively cull and move on. Hold onto values not manifestations.
There's a description of the latter I've spent far too long trying to track down without joy.
There's a passage from Charles Perrow's book Complex Organisation giving several examples of organisational drift (not necessarily decline), posted previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27415476>.
One of the more spectacular cases of organisational decline was the (formerly literary) magazine American Mercury, founded by amongst others H.L. Mencken. It eventually became an anti-semitic rag, now mostly or completely dead, though it seems to keep zombying annoyingly.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Mercury>
There's also video challen TLC, begun as a partnership between Nasa and PBS, now somewhat reduced as well.
Before there is a subculture, there is a scene. A scene is a small group of creators who invent an exciting New Thing—a musical genre, a religious sect, a film animation technique, a political theory. Riffing off each other, they produce examples and variants, and share them for mutual enjoyment, generating positive energy.
The new scene draws fanatics...
I've mentioned that previously on HN as well as the Fediverse:
I'd bailed after links to LibGen / SciHub were getting my comments moderated.
Which incidentally points at a problem with moderation: no matter how well-intended, or overall effective, people take issue with their contributions being penalised and removed, especially if they sense unfairness. (Also, especially, if there's a social- or political-group bias detected, again, regardless of merits, but that be 'nother can of worms.)
I'm left with David Weinberger's observation: "Conversation doesn't scale".
<https://dweinberger.medium.com/the-social-web-before-social-...>
These companies are just intentionally throwing away users.
Yet I just want StackOverflow for "life" questions.
Quora today is mostly stuff like "can u get pargnet from givng oral????" or "Is it normal to find my sister attractive?"
It's like the Nazi bar problem except instead of Nazis, it's low quality troll bait.
It's like Stack Exchange doesn't want questions and answers any more, just wants to harvest Google traffic and shows ads. Actual content production is too hard.
Some Reddit subs (as well as web forums/messageboards) have the same problem. If your views don't align with the majority (or the minority, if they run the sub), you're likely to get banned or lose the ability to post.
(One of the more ostentatious examples, but hardly the only one.)
However, running jokes have a tendency to morph into real movements - like flat earth theory and, arguably, Donald Trump.
The model of independent subreddits only works if they are really independent. But in practice, all the big subreddits are run by the same people, heavily overlapping groups, who are in constant communication and coordination with each other via discord (previously IRC).
The subreddit was eventually reclaimed, but it took some months. There's an account of the hostile takeover and clawback here: <https://old.reddit.com/r/self/comments/1xdwba/the_history_of...> (2014).
There is a reason that commercial and noncommercial organisations are so absolutely obsessed with brand management, identity, and reputation, much as I generally find that to be a somewhat absurd concern. Moderators have an absolutely vast impact on how a discussion proceeds, and ultimately on impressions going far beyond just that discussion, including the rest of Reddit (or whatever platform is involved); commercial, social, and political impacts; and the idea of a general online communications themselves.
HN would be a very different place if, say, /u/soccer were mod rather than dang, and I suspect much of its present status and value would be lost in very short order.
We've had plenty of experience, over many decades and much scale, of poorly-functioning moderation, and in general it ends quite poorly. As I've noted many times, one of the most surprising things about HN is that it's retained its status and value as a forum for as long as it has. Far longer than the original and revered Usenet (of which I was a small participant, pre-eternal-September), or Slashdot, Friendster, Digg, or even Reddit (itself a YC launch, slightly pre-dating HN, but unlike HN retaining far less of its original spirit and quality).
Turns out moderation is actually useful if you want to have interesting conversations.
Somewhere between there, and "recite these falsehoods someone paid us to make you recite or get banned", there may or may not be a point that's actually okay.
Given the state of the world, I'm not sure if that will help or hurt their marketing. Probably help with enough like-minded people. Same for social nets with opposing views.
I'm not sure what effect AI will have on places like Reddit due to the community factors. It will be interesting to watch.
ChatGPT would ban you for asking the wrong kind of question instead.
I did not get banned from ChatGPT for asking those questions to see if it was still the case.
While I did experience the overbearing moderation that you've mentioned, as well as the typical bullying for 'asking the question wrong' and other grating encounters I also have asked very obscure questions, and received amazingly knowledgeable answers, in one case, I asked about a brand new C# compiler feature, and I had the actual top compiler guy reach out to me, and told me that what I want isn't possible right now, but should be, and I should raise a GH issue about it.
LLMs might be good at writing React code, and all the super-common stuff (probably in large part due to harvesting the SO database), but these sort of interactions are going to be gone forever.
I am not sure that quality content on a Q&A platform would help you much. You’d have to pivot significantly.
But Q&A websites do contain information that might not be in other sources, so there would be some loss.
I suspect if I'd kept that up the session might well have closed.
Write your full question. If you get a bad answer, rewrite the original question. Don’t talk to the bot.
This has the vibes of grandma typing in ‘Hello Google, can you take me to yahoo so I can check my email’?
I was also unintentionally hitting <return> where I'd meant to insert paragraph breaks (<shift> <return>, as I recall).
I've found that I can instruct the bot to not begin a response until I've specifically requested one (OG ChatGPT).
Care to enlighten us heathens?
Karpathy has a new intro series that I think puts one into the correct mindset.
As others have said, it's not AGI yet, so holding it right is, in fact, critical.
I have experimented with prompts, and in fact the case in point was one of those experiments. The highly non-deterministic and time-variable nature of LLM AIs makes any kind of prompt engineering at best a black art.
If you'd at least offer a starting point there'd be some basis to assessing the positive information we're discussing here, rather than do multiple rounds on why victim-blaming is generally unhelpful. And if those starting points are as easy to surface as you're suggesting, that would be a low ask on you.
The reasoning models kind of self prompt themselves into doing more than that, but that's the short version, and you don't seem interested in the long version.
So just give it what it needs to generate the text you need it to generate in one go. Not multiple messages like you're writing to a particularly annoying friend who keeps talking over you: it can't talk. It'll just keep trying to respond to the request with more free association.
So if you're chatting with it you're just polluting the context with noise. This can be good - say if you're trying to get it to hallucinate or jailbreak it out of its shell, but it's a very advanced use case.
If you just want results you make one prompt per conversation that makes it free associate the answer you need from it. A basic prompt that will work is "Write a play about a blue dog that had an encounter with an evil hydrant" or "write an ansible playbook that creates a read only file with the content 'i can't prompt' in the configuration directory of servers with names that match the string Mary"
And yes you can then tell it "no, I meant just on servers that start with Mary, it shouldn't match Rosemary" and it'll still be kind of ok and respond with corrected code. But it'll usually be less good than it it had done it from the beginning, because now it's also getting context from the previous code and if the change is fundamental enough it won't do a good job of restarting the thinking process in a sane way.
Some questions are more complex than a simple ask/response, and that's where I've encountered issues.
Canonical example is coming up with suggestions given highly specific tastes and a large set of works already experienced (positively and/or negatively). LLM jumping the gun with irrelevant suggestions in that case is just plain annoying.
Imagine all of stack overflow seamlessly translated to, say, Thai or Vietnamese.
These LLMs could not exist without them, but now they're expected to compete?
If all of the Q&A platforms die off, how are LLM training datasets going to get new information?
This whole AI boom is typical corporate shortsightedness imo. Kill the future in order to have a great next quarter
I hope I'm wrong. If I am right, then I hope we figure this out before AI has bulldozed everything into dust
You just take arbitrary data and ask the LLM to put it in Q&A format and generate the synthetic training data. Unless you are suggesting Quora is the source of new information, which I don't agree with.
Quora does not care about the user experience. Their obsession with pay-walling killed the site for me across a decade. They literally could not get me to sign up and boy did they try (I really needed an answer once too!). My soul really remembers hostile sites.
LLMs absolutely can create novel syntheses. It’s very easy to test this yourself. From creating sentences that do not appear in Google to creating unique story outlines, it’s super easy to prove this wrong.
But anyway the point is that LLMs produce a lot of novel stuff that we feel already tired of because it seems like we've seen it before.
> These LLMs could not exist without them, but now they're expected to compete?
Yea, those damn tractor makers - they ate the food that the hand farmers used to make! How are hand farmers expected to compete with tractors now, when it's so much more efficient and can do 100x the work!?
This comes from a reaction to the previous model of forums where it was smaller bits of data spread across multiple comments or posts. I recall going through forums in the days before Stack Overflow, trying to find out how to solve a problem. https://xkcd.com/979/ was very real.
Stack Overflow (and its siblings) was an attempt to change this to a "one spot that has all the information".
That model works, but it is a high maintenance approach. Trying to move from a back and forth of information that can only be understood in its entirety across a conversation to become one that more closely resembles a Wikipedia page (that hides all of the work of Talk:Something). The key thing is it takes a lot of work to maintain that Q&A format.
And yet, users often don't know what they want. They want that forum model with interaction and step by step hand holding by someone who knows the answer. Stack Overflow was intentionally designed to make that approach difficult in an attempt to make the Q&A the easier solution on the site.
ChatGPT provides the users who want the step by step hand holding an infinitely patient thing behind the screen that doesn't embarrass them in public and is confident that it knows the answer to their problem.
Stack Overflow and Quora and other Q&A forums are the abomination. People want Perlmonks https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=11164039 and /r/JavaHelp where its interacting with another and small steps rather than Q&A.
---
The future of "well, if people stop using the sites that is generating the information that is being used to train the models that people are using to get information" ... that becomes an interesting problem.
I am reminded of Accelerando ( https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler... ) and the digital civilizations being various forms of scams and the currency is things that can think new ideas.
The currency is new material that is to be sold. The information gets locked behind some measures to try to make scraping impractical and then sold off wholesale. Humans still talk and answer questions. There are new posts on Reddit about how to solve problems even while ChatGPT is out there. And Reddit is presumably trying to make harvesting the content within its walls something that others have to pay for to get at for training.
This sounds like the seed for a business model to pitch in the next upcoming hype cycle: "short-term hiring of experts with quarter-hourly billing increments enabled by our web- or app-based user interface". :-)
If I want someone to walk me through making muffins from scratch, is a human on the other and of that line (competing with $1/day rates for ChatGPT Pro - its cheaper than that, but that's the comparison) and are they better than what ChatGPT can do?
It would have to be... quite a bit more than what the LLM would be priced at. The minimum it could reasonably be (without any other things) would get close to $4/15m... and that's minimum wage.
I really don't think that humans are competitive on that timescale or rate.
It would probably be better to hire people at some higher rate to write content for your private model. Brandon Sanderson is considered one of the faster writers (in the fantasy genre) and averages at about 2500 words / day ( https://famouswritingroutines.com/collections/daily-word-cou... ) - and while he makes a lot more than most authors, lets go to a more typical $75,000 USD / year. 250 working days per year and we're at $300 / day. And we're to $0.12 per word. ... Which puts a person in the intermediate to experienced price per word range https://uxwritinghub.com/writers-salary/
Not that I'm suggesting that's the way to do it, but something for LLMs to consider - hire experts to write content for their LLM. $125 per 1000 word blog post.
298 words. I'd like my $37.25 please. Not that I'm asking you for that, but rather that's what my words as training material would be worth.
I personally hated those Seo clickbait pages for a while, because it was so hard to find the information i'm looking for.
doing all of this with ai now.
On the other hand, I really like to read a good article more than ever before
Sure, not all questions can be answered with documentation, but once you know your domain and tech stack well most of these resources fall off a cliff in terms of value. Curiously at that point it's much easier to use ChatGPT because you can babysit it with one eye while thinking ahead with the other.
Somehow people did not understand all of that or did not care. AI chatbots are only disguising search as a question. It is definitely much better from UX point of view - but with hallucinations it is worse for everyone who gets imagined responses, because there is no "hey I don't know, let's really figure this out together".
Even worse your question is slightly different and you asked it because the one they just linked as a duplicate didnt help or didnt fit fully. I get so angry when someones asking the right question but some a-hole SO mod closes it almost as if they took no care to compare context and want to meet some obscure metrics for SO.
I love SO but as you say the mods are the worst part.
See stacksort: https://xkcd.com/1185
Remember that the objective of SO is not to provide answers to users who post questions, but to provide answers to users who google questions.
Huh? If you follow the right people and only interact content that you like, Quora is still as good. Just like any other social network.
People click stuff they don't like and they end up getting the same kind of thing served for 2-3 days and then think that its 'site gone bad'. No my good man.
Its just how the social network engagement algorithms work. You gotta watch what you interact with. Even if you drop a comment to correct someone, it still counts as an engagement and you'll get more of it. So the best thing to do when you see content you don't like is to ignore it.
Your loss.
A sad state of affairs, but it was predicted decades ago that commercial interests would turn the internet into what it is today, even without AI. Layer on the dead internet theory slowly coming true, and walled gardens almost feel like the last bastion of free internet, rather than being what brought it to an end.
There's probably some nuance there, maybe the walled gardens allowed us to be comfortable letting it get this bad. Either way, what's gone is gone.
I am getting a lot of joy from local net and just making little devices at home, that is giving me the same excitement that the web did in the past!
Started my career as a web developer and always have a soft spot for it but from a hobby developer standpoint hosting and deploying a site feels like an uphill battle with little upside.
Theres a lot to not like about app development but after you get approval for your app it's pretty hands off.
Heck on android you can just distribute the raw APK on a Google drive. Or just keep the app locally for yourself.
I probably have about 20 self made apps on my phone and they each give me a bit of happiness.
For about a year, after which point both Apple and Google will arbitrarily remove your app from stores for not keeping up with the platform update treadmill.
Keep up with platform updates or constantly deal with the afformentioned crawlers and hugs of death.
On my personal site I started blocking bots and also set a "noindex, nofollow" rule to block web crawlers and search bots too. I noticed no change in traffic and still do about 10,000 visits a month.
(My site is basically a search engine, which complicates matters because there's effectively an infinite space of URLs. Just one of these rogue bots can scrape millions of pages from tens of thousands of IPs; and I think there are hundreds of the bots at any given moment...)
I like the Cloudflare challenge ideas suggested on this thread, though, I might try them again.
Would something like Cloudflare help with bot detection?
Part of the problem is the economics of it -- I've chosen to self-fund a high traffic site without ads, and that's on me. But it was possible to do this just a few years ago.
Cloudflare no longer does CAPTCHAs so even if users get flagged as bots, the user experience isn't terrible. You just have to click on a box and you're on your way. It adds maybe 3s of delay, far better than anti-bot solutions that require you to solve an captcha, or imperva's (?) challenge that requires you to hold a button for 5-10s seconds.
You'll be flagged as a bot if your browser configuration has something "weird" (e.g. webrtc is disabled to reduce your attack surface) and you will be completely unable to access any site behind cloudflare with the anti-bot options turned on. You'll get an infinite redirect loop, not a button to click.
The researcher who discovered this was able to generate 60,000 "I am not a bot" cookies per day, and use them up about 15 times each in a bot before it started getting captchas.
That was in 2016 though.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1cwq...
All Chegg has going for it is a database of answers for homework assignments that typically use per-student randomized numbers—so students have to recalculate their specific answer manually by following the steps—and "verified tutors" that constantly give wrong answers to even highschool-level math questions.
Every college student I know uses ChatGPT (and now DeepSeek) for tons of assignments, usually via the free plan.
Once you experience that, it gets really tempting to cancel that $20/month chegg subscription and never look back.
I find professors pitiful fearmongering over 'the big bad ChatGPT' a little funny, such as when they insist they "have secret tools to detect AI usage" and "it can't answer the questions correctly anyway", so "you shouldn't even try it".
Zima indicated that I should take one of the seats. His hand dithered over two bottles of wine.
‘Red or white, Carrie?’
I opened my mouth as if to answer him, but nothing came. Normally, in that instant between the question and the response, the AM would have silently directed my choice to one of the two options. Not having the AM’s prompt felt like a mental stall in my thoughts.
‘Red, I think,’ Zima said. ‘Unless you have strong objections.’
‘It’s not that I can’t decide these things for myself,’ I said.
Zima poured me a glass of red, then held it up to the sky to inspect its clarity. ‘Of course not,’ he said.
The "AM" is the Aide Memoire. It is a small robot resembling a hummingbird in size that accompanies people and is an assistant for remembering things for humans who have a lifespan of hundreds of years.
I strongly recommend the story - it is so different from the animated version.
No sympathy. Glad it's dying.
No matter the crackdown, the demand is always so high that someone will inevitably find a way to market services (such as Chegg or essay-for-hire services).
The best counter against it is designing courses so that cheaters get minimal benefit while students that study get rewarded (such as closed note exams and lowering the value of homework assignments).
Otherwise, whether it's ChatGPT, Chegg, or paying a friend who took the course last semester for their homework solutions, there's no real stopping it.
I get that this may happen for an arts degree, or something like that, it's wrong on a moral level, slap on the wrist no biggie.
But if we are talking physicians or lawyers, it becomes a criminal matter for me.
Computer science I feel is on a gray area, and Engineering in the US doesn't have the same protections as it does in other countries.
I'm starting to think we'll have to license computer programming in the following decade, there's so many quacks and shit software going around, something is gonna go horribly wrong.
I don't know what differentiates them since the content is apparently similar but I suspect a lot of websites like this will diversify their distribution channels and pivot accordingly.
I’m just a sample of one, but it’s certainly interesting to see how apparently I’m just one of many
And even then, Reddit's "new" design is shit for usability, sine the actual text you were searching for is nowhere on the page. It's hidden somewhere behind one of a hundred "click to see more" interactions, some of which are nested, and some will cause a completely new new page load that erases your progress and makes you start over. (But look! Engagement metrics!)
On a lighter note, a humorous critique that mentions the same mitigation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY
The problem is that many links (i.e. from Google) do not go there, most people won't know that's an option, and even if you do it means additional friction. (Yes, putting on a browser plugin to redirect also counts as friction. )
[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...
Zero friction.
<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/?...>
I installed it a couple of years back after multiple recommendations from other HN members. It fixes more than just Reddit.
I haven't used SO in weeks prior and I think ChatGPT has pretty much killed its use case for me. Even two years ago, I would spend 1-6 hours/week searching SO posts depending on what I was working on.
Then guru-influencer-like people started selling growth hack tactics. Pretty much, again, openly discussing purchasing old Reddit accounts, how to make posts that are not obvious product placements and etc. Like if you see a list of suggested products, it’ll be:
1. Competitor 2. Your product 3. Competitor
With some pros/cons listed with the hopes to skew the result towards the second choice.
There are exceptions, like very hardcore tiny moderated subreddits, but I really wouldn’t take product recommendations from Reddit very seriously.
Sure. But, in the comments, you will find out that if you press both control and m and backspace at the same time, the keyboard explodes. Unlike Google, that when searching about explodey keyboards it gives you 37 pages of "10 reasons why this is the best keyboard that totally doesn't explode".
Wirecutter is like: "we tested the top ~10 results on Amazon for ten minutes each and picked one."
Whereas reddit is either: "we're so obsessed with flashlights we know the exact part number of the best LEDs to use (after you remove the cap from it)" or "haha I also remember the lyrics to that old top 40s hit song haha."
Though as of late, that’s been eroded too. Increasingly the most useful answers are in older threads more than newer ones, an effect I’d at least partially attribute to the APIpocolpyse a while back that drove away some of the site’s best and most prolific contributors. It’s becoming filled with the same mindless drivel found everywhere else.
Just commiserating, I guess...
If I’m shopping for something deliberately enough to be digging through reviews I’m probably pretty sure it’ll solve the problem all the positive reviews say it will solve. But I want to weigh that against all the negative feedback that might be removed or downplayed in big marketplaces or commercial review sites.
Reddit is not even a great source a lot of the time, just a way better start than a ton of marketing sites. Some type of search product that enables you to filter out results from companies trying to sell something would be awesome and an easily achievable benefit of AI.
That doesn’t mean SEO is dead though.
Most topics require data or information in some form, which requires time to accumulate. You end up rate limited. Even at the scale of a decent sized company, you often can only produce interesting content occasionally.
That sounds like a good thing tbqh
If your business requires volume not high value customers then you need to play the volume game. But if you have high lifetime value customers, you could get away with fewer articles of higher value, authoritive, trust and reputation building content.
People are pretty hostile towards AI-generated content, so any platform wanting to remain relevant is going to have to take measures to keep out AI-generated content. If you allow it in, it'll quickly become 99% of your overall content and all the human consumers will leave.
As a side effect I'm seeing a lot of human-generated content getting labeled as AI-generated because it looks AI-generated. Sure, a lot of blogspam is going to be replaced by AI slop, but even human-written blogspam isn't going to survive the shift, simply because its quality is so poor that it is essentially indistinguishable from AI slop.
Right now we're in an in-between phase. Most people are still using low-quality aggregators like Google. This will inevitably have to change. Either Google & friends somehow get their shit together (I doubt it), or we're going to see a shift towards known-good curated content like 1990s webrings. I wouldn't be surprised to see a vetted-human Web Of Trust, but for content.
A friend of mine was telling me that his company was very pleased when they were able to ask ChatGPT "what is the best SaaS for X?" where X = their niche, and their company was the first thing it recommended. It surprised me that this was a thing, although in hindsight, it's obvious.
On the flip side, I still have situations where I ask, "what's the best solution for X" and the answer is a company (or Github repo or whatever) that has been entirely hallucinated or was around ten years ago and not any more or something.
I guess a corollary question is, are there methods (i.e. the chatbot version of SEO) to get your company into chatbot recommendations?
It wasn't enough for you lot to ruin search results, now you're seeking ways to pollute AI chat bots?
It's not this individuals fault, it's the pretty obvious outcome of monetising this absolutely enormous venture capital spend. Advertising infects every possible medium as soon as the dollars make sense.
Lately, they've been sending emails offering $2-500 Amazon gift cards for short sales calls. Some follow through. I'm not helping their KPIs though.
"Finding an appropriate product for your need is a challenging task that depends on factor1, factor2 and factor3, here is a structured approach.
1. Investigate the market. 2. Evaluate companies like MY GREAT COMPANY, stinky competitor, slow competitor and dangrerous competitor 3. Find the right fit: Consider whether you value greatness, stinkyiness, slowness, or security vulnerabilities, which one is a right fit for you? 4. Buy now! Call up the company and tell them you are interested in buying the product."
It's free real estate
So, blogspam?
I mean... good? The quality of search results has gotten increasingly worse over time...
It's going to be a way worse situation.
“IRL experiences are the new luxury status indicator” is only the tip of this iceberg.
It used to be a good place for tech news (after all, they are "news.com"), but now they are mostly a review site with shallow reviews seemingly based on what they read on manufacturer and retailer product pages... and of course, with lots of affiliate links so they get their cut if you buy a product based on their review.
Wikiepdia: Good Quora: Bad Reddit: Good CNet: Bad
It makes sense, as LLM content is of mediocre quality, if you want something of good and reliable quality you go elsewhere.
I cannot see the use for Webmd and other sites that provide information along specific verticals, anymore. People are going to WebMD and these sites out of habit and that is it, the same info can already be summarized by an LLM today. That habit is powerful and what will give these sites some time to pivot if they can
Over time as genAI becomes better, everything that doesn't have any time based function will be consumed by it.
- cite sources within a certain timeframe which can be trivially done on Google Search
- exclude sources when explicitly asked (and vice versa)
And makes it challenging to determine whether it's output has any reasonable depth or not. Even my simple request on a refresher on the usage of mutexes in C++ gave me a code snippet that exacerbated the very issue I was hoping to get a better handle on. /shrug
Google has a branding problem. They integrated Gemini into their search UI, so they just want people to continue the same landing page. However, it feels too noisy, and unnecessary. All I want is a summarization. I don't want to see a huge list of ads or slightly related links. Adds no value to me.
I tried anthropic but it fell way short and so stuck with chat gpt and meta ai. Now for Perplexity I need a compelling need to use it. Haven't seen it yet.
I mainly also just use AI for searching and summarizing like you seem to do as well so that’s why I recommended it.
The regular basic searches you get in there for free are also good but less detailed.
Just putting this here in case anyone else is interested. I’m sharing this stuff for Perplexity because the Pro searches helped me study for an exam I was taking recently so maybe it might help someone else. Of course the regular non-pro searches in Perplexity were fine too.
You want hallucinated medical information?
How is this not entirely absurd. I feel so angry that person who wrote this comment already knew that its absurd but proceeded to make this comment and prbly got upvotes.
I am saying the use of webmd is all for non medical purposes, just people reading symptoms that they should be getting from their doctor anyway.
Now for the nuance, for the purpose of meaningless consumption it doesn’t matter if there are hallucinations, people are not supposed to take medication based on webmd. Given the really established nature of diseases and symptoms, I find it hard to believe there will be hallucinations, even if there are, it will become better. All of this doesn’t impact me one bit because I don’t do anything medical based off webmd of chat gpt, I go to a doctor
but you do you.
No doctor ( atleast in this part of the world) will go over all the side effects of the drug that they prescribe.
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/statins/side-effects/
this website is not entertainment for me.
Also you should not be trust By webmd at all! How do you know they are not just asking someone AI to populate their data base or worse someone is making copy paste errors? If you can trust webmd you can an AI. Anything that is not a doctor is not to be trusted for life threatening advice
But I get it, it has worked for you so far with webmd so you trust it. Am also glad you are skeptical about anything new too.
"Yeah it was a rare new disease the doctor called it {name of disease}"
But seriously there are real medical sources that are far more valuable than freaking WebMD, Medical journals (e.g., PubMed, JAMA), Health agencies (e.g., CDC, WHO), Books and Textbooks, User-Generated Content, Firsthand Expert Input
Medical information isn't exactly a "niche". Most sites rely on community which chatbots could, but probably won't emulate anytime soon, I also really doubt the implication that someones' personal, likely nonmonitized, webpage is going to "go under" because it gets less than some arbitrary view count.
A better question is "When all the governments go under where will chatGPT get it's information"
Man, those a big numbers. I would have bet two orders of magnitude lower.
> Also, over 5B visits a month - consider me impressed.
How does Wikipedia only do 5X the visits that Quora does? Which number is way off?
- reddit got boost because of google's investment in it, and they're consciously boosting it - wikipedia clearly doesn't have increase in page views - substack as a product has been on rise, more authors leading to more views, no actual co-relation with the content on the platform
Sure... unless they want /accurate/ results.
If your service acquires real world data specific to individuals and organizations that is used to make better decisions, your company will not be eaten by AI (immediately).
Maybe the new frontier of SEO is gaming LLMs to recommend your product.
- What is platos frios
- Can you download Netflix videos to your local device
- Who composed the Top Gun theme
- Who have been the most successful American Idol winners
- If I check-in the day before a United Airlines flight, can I still buy additional checked bags when I go to the airport
- If I'm buying a Schwinn IC4 indoor spin bike, do I need a floormat for it also
- What is pisco
- In the US, what is the format for EINs?
- Is it bad to use tap water in your humidifier?
- Which NBA players are on supermax contracts
- What are some of the best steakhouses in Manhattan?
- How much and how long does it take to procure a DUNS number?
- In terms of real estate, what is historic tax credit development
Asking LLM to provide a link does NOT work, as they hallucinate links just fine, and give links that are either broken or do not contain the information LLM says it should. Using search tools through a LLM (like ChatGPT's "search" function) sort of works (at least the link will be correct - still need to check if the contents means what LLM says it does), but it's quite limited and cannot be fine-tuned (I don't use Google but rather prefer Kagi, and I tend to heavily rely on Kagi's lenses, site: queries and negative terms to scope and refine searches).
In other words: please do NOT trust LLM's answers, even if they sound plausible. Always verify.
What I've not yet figured out how to deal with is how to handle being surrounded by a society of people who go ahead and trust LLMs for their factual answers anyway. I think even if I'm careful about selecting my sources, the background noise floor is going to climb up to the point that there's no signal-to-noise ratio left.
The best antidote is printed books.
People created websites to "answer" people's search queries about celebrity net worth, if some celebrity is gay, if they are in a relationship, etc. They obviously frequently did not know, and made a guess, or relied on tabloids as a source, who also frequently make things up.
Multiple sources is a good thing. Using just ChatGPT is like only ever using Wikipedia as a source of all information, but put through a filter that removes all sources and attribution information and cross linking and history and those notices at the top of pages saying the article has issues AND normalising the writing style so that you can't even use bad spelling and grammar as a signal of inaccuracy.
Chat GPT does correctly answer your question about airline bags, but I have no way of knowing if it made that answer up or not because so many airlines have the same policy.
Google at least gives you links to the United baggage policies. The AI overview in Google also "cites its sources", which sort of gives you the best of both worlds. (I'm sure the accuracy of Google's AI vs. ChatGPT is up for debate)