I mean... Yeah. Alcohol is very well documented and even more widely used for exactly this purpose BECAUSE it works.
The side-effects are often terrible. This is also true for many widely-prescribed drugs, and has been even more true in the past. The folks I've known on MAOIs were pretty wrecked.
Crucially, SO's election system needs to be bootstrapped: users aren't eligible to vote until they have a history of participation. The level of participation is fairly trivial, but it provides enough signal to allow a reasonable detection (and elimination) of bot / sock puppet networks without resorting to crude measures like blacklists or "bot tests".
For new sites, this meant that the bulk of moderation was done by employees, followed by employee-appointed temporary moderators. This dramatically reduced abuse, but also reduced the explosion of new sub-communities that sites like Reddit thrived on.
Nail guns are great. For nails that fit into them and spaces they fit into. But if you can't hit a nail with a hammer, you're limited to the sort of tasks that can be accomplished with the nail guns and gun-nails you have with you.
That's the problem with solving a casually made metaphor instead of sticking to the original question. Since when is AI assisted coding only when you do 100% AI and not a single line yourself? That is only the extreme end! Same with the nails actually. I doubt the builders don't also have and use hammers.
> This is the way with many labor-saving devices.
I think that's more the problem of people using only the extremes to build an argument.
There was definitely a bit of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy [0] at work. I worked there during a lot of the drama you allude to, and... It sucked, for everyone. But also...
For most of SO's history, the vast majority of visitors (and this questions, answers) came in via Google. Not "search engines"; Google. This was pretty much baked in right at the start, and it effectively served as the site's primary user interface for years. And it worked. It worked pretty well! Until it didn't.
At some point, Google started surfacing fewer "tried and true" Q&A examples and more unanswered, poorly-answered or moderated examples. This broke the fundamental assumption that sat behind SO's moderation - that curating a smaller set of posts was preferable to encouraging more, and newer. Suddenly, Google wasn't a very good UI for SO anymore.
...and SO didn't really have a fallback. Heck, for a while during this period they actually stopped showing questions on their homepage unless you were already logged in; the core assumption remained that there was a never-ending spring of new people feeding the thing. LLMs weren't the start of the problem, they were the end - the final wake-up call.
I don't know that a site like SO can exist without the old Google, the old Internet; it is a product of all that, in the same way that mass-market TV shows were a product of 20th-century broadcast technology, or trade paperbacks of a particular intersection of printing tech and reading habits.
Believe me, I'm full of vision (and hope). But it's hard to write stuff when there's so much to write that I can't find a natural starting point, and when the (lack-of-)network effects are so brutal.
I don’t think there’s anything virtuous or non-virtuous about it. The internet is a big place and search engines aren’t optimized to produce results according to singular sites’ idiosyncrasies.
The obvious flaw in Stack Overflow’s bias toward closing new questions is that over time the best pages are also the oldest and most stale. They even locked questions with enough answers to prevent new content from being added, guaranteeing that they became stale.
Yet at the same time they allowed new questions to be asked and indexed by search engines, but didn’t allow new answers to that new content. So the freshest and most recent content was also the worst.
I don’t see this as a “Google bad” moment. It’s a failure of Stack Overflow in clinging to their oldest content and building rules that made all new posts frustrating and unhelpful.
It worked that way for its first ten plus years. Why would it change? Why/How could you plan for an unknown future. Personally I’m horrible at predicting the future, so I don’t blame them.
> the core assumption remained that there was a never-ending spring of new people feeding the thing.
Hi Shog, hope you're doing well! Just thought this bit was insightful; I can fully believe this was the idea and the motivating factor for a lot of the decisions made seemingly in a vacuum (from the outside).
How much do you think Area51 and the push for the SE network rather than sticking with the Big Three affected things? I always got the impression that they tried to scale into places that ultimately attracted too much noise and overestimated the willingness of (community) moderators to effectively work for free for them to take on the wave of less technical/principled users.
There was some of that for sure; sites that were all but designed to be attractive nuisances and took near-heroic efforts to moderate at all, with little chance of not causing a lot of drama.
OTOH, topic-specific sites like Mathematics, MathOverflow, Physics, even small ones like Home Improvement or Seasoned Advice... Managed to collect a lot of good stuff: common niche questions with good answers that have a good chance at staying relevant for a long time to come.
In a sane world, a few relevant ads on these sites would be enough to fund them for decades. But that appears to be another area where Google kinda shit the bed.
It has been ... Borderline creepy... Watching how folks - including some professional writers - have adapted their workflows to the capabilities of LLMs, treating them as a copywriter whose input is a spec and for whose output they are the editor.
Because it seems natural to me; that's how I've always written... Except, I'm also the bot. Just turn off part of my brain and an endless stream of verbiage emerges, vaguely centered around a theme... Then the real work begins: editing for relevance and imposing a coherent structure.
So, I don't really fault anyone who adopts these new tools for the task. But I have some strong feelings about the lazy editing.
Shog9, excellent comment and very apt. I have to point out that you were also part of the toxicity and bad tone. You very much were part of the problem. Moderation and staff were very much the downfall.
Shog9 was probably the best person on staff in terms of awareness of the moderation problems and ability to come up with solutions.
Unfortunately, the company abruptly stopped investing in the Q&A platform in ~2015 or so and shifted their development effort into monetization attempts like Jobs, Teams, Docs, Teams (again), etc. -- right around the time the moderation system started to run into serious scaling problems. There were plans, created by Shog and the rest of the community team, for sweeping overhauls to the moderation systems attempting to fix the problems, but they got shelved as the Q&A site was put in maintenance mode.
It's definitely true that staff is to blame for the site's problems, but not Shog or any of the employees whose usernames you'd recognize as people who actually spent time in the community. Blame the managers who weren't users of the site, decided it wasn't important to the business, and ignored the problems.
But was “today “ that profitable? Stack overflow always struck me as a great public good and a poor way to make money. If the current business makes very little money, it may not be worth the work.
Can you provide an example? The only rude Shog9 posts I can think of were aimed at people abusing the system: known, persistent troublemakers, or overzealous curators exhibiting the kinds of behaviours that people in this thread would criticise, probably far more rudely than Shog ever did.
This sounds plausible - I grew up in the Midwestern US, and thus "vaguely passive-aggressive" is pretty much my native language. The hardest part of the job for me was remembering to communicate in an overtly aggressive manner when necessary, developing a habit of drawing a sharp line between "this is a debate" and "this is how it is."
Sometimes I put that line in the wrong place.
That said... I can't take credit for any major change in direction (or lack thereof) at SO. To the extent that SO succeeded, it did so because it collectively followed through on its mission while that was still something folks valued; to the extent that it has declined, it is because that mission is no longer valued. Plenty of other spaces with very different people, policies, general vibes... Have followed the same trajectory, both before SO and especially over the past few years.
With the benefits of hindsight, probably the only thing SO could have done that would have made a significant difference would have been to turn their Chat service into a hosted product in the manner of Discord - if that had happened in, say, 2012 there's a chance the Q&A portion of SO would have long ago become auxillary, and better able to weather being weaned from Google's feeding.
But even that is hardly assured. History is littered with the stories of ideas that were almost at the right place and time, but not quite. SO's Q&A was the best at what it set out to do for a very long time; surviving to the end of a market may have been the best it could have done.
I always found these discussions around the tone of SO moderation so funny—as a German, I really felt right at home there. No cuddling! No useless flattery! Just facts and suggestions for improvement if necessary, as it should be. Loved it at the time.
It's a solution. There are better solutions, and far worse solutions (anyone who has worked to get a deposit back on a college rental has probably developed a few of their own), and most of them are all still fine because drywall isn't (shouldn't be) structural.
Crucially, even if you are completely unwilling to take a stab at a fix yourself, hiring a local handyman to patch a hole via some good enough technique should still be far cheaper in most places than buying a nice new TV.
But nothing is gonna ever beat buying a 2nd-hand framed picture or plaque or movie poster or grabbing a flyer from the junkmail on your porch and tacking it over the hole... And if you're determined to fix holes with a TV, you can probably find one used for about as cheap / free as any of the other choices. Which is what makes this such a stupid example - the cost of TVs, like framed images or furniture, spans from $0 to "as much as you're willing to pay". Hiring someone can also be arbitrarily expensive, but can by definition never be 0. So the comparison is rhetorical trickery and demonstrates nothing.
...other than, apparently, Andreessen's dissatisfaction with paying tradespeople.
Android works great - lets you select the # and then gives you a context menu with the option to call (or copy, or search).
...unless someone made the phone # a tel: protocol link, in which case it has the selection behavior of any other link. Which is mostly fine, since "copy" is a context menu option for tel: links... unless some jerk put a tel: URL in that isn't the same number as what is shown in the text of the link, in which case it's time for some crazy hoop-jumping to either copy OR call the number.
FWIW, you can generally figure out what's allowed fairly quickly by checking the content model for a given element[1]. Some browsers might be more or less restrictive, but for normal usage this'll be more than enough to avoid unexpected behavior.
It does not. What it does do is submit the form, so if you trigger some fast change to the page or async behavior from the click event, you may never see it because the submission happens and the page reloads (or a different page loads if form action is set to a different URL). If you're relying on event bubbling, the click handler may run after the form is submitted, which is even less likely to do what you intend.
If you aren't expecting this (and don't know how to discover it e.g. by examining browser dev tools, server logs, etc.) then you'll assume the button is broken and... probably try something else.
Even if you do discover it, you may try something that won't quite have the same reliability - at one point it was common to see folks putting preventDefault() or return false in their click handlers to squelch the (correct) behavior, rather than changing the type of button.
Your control for this test should be (and maybe was, you don't say) running the furnace circulation fan without running the burner. CO2 levels are unlikely to be uniform throughout a building, and thus mixing will change (raise, lower) the CO2 levels depending on where you're measuring.
Better variable frequency drives for both fans and compressor is a big part of it (see other comments about being less prone to short-cycling).
This isn't exactly new or unique to heat pumps (and some older heat pumps lack both), but as the technology has gotten cheaper and more reliable, coupled with the drive for better efficiency, it has become commonplace.
The side-effects are often terrible. This is also true for many widely-prescribed drugs, and has been even more true in the past. The folks I've known on MAOIs were pretty wrecked.
reply