SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
After ChatGPT disruption, Stack Overflow lays off 28 percent of staff:
Stack Overflow used to be every developer's favorite site for coding help, but with the rise of generative AI like ChatGPT, chatbots can offer more specific help than a 5-year-old forum post ever could.
[...] You might think of Stack Overflow as "just a forum," but the company is working on a direct answer to ChatGPT in the form of "Overflow AI," which was announced in July. Stack Overflow's profitability plan includes cutting costs, and that's the justification for the layoffs. Stack Overflow doubled its headcount in 2022 with 525 people. ChatGPT launched at the end of 2022, making for unfortunate timing.
[... ] OpenAI is working on web crawler controls for ChatGPT, which would let sites like Stack Overflow opt out of crawling. [...] Chandrasekar has argued that sites like Stack Overflow are essential for chatbots, saying they need "to be trained on something that's progressing knowledge forward. They need new knowledge to be created."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday October 18 2023, @12:01PM (1 child)
Their explanation is overly positive.
What kills stack overflow is its primarily a karma farming site, SN is prevented the worst farming problems by having a level cap, so the answers on SO are now all poorly executed chatbot answers with the bot operators all upvoting each other's cut and pasted bot responses.
Its not that chatbot answers are so good; the problem is that site will no longer permit human answers, so why ask some idiot on SO to do a poor job of asking chatgpt for you then cut and paste the answers up for karma? Or rephrased what value does SO provide in being a very poorly designed web frontend to a chatbot, compared to existing web frontends for chatbots?
The problem with SO in the old days was the belief that scientific and technical truth is democratic; the problem with SO now is the hyper authoritarianism belief in chatbots. Its gone from various forms of sophistry mixed with "hey dude everyone knows the earth is flat so upvote with the winners and downvote the guy claiming its round like you're supposed to" to "hey dude I cut and pasted your answer into a chatbot mostly correctly for you, now give me my updoot for my irreplaceable service"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by OrugTor on Wednesday October 18 2023, @04:32PM
I have generally had a good experience on SO. The questions tend to be very specific, at least the genuine questions. There are still some "do my homework for me" questions. If I find the question that expresses my problem there are typically one or two distinct answers that work and several more where the question was misunderstood or the answer is some obvious remedy that is known not to work. I don't see GPT having much impact. Any answer coming from GPT will either be patently inadequate or specific and plausible enough to have been copied from a human-originated answer and therefore likely correct or at least it can be treated the same way as a human answer.
SO hired a bunch of people for whatever purpose and it didn't work out. I'm not convinced the layoffs have anything to do with AI.