Why you should know: StackOverflow is facing a mod strike in a similar way as Reddit’s mod strike. They are doing this in response to StackOverflow’s failure to address it’s promises and provide moderation tools
Is there a FOSS alternative to stackexchange yet?
https://www.codidact.com/ was started in response to the previous round of exactly the same shitty behaviour from the stack exchange management a few years ago.
Unpopular opinion: for a beginner, ChatGPT gives way better answers than stackoverflow users. The advantage of ChatGPT is that I can command it to dumb it down. Stackoverflow users are used to answer in a language that resembles the language in documentations. They are dry, abstract, lack good examples to the point that the “foobar” shit triggers an immediate defensive reaction in my brain and are phrased for people who already understood a concept but need to refresh their knowledge. Their core problem, as is tradition in any IT field, is that they lack the empathy to understand the viewpoint of someone who understands less of something than they do. It’s like asking someone to teach you reading and getting a poem with the advice to just read it as an answer.
I can circumvent that via ChatGPT by asking it to ELI5. Also, I get an answer instantly, am not discouraged to ask further questions and not advised to read a link where a solution is offered in an equally difficult language.
People are saying that using ChatGPT doesn’t give accurate information and fails to convey important concepts, but I feel it’s actually the other way around. Since there is ChatGPT, I’m making way more progress than before.
I understand that users don’t want AI answers, but I also don’t get why anyone would want that on this platform. You can just, you know, use AI directly.
I’ve yet to get a useful answer out of chatgpt for a technical question. It’s good for fluffing up emails, but I haven’t been super impressed with any use case I’ve tried for it.
When I’ve used it for decently complex programming questions I’ve found it often likes to make up functions and libraries. It’ll be like just use this reasonable sounding function from this library, and I look it up and the library does not have that functionality at all. Over and over!
