If we do not stop to help each other, what do we become?

popularonion

> I reached out for help. The standard response from everyone fell between ignoring me or telling me I need to "do it myself". > You know who did help me? Random strangers on Stack Overflow. People who had nothing to gain from helping me other than just trying to help someone in need. This part makes the entire post sound like a parody. Maybe Jeff Atwood has a wicked, self-deprecating sense of humor? Yeah no, ask for help on Stack Overflow and you were were more likely to be met with castigation and snide remarks. It was such a breath of fresh air when ChatGPT let us not have to deal with that community anymore.

Cider9986

On the GrapheneOS forum, I enjoy answering the questions in a post of user who just set up their phone. AI does not have as good knowledge of the OS as frequent forum contributors. I'm sure plenty of people get by with AI help for their questions and there's likely little questions that hasn't been already discussed, but I love to see new people using the OS and it doesn't take long to give them an exact answer. The Flarum software that the forum runs is very fast, as well.

zorpner

Humans are social animals. It's true that not all of these interactions re positive, but so much of what drives us is not even related to acclaim or flattery, but merely interaction in a general sense. In a sense this is one of the true perils of LLM-style interaction (going back to Eliza, I guess) -- that we can not only potentially satisfy that drive mechanically, but do so in a way that's structurally produced by a commercial entity. Do you think that the models talking to you have your best interests at heart? They don't have any interest in you at all.

altcognito

We had better have even more time to help each other as a result of LLMs, or what are we even doing here? I realize that everything seems to be about increasing the pace of life, but this is another "chance" for humanity to figure things out.

sciencesama

Every scope of help commoditised. Help for late night drop. Uber ! Need for friendly food door dash !

runarberg

At some point LLM users and proponents have to come to terms with the fact that this has all been a massive theft of labor, including donated labor and mutual aid in forums such as Stack Overflow. Such a massive theft of labor will have negative consequences that we all have to live with.

pech0rin

Stack overflow was one of the best ways to learn and mature as an engineer “back in the day”. The meme is that devs would copy and paste and hope it worked. The reality was more like you had an obscure bug, you wrote a detailed and cohesive question, and you connected with people who were more knowledgable and would help you. It also sharpened your writing and thinking. By responding to questions you solidified your understanding of topics. It got a lot of hate for the moderation but I think that was mainly in huge communities where literally “dumb” questions got bombarded every minute. Smaller tech like Docker when it first arrived on the scene had communities that learned together. Spent a lot of time there when I was a few years out of school and still trying to figure out what it meant to be a software eng. It’s sad to see it become a ghost town and I think it’s a net negative for young engineers to have an all knowing entity spit out every answer.

hobo123

What a post. On Stack Overflow without karma you couldn't even comment on wrong answers, fix them or anything. I would spend time on there looking for questions I could answer in hope I could get enough karma, but I didn't. Deleted my account after a while and never looked back. Also toxic community in general. So glad now I can just spar with AI to troubleshoot stuff.

0xbadcafebee

> Perhaps the LLMs are a reminder that we should make an extra effort to cultivate relationships with each other and form communities online – communities that belong to us, not some billionaire Quick, remove this from HN before the investors see it! Seriously though, there's so many posts "about AI" that amount to "is AI going to ruin humanity?" and I find it so tiresome. It's just a tool, people. Tools don't stop people from being people. If anything the problem is it makes people more peopley . The telephone didn't end in-person socialization, and neither did books, television, VHS, video games, the internet, etc. These are technologies that, despite allowing you to distance yourself from people and get information without talking to a person, actually brought people together more. Six million years of evolution doesn't go away because you made a robot. There will still be communities. People are still gonna people. What we should be doing is not focusing so much on the technology, and focus more on how we are constantly being manipulated by the rich, corporations, and government, so that our socialization is to their benefit and our detriment. If your problem is connecting to people, and someone's answer is "I have a business idea", run away from that person.

jmathai

This really hits me, as someone building tools that utilize LLMs to help people deepen their faith. My app tries to help people read the Bible more. I’m asking myself.. What constitutes better? And is it worth pursuing? Is better always better?

asciimov

If even half of the toxic communities go away to LLMs, maybe AI will be a net positive after all.

zkmon

>> we should make an extra effort to cultivate relationships with each other and form communities online – communities that belong to us, not some billionaire. The assumption here is that, people as a crowd, have some discretion, will, thouhht, intention, agentic control and act to change something. Mostly they don't. Especially on the matters that don't affect their survival drastically.Things might be going down-hill, but if is a slide with mild ramp, no one even notices it. They might even enjoy the ride and going-down is normalized. Just like Romans might have done when the Rome declined over a prolonged period. No one noticed it. People are just subjects without own descretion on all matters that are not survival related. They go with crowd. Theat's precisely why we have billionaires owning people's communities.

coolThingsFirst

SO people were one of the most stuck idiots I have ever seen. I found the opposite thing, for easy questions they'd upvote and answer very soon but for harder questions they'd downvote it because they didn't know the solution. I'm very happy SO is done and dusted with. Thing is Quora which was supposed to be a forum of people with real credentials also went down the drain because it succumbed to low quality questions and answers. I guess we need a LinkedIn like place where people with real credentials and experience can contribute to deep discussions. Discord won't cut it since it's not index-able.

kstenerud

Maybe I'm remembering a different Stack Overflow. Yes, there were genuinely helpful people there. I strove to be helpful as well. But my most common experience there was: - People asking why you're doing that (without answering the question). - People telling you that you shouldn't do that (without answering the question or providing an alternative). - People closing your question as off-topic or duplicate without actually reading and understanding what you wrote. - People editing your question and changing the meaning (leading others to innocently conclude off-topic or duplicate). Or removing actually important details. - People giving just plain wrong answers that get upvoted, with comments from more senior people begging them to change or remove it. And yes, every so often a golden answer by an amazing person. Now I can just ask a few LLMs, comparing and contrasting their answers. Even better: I can interrogate them on their answer. Stack Overflow had a community of sorts, but it wasn't anywhere near like a physical community. We may work online, but we exist in the flesh.

AndrewKemendo

Community activists have been saying his for millennia but it’s not possible. Like literally every “prophet” as said almost exactly this since pahotep ( https://kemendo.com/WOPFirstPrint.pdf ) I’ve personally started a half dozen different communities over the last 20 years. some last longer than others but almost none last beyond the moment leaders stop putting effort into them, which is the fate of every community. As a serial community organizer I can tell you definitively that there are no long lasting communities drums eventually turn into an obvious scam on someone or finding increasingly unhinged people willing to stick to a mythology. I would love for not this to be true but I’ve yet to find an example otherwise Pick a group: shriners, elks, masons, religious groups, cults, wellness groups, drug user communities, veterans, long distance runners, gardeners etc… It literally doesn’t matter, none of them last unless there’s some kind of expectation that either you’re going to get some financial or opportunity to improve your social standing or access to resources unavailable to “those people out there.” It’s a shame really, but that’s the limits of human society it seems.

sheepscreek

I don’t fully agree or disagree. Perhaps the honest truth is that nobody really knows how to proceed. That is why I truly appreciate a constructive, open public discussion like this, where people voice their opinions within the bounds of civility. Take that away, and are we any different from animals in the wild? As a side note, Stack Overflow did embody this better than any other popular online platform. X has become the opposite cesspool with floating gold nuggets here and there. I digress..

jacobgold

> An LLM would have done exactly what I wanted back then. But would it have given me what I needed? At the time, I needed to know somebody cared enough to help me. Were StackOverflow, Google, and LLMs not all created by people who cared enough to help you? Today, there are much better places on the internet to find personal connection than StackOverflow ever was.