Some words from Jeff Atwood, thought on what now seems like a bigone era.
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I don’t know about you, but half my internet searches end in “blog” or “forum” or “reddit”, because I’m specifically interested in human voices. If I wanted to ask an LLM, I would ask an LLM.
It’s also why I enjoy spending time on this here forum with you guys.
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Not so fast. While LLMs are indeed very good for simple stuff, their reliability diminishes for complex tasks, or ones that require intuition and perspective. And they are also expensive to run, the more complex, the worse.
The current situation is not sustainable and everyone knows it. Either there will be a massive cost drop in running these services, or they will have to be monetized somehow.
I expect the free tiers to be enshittified within a few years (who here is old enough to remember when Google Search was so good that 99% if the time the first result was the right one?)
People have a tendency to extrapolate from ephemeral conditions.
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Its not about LLMs. It is about us.
From the link within the link, “you can’t vibe code love”
But what happens to the commons when everyone is privately whispering to LLMs?
Where exactly will the LLMs get their next set of training data from, if we don’t build for and protect the commons together? How will we continue to share knowledge – and love – with each other?
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This is a valid point. But when the service model of LLMs changes, so will our attitudes.
On the other hand, I would not romanticize forums like SO either, as the experience changed significantly in the past 10–15 years, way before LLMs. If I post a question on SO now, chances are that either it will go unanswered (if difficult) or someone will mark it as a duplicate (without necessarily reading it first) even if it isn’t, or someone who is well-meaning but knows little about to topic misunderstands and tries to answer.
From the other side, I stopped frequenting forums where I used to help people. I was previously very active in the Julia discourse forum, but at some point it became an unpleasant place when a few bad actors (<5, but that is plenty) started using it for offtopic/ragebait/rants disguised as conversations about Julia.
The early days of Usenet, with mostly highly educated and smart people (and a few crazy ones with apparent personality disorders, but the majority of them were smart too), are not coming back. Neither are mailing lists on various niche topics, the ones I am subscribed to are now fighting spam from increasingly clever bots which laugh at the usual barriers.
Discourse is holding up well, at least providing the tools that communities can use to maintain a good atmosphere. This forum is an example.
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I was an early user of StackOverflow, back when it was genuinely refreshing and helpful. I was quite active, too.
My last active interaction with it is probably, let me check… a decade ago. Yet my reputation score keeps rising, and I have access to all publicly accessible moderator tools. Not that I ever used them.
Nowadays it’s a ghost town. Its innovation was turning the messy personal interactions in forums on their head, and focusing on concrete outcomes instead. Now that concrete outcomes have been automated, we’re back to seeking personal interactions.
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