[lxgr]

Yes, this is incredibly frustrating.

I wonder if we've surpassed "peak publicly searchable discussion". It definitely seems harder to find quick answers to obscure topics than it used to be 2-3 years ago.

LLMs will gladly hallucinate something, but given that this stuff is literally the training data that could help ground them in truth, I wonder where we're going to go next.

[giobox]

Of course we have passed it. The moment LLM training happened was when everyone started locking down access to their data or increasing costs of developer API access - twitter/x have done similar things, and quora etc.

Now the corpus of user questions/answers, posts and so on has real value as machine learning training data it’s hardly surprising this is happening - no one wants to “give away the farm” to a rival LLM product bootstrapped on data that was too easy to scrape.

For older readers who remember the buzz about web2.0 in early 2000s and everything would be a public api or feed - the recent history of the web now has almost been the opposite. Examples of this are everywhere - RSS is essentially dead, news readers died, people are trying to put podcasts behind proprietary systems (Spotify) etc etc, more and more data is hidden behind account walls, app binaries on mobile often only arrive from a mandatory store…

[namlem]

Yeah all that discussion is now on non-searchable, ephemeral private discord servers

[pixl97]

I mean yes, tons of discussion has moved to places like Discord to disappear forever.

But unlike the previous poster, who blames the information creator for revoking what they published, why are we not blaming the actual abusers? Every site that is build on growth, Facebook, Google, Reddit, et al eventually turns into an authoritarian capitalist nightmare dystopia. Gobble up, lock down, and extract wealth.

[lxgr]

> tons of discussion has moved to places like Discord to disappear forever.

This is actually even worse than the new Reddit.

Every open source or other project that links to their Discord as a main place of providing support immediately loses a lot of respect from me: Chat is a horrible way of creating a searchable knowledge base.

Besides being opaque to search engines, it effectively signs up their users and contributors for either having to maintain parallel long-term-visible and searchable FAQs and other docs, or answering the same new user questions over and over again.

Having to publicly join a Discord (unlike Reddit there seems to be no way at all to browse anonymously) just to be able to see if anybody else has had my compile or setup error is completely unacceptable as well.