[JohnMakin]

It's probably an artifact of how I use it (I turn off any kind of history or "remembering" of past conversations), but when I started becoming really impressed by tools like claude/chatgpt/etc. was the first time I was chasing down some dumb idea I had for work, convinced I was right, and it finally gently told me I was wrong (in its own way). That is exactly what I want these things to do, but it seems like most users do not want to be told they are wrong, and the companies are not very incentivized to encourage these tools to behave that way.

I have identified very few instances where something like chatGPT just randomly started praising me (outside of the whole "you're absolutely correct to push back on this" kind of thing). I guess leading questions probably have something to do with this.

[Avamander]

In one recent thread about StackOverflow dying, some people theorized that the success of LLMs and thus failing of SO could mostly be attributed to the amount of sycophancy of LLMs.

I tend to agree more and more. People need to be told when their ideas are wrong, if they like it or not.

[StableAlkyne]

There's also the communications aspect:

SO was/is a great site for getting information if (and only if) you properly phrase your question. Oftentimes, if you had an X/Y problem, you would quickly get corrected.

God help you if you had an X/Y Problem Problem. Or if English wasn't your first language.

I suspect the popularity is also boosted by the last two; it will happily tell you the best way to do whatever cursed thing you're trying to do, while still not judging over English skills.

[bsder]

SO is dying simply because SO became garbage.

It became technically incorrect. You couldn't dislodge old, upvoted yet now incorrect answers. Fast moving things were answered by a bunch of useless people. etc.

Combine this with the completely dysfunctional social dynamics and it's amazing SO has lasted as long as this.

[thephyber]

The technically incorrect issue is downstream of their rigid policies.

Yes, answers which were accepted go Python 2 may require code changes to run on Python 3. Yes, APIs

One of the big issues is that accepted answers grow stale over time, similar to bitrot of the web. But also, SO is very strict about redirecting close copies of previously answered questions to one of the oldest copies of the question. This policy means that the question asker is frustrated when their question is closed and linked to an old answer, which may or may not answer their new question.

But the underlying issue is that SO search is the lifeblood of the app, but the UX is garbage. 100% of searches show a captcha when you are logged out. The keyword matching is tolerable, but not great. Sometimes Google dorking with `site:stackoverflow.com` is better than using SO search.

Ultimately, the UX of LLM chatbots are better than SO. It’s possible that SO could use a chatbot interface to replace their search and improve usability by 10x…

[nurettin]

SO is officially dead according to the graph of number of questions posted per month.

Google+SO was my LLM between 2007-2015. Then the site got saturated. All questions were answered. Git, C# Python, SQL, C++, Ruby, PHP, most popular topics got "solved". The site reached singularity. That is when they should have frozen it as the encyclopedia of software.

Then duplicates, one-offs, homeworks started to destroy it. I think earth society collectively got dumber and entitled. Decline of research and intelligence put into online questions is a good measure of this.

[JohnMakin]

> People need to be told when their ideas are wrong, if they like it or not.

This is one of those societal type of problems rather than a technological one. I waffle on the degree of responsibility technology should have (especially privately owned ones) in trying to correct societal wrongs. There is definitely a line somewhere, I just don’t pretend to know where it is. You can definitely go too far one way or another - look at social media for an example

[okayGravity]

It all has to do with specific filler words you use when prompting, especially chatGPT. If you use words that suggest a heavy (and I mean you really have to make the LLM know you're questioning), then it will question to an extent as you imply. If you look at the chats that they do have from this incident, he phrased his prompts as more convincing rather than questioning (i.e "Shes doing this because of this!") So chatGPT roleplays and goes along with the delusion.

Most people will just talk to LLMs like they are a person, even though LLMs won't understand the difference in complex social language and reasoning. It's almost like robots aren't people!