Interesting question. I read “It's no secret that Stack Overflow has pretty much stopped receiving new questions and answers,” then I go back to the title, “Ideas for incentivizing curation of old questions,” and my poor brain translates it as “how to improve the appearance of the baseboard in the kitchen while the ceiling is falling on my head”, really interesting.
We can continue to “look the other way” we can continue to shift responsibility (“it's AI's fault”**), or we can do something truly reckless: accept that we have a “very big” problem with how the site works and try to reverse the situation... Yes, it's not easy, but it's not impossible, it's not even a Herculean task. .
I don't expect the company to do anything about it, history shows us that it has always followed its “roadmap,” turning a “deaf ear” to the community's complaints and, in this particular case, to its own convenience.
I don't expect the curator community to do anything, we know how it is (before I get into the description, I apologize for the generalization; many of the curators do not deserve to be described in the following lines, so please, feel excluded):
Our community:
It systematically resists almost any attempt to “rethink” the model, and when I say “model,” I don't mean the one proposed by the company, but rather the “own” model, which can either follow the company's model (which already has enormous shortcomings) and going completely in the opposite direction.
It has embraced the protest vote as a method of "personal satisfaction"? (if you say this is not the case, try to explain why most negative votes, even to correct answers, have no comments attached, or why a poorly worded question... or not, can receive more than ten negative votes, some after being closed, and a good answer rarely reaches five).
And if I don't expect anything, why do I publish?.
In principle, I am human and therefore imperfect, so I force myself to accept that I may be wrong and that perhaps what I consider immutable is not so. On the other hand, remaining silent would make me an accomplice.
** I know that many will use statistics to reaffirm that “it's AI's fault,” so let's take a closer look at them.
“Coincidence” is not the same as “causality.” The fact that two events coincide in time and space does not necessarily imply that one is a consequence of the other.
In this particular case, I believe that there is a correlation between the two events (proving this is very complex, if not impossible), but we must be very careful in our analysis, as it could refer to two very different scenarios. Let's look at the following two scenarios:
“Our site was working very well, but then AI appeared, offering a much superior service, and displaced us.”
“Our site had very serious problems, concealed by the lack of competition, and when AI appeared, offering a service of inferior technical quality but greater human quality, and given the pronounced dissatisfaction of ‘visitors’ with how the site worked and how they were treated on it, it ended up displacing us.”
They are very similar, but the implications are vastly different. If the first scenario had occurred, there would have been an initial loss of visitors, but it would have been restored over time due to the serious limitations of LLMs.
Note: The description of the “flaws” of our community of curators is incomplete and does not differentiate between behaviors determined by the help center and those that are unique to it.
