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Comments on What’s the point of Q&A sites anymore?
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What’s the point of Q&A sites anymore?
Lately, whenever I consider asking a question on a site like Software Codidact, I end up just asking an LLM chatbot instead. Just thinking of the effort of distilling a minimal working example, formatting the post correctly, and anticipating the downvotes, is enough to have an aversion to the site. So what’s the point of these Q&A communities if the friction to participate often outweighs the benefit, especially when a language model can give you an answer instantly?
In short: LLMs are trained based on what we already know. I'm oversimplifying massively, but essentially they produce a …
6mo ago
Although I was tempted to add a sarcastic comment suggesting you could just ask this Meta question of an LLM, I do think …
6mo ago
Asking the last five or so questions on SO (I am new here), I felt pretty much the same as you do. I've put a lot of eff …
2mo ago
There are always problems that LLMs can't answer, or they give trash answers. Then you check the traditional sources, do …
5mo ago
Just thinking of the effort of distilling a minimal working example, formatting the post correctly, and anticipating the …
6mo ago
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Asking the last five or so questions on SO (I am new here), I felt pretty much the same as you do. I've put a lot of effort in illustrating the problem and ask a concrete question. While others confirmed they were legit questions, they received downvotes without explanation, and as one commenter pointed out:
Eh, the replies are mostly about side stuff rather than what you're asking about.
So I asked my local Gemma 4 and got a good, well-balanced answer.
I also asked Gemma your question and the final point is:
The friction you feel is real, and it is a sign that these communities need to evolve—perhaps by becoming less about "fixing syntax" and more about "discussing architecture and nuance"—to remain relevant in the age of AI.
Or as ArtOfCode put it:
For Q&A communities like this, perhaps that means a pivot away from asking simple questions looking for help debugging code, and towards asking complex questions looking for ideas that only humans can generate.
I have actually become unsure about "asking complex questions looking for ideas" as I've received feedback like "too broad; inviting for opinionated answers" and close votes when I tried that on SO.
2 comment threads