You seem to think they weren't failing before LLM (simply rapidly losing member activity), which is a narrative that I won't follow.

They are actively harming human users in defense of their toxic mods & botters. Site is dying and they are the murderer.

As I said in my original post, LLM was the final nail in the coffin. I'm not arguing they aren't related. I'm saying they SO was falling long before LLM's took over. This isn't difficult logic.

I feel some users will leach into platforms that created even more walled gardens, i.e. Discord, or platforms that reduce the sense of walled gardens i.e. Twitter.

This doesn't hold up when looking at usage charts. There is a clear peak around ~2015 with a steady decline through to now. LLM's came to market in their current form in the last couple years, and took a couple years to be broadly adopted. There was a clear and obvious market fall off way before AI / LLM.

> Reddit isn't comparable

I agree with that in isolation; but since I don't agree with the AI premise this isn't especially relevant. I don't think AI will replace Reddit, I think one of the other major platforms will absorb it's users like Reddit / Hackerrank / better documentation / back searching absorbed SO's users through 2015-2021

When you load a random content page, the top 50% of the page is a question, the bottom 50% is an ad that is designed to look like a comment, and the entire right panel is ads. Quora is more ads than content, you have to scroll and decipher what is or isn't an ad based on their greyed 2px font ad disclaimer.

So - is Reddit headed the same way as SO? The mods of individual subreddits have been toxic for ages. Political subs curate hive minds, niche topics exclude members that are less informed, etc. Reddit admins, the ones that are emplyoed by the site, are also generally anti-user. Banning members without cause, poor or no explanations of what the ban is for and generally just policing with an iron fist & a rubber brain.

Reddit fills a different niche from SO, being more entertainment focused. But I feel it's the same mistaken model of moderation that will lead to the same demise in ~5 years.

Thoughts?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45164469

Points: 13

# Comments: 26

And from everything I've seen/heard, tidal based solutions are just fundamentally incompatible with their product. Keeping sensitive metalic moving parts in saline solution exposed to the sun for years on end - paired with other random things like boating accidents or marine life - it's a non-starter. Constructing these things creates pollution. If it's lifecycle impact is less than oil's, great, I just don't believe we'll ever get to a state where it's better than oil AND (solar/geo/wind) + Batteries.

Also I might just be misinformed but I thought nearly all of the radioactive waste from nuclear plants is already collected. It's not a collection problem, it's a storage problem. And a "what do we do when the energy company shuts down and stops maintaining their storage yard" problem.

Meltdowns are tragic when they occur - but rare. It just gets a lot of press when a city of 50k gets deleted than when global ecosystems fail or a billion people die a decade earlier than they otherwise would due to pollution related helath issues.

And I'm not qualified to say the tidal based solutions will never beat out Geo/Solar/Win + Batteries. In my informed but non-professional opinion, it seems like this avenue will never ever work at scale.

From everything I've seen, we have the answer, we're just stuck under the boot of old money oil barons. Solar + wind + geo (depending on the geographic area) for the majority of our power generation. Nuclear + batteries to smooth out the duck curve form the bottom, paired with more aggressive demand pricing & thermal regulations to smooth it out from the top. That's the answer. But lobbyist's going to lobby.

1. It's expensive. I never once got a reasonable contribution from my friends. I knew this at the time, but eventually I was over it. Paying $100-250 per event just to deal with all the work and drama that comes with it.. not worth.

2. It's a lot of work. Hours of prep, hours of hosting, hours of clean up after. At the end of the day ~12 hours of effort for ~4 hours of fun is not a good ROI.

3. It frequently was an excuse to get drunk or high. Which is fun, whatever. But as I grew more health conscious, this was less and less appealing. I can drink on my own if I want.

4. There are better alternatives. I don't have to do any of the above options if I just jump on Discord for a while. Or join a rec league sport. Or spend it with my family.

It's better than oil (duh), and something that provides power when solar/wind can't is great (duh). I just wish we would give up on approaches that are basically "If we had a few million of these giga-ton structures all over the ocean, they would provide power equivalent to a few dozen nuclear plants"

I need to know if using it as AI therapy is actively harmful for some significant percentage of the population, and should be avoided. This arxiv does not discuss that as far as I can tell. LLM therapy is closer to an interactive journal. Journaling, getting your thoughts out, being forced to articulate grief in succinct words and pick out patterns - is all healing.

And most people cannot afford professional therapy.

You're still a great product designer and not an engineer.

I'm open to new things. I've seen demo's, attended presentations, and spent a long time toying around with it myself. I have not been convinced there is any meat there, not in it's current iteration. LLM's are designed to make things that "look" like human output and thus are very good at hiding bugs. It's ok at getting the first 20% of the project done, but that was never the hard part. It's always been the last 20%, and modern LLM's simply cannot do it. Not on large scale projects.

New things have come and gone. So far the only thing I'm convinced of is, it's easier to get funding when you can claim you use AI. That's it.

> I have never copy and pasted code into development from an LLM/AI helper

Well that's simply a different reality from what my employer is encouraging. So not relevant. They not only want us to copy-and-paste, they want us to delete otherwise functional code to make it easier to paste in AI generated stuff.

Asking questions is fine, that's much much closer to an augmented search engine than prompt engineering. You're describing something different from what this post is about.

>5 years is not what I would consider a big bargaining chip

I'm not bragging. I'm giving context. If I was 0 yoe or 20 yoe, those would be relevant too. And for what it's worth, I also started in middle school.

>one leadership away from asking their employees the same thing your employer is

Yeah that's probably true

Do you count making a square space splash page 'engineering'? Tools improving to the point that the barrier of entry plummets is great. That doesn't mean you're now engaging in the same fundamental task that happened before things got easier/

A lot of people have drank the 'exponential growth' kool aid but don't have enough understanding of the underlying tech to realize (1) there could be some fundamental limits to how good LLM based AI can be. Or AI in general for that matter. (2) a big part of why it got so good so fast is because we started pumping trillions of dollars of microchips & electricity into it. The hardware and energy consumption cannot continue exponentially.