There was a lot of engagement in the communities I participate up until a couple of years ago. People were interested and actively discussing a lot of topics. There were a lot of newbies asking questions and people proposing different ways for tasks.
Is it just me or did it reduce a lot? LLMs? Company forums? Other forums I did not move to (e.g. discord)? Reduced interest? Or is it just subjective?
90% of the time if I ask for help on forums the answer will be one of three things:
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Completely absent
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Just google it scrub lmao (nevermind the fact that search has gone to shit)
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Doesn’t actually answer the question
In the early days it seems pike Stack Overflow tried to regulate engagement from trolls. They encouraged support for dumb/newbie questions and discouraged obnoxious behaviors.
I’m guessing that’s just a losing battle. I don’t think there’s much hope of keeping a good moderator for free. It’s a tough, thankless job. Troll/poor moderators are free.
Don’t forget these responses
why do you want to do X?? Why don’t you do it Y way (that doesn’t actually solve the problem)
XY Problems are much more common from the person asking the question though…
The more time passes, the more information can already be found on the web (including forum threads) and the less need there is to post new threads to these kinds of forums.
generative AI “helps” with this too
why deal with stackoverflow when you can brainstorm with a chatbot that replies instantly
And to the end user who doesn’t know what they’re doing, the end result is the same or the AI one will get them “further”.
I say this because if you’re following forums, chances are you’re following guides, which means you don’t understand what it is you’re doing. Which is fine, I typically don’t either, which is why I have a harder time with Linux.
But realistically, following the guide of Stackoverflow will hit a hiccup and you will be stuck. Following AI, things might not work and need to be troubleshooted, but it will continue answering questions until the two of you put together something that sort of works.
Not because of AI, but because the person kept trying. AI only made it so they didn’t need to understand.
I find working with AI to help me understand way better.
Using Linux as an example. If I search for “give me the size of each subdirectory in the current directory” the stack overflow answer will be “just type du -h --max-depth=1” so you copy and paste it and, voila!, it’s exactly what you want. Except I have no idea what any of it means.
However, I ask chatgpt, and it will explain that du means disk usage, -h gives a human readable form, and --max-depth=1 will only go down 1 level, without showing all of the subdirectories.
So now I’ve learned something.
Additionally, with coding, it’s a lot like rubber duck debugging for me. Just formulating my question will often lead to an answer, or trying to explain what went wrong with the AI solution helps me get to the proper answer.
Duplicated question, I’m closing the topic.
I feel that /r/programming lost a lot of volume and intensity following the API protest drama. This community seemed like a beneficiary. Even anecdotally though, I sit in a couple of language discord servers and engagement seems lower than it was a couple of years ago.
It’s no reddit in terms of quantity but honesty I’ve had higher quality topics and discussions here than there. Lemmy/kbin might not have taken off in the mainstream to offer a variety of subjects but when it comes to tech and software I think it’s covered well enough and people are generally nicer about it. The main problem is lack of (remotely) good seach function, I dont think the threads are getting indexed by google and the on-site search is atrocious.
I don’t know of any discord programming communities, I wish forums were still a thing but the only live one I know of is the jellyfin one after they moved from reddit. Other than that it’s here or the various subreddits
