One may like helping the people generally, but real-time monitoring of unanswered questions for posting the FIRST answers.... that's something different.
The biggest advantage is not in finding the answer. It's in being able to ask questions about that answer and getting immediate and pretty accurate responses.
I don’t understand this scenario. If someone already posted the answer then asking the question again on SO has no value. If the LLM can automate giving answers then we don’t need SO as much as before.
What the article doesnt mention is that its not easy to ask a good question or give a good answer, as is made evident by going through a new question/new answer queues that are littered with code-only/cryptic stuff.
The hidden value of such participation, at least for me, is that it forces you to express yourself clearly, if you want to get any real help that is.
> I suppose if you have a very specific question, it gets the job done. However, in the more traditional forum model, I find the discussion that follows the answer to be far more valuable the answer itself.
In fact, the mission of SO is precisely that: compile as much knowledge as possible in the form of answers to very specific question. There are many forums out there to cover "enrichment", but until SO came around it was significantly more difficult to find answers to specific questions amid the chaff.
People like helping people, it gives them a sense of self-worth. Answering questions also can make you feel smart. Now think about how many important websites are functionally built by free labor due to this: Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, subreddits you like, this site etc. It doesn't seem sustainable does it?
What if the 12% were answering questions - not asking o.O. Hell, I'd rather a person go through the effort/thought process of asking a _good_ question to get closer to the answer they might be looking for.
I believe that's part of the motivation behind bounties: if I've invested a lot of time and accumulated karma, I can spend that karma to improve the quality/speed of answering my question.
Re: TwoToReal. It's an interesting idea, although it seems like it adds burden to the answerer. One quality I like of SO is that it encourages people to ask better questions (keep concise, provide relevant details, etc), but in a system where I'd be getting real-time help I might become lazier about posting my question. "I have a problem with node.js" rather than "I'm getting this output when trying to use node in this way".
They do give you the ability to post an answer along with your question. I've found that particularly useful in the private Stack Overflow instance my company uses.
Good point, that's why we added analytics where we cluster the most common questions and show you the most common unanswered questions, so you can improve your help pages. There's also a (albeit rudimentary) human handover when the question can't be answered.
But you would also need someone to search for and find that answer in order to actually deliver you payload. Answering random questions has the advantage that the original poster is incentivized to execute your code.
1) Karma-seeking individuals are likely going to try find a way to get as much of the good stuff with the least effort. Easier questions will get snapped up.
2) You can still use the system, just offer a karma reward for a good answer.
Because they give incentives to people answering a lot of questions so in the end you have normal people working like their real support channels with boilerplate answers and without reading the posts besides checking for keywords.
I believe SO is designed so that new users ask questions. Then after getting a few rep points from questions they can contribute back with answers or comments (my preferred input).
I wish that StackOverflow rewarded unanswered questions. Most of my questions are open-ended without satisfactory answers because they hint at oversights or weaknesses in methodologies. I've had people comment that they refuse to answer my new questions because my answer selection rate is so low.
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