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People used to recognize me because they had seen one of my 7,000+ Stack Overflow "free" answers when they got stuck on a tricky CSS issue. Now, you will thank your favorite LLM for giving you that bad/outdated/inaccurate answer. And some people pay for that.

Kevin Powell@kevinpowell.co

More and more people I deeply respect and have learned a lot from over the years feel like they are speaking into a void, to the point where they are losing motivation to continue making content, which got me to write my first post on my site in over a year... www.kevinpowell.co/article/tell...

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I'm not that much bothered by the lost of recognition, but this new paradigm mean I learn less too, because that was my motivation nb 1 to be on SO, and even at the specs level, SO used to be a great marker for "users want this new feature", now it's all big corp wanna push their thing, they can.

This was a frustrating part of Stack Overflow. But at least you could look at the source and see that it was a decade old. All of it getting thrown in the hopper and smeared out means you can’t see if it’s based on outdated information anymore. Just a tragedy.

I think we have here two different issues: 1. outdated content: a prevelent problem on the web 2. broken revenue systems for content Everyone who has ever looked up a recipe and had to scroll past 20 adds knows these problems are not new.

At least in the "old" web, we can distinguish outdated content from the new one. We have article dates, comments, alternative answers, filtering stuff by dates, etc. Now, AI gives you an answer "now". No more temporarily.

In the old web forums and other websites pointed to the „Sliding Doors of CSS“ year; even decades; after browsers supported rounded corners and gradients. Keeping it „fresh“ even though outdated. Many people didn’t open the link to get this message. alistapart.com/article/slid...

It's not really an issue to point to old/outdated content as long as the content itself contain a date (2003 in this case). It's not easy to keep stuff up to date but at least we can track the temporality of the stuff we see in the internet.

As much as I value LLMs for providing quick answers, but they have indeed made a mockery of intellectual property. And I don't even mean IP in the sense of making money from it, because I'm in the open-source camp. But simply giving credit to the experts who wrote that piece of knowledge.