> I dread to call it a decline: it’s a metamorphosis that reflects the shifting priorities of the members of the community — and naturally makes room for new communities to thrive.
Thanks. There's naturally an assumption that "we have to keep this going forever, so how do we do that?" Your answer, if I may be so bold as to rephrase, is "why? organisms are born, they get old, they die. It's natural and there's nothing wrong with it."
Organisms need to die when they get older. Evolution has built it in. It's the mechanism by which the youngest generation, which will be the best adapted to an ever changing environment, has the best chance of surviving and reproducing. As Steve Jobs said in his Commencement Address at Stanford in 2005, "Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new." The same applies to organizations, as so well described by Nassim Taleb in "Antifragile".
Your closing remarks are most observant - the original community was formed to serve the needs of some group of people early on that were at a compatible stage. As these people change and acquire knowledge their needs change. It’s a bit like packing ever more people into same year of school , where advanced topics are introduced but new people need the basics
I wonder if LLMs provide an opportunity for this arc to evolve in an interesting way. That is, by replacing the FAQ step with something substantially more valuable: an infinitely patient chat partner that "understands" the collective wisdom of the community.
Possibly. I suspect there would be a psychological barrier, though. If your community exists to offer expertise, it's probably uncomfortable to cede a part of that job to an LLM.
Plus, realistically, we're not there yet in terms of technical capabilities. LLMs are pretty great for looking up common answers to common problems, but if you present a less common scenario, they routinely make up plausibly-sounding gibberish that will send any novice on a wild goose chase.
I don't disagree in general, but aren't "common answers to common problems" exactly what FAQs are? I'm not suggesting LLMs are ready to replace the experts in expert communities. Just maybe to help experts and noobs coexist more harmoniously.
What I'm saying is that right now, LLMs aren't good at telling these situations apart. A newcomer interacting with a bot doesn't know if their question is common or not. A bot doesn't know either, and might give an answer that is completely off-base.
To build such a LLM right now, you'd have to use a retrieval approach, so including the retrieved data would inherently illustrate to what extent the chatbot summary is based on the community documents vs what it's making up.
Agree. I know there are plenty of researchers working on better epistemic modesty in LLMs. I'm not sure how heavy of a lift that is, but it doesn't *feel* like such a huge leap into scifi territory.
I guess it’s the "natural" life cycle for online communities that are solely based on expertise, and not on socializing, isn’t ? Or did you ever feel there was another way to handle the cycle? As a L&D professional, I must admit that skills and knowledge do have also some kind of life cycle, so I’m not surprised by what you describe. Great pov btw.
You can try actively resisting that "us-versus-them" mentality that creeps in between stages 2 and 3. Focus the community on the journey, not on on the mastery of the craft.
Of course, this has downsides. It means accepting lower content quality across the board, and can mean losing the identity of the group. To give you an example, in its early days, the /r/ResinCasting community on Reddit was a fairly advanced group for folks doing moldmaking and casting for mechanical assemblies, complex art projects, and so forth. Now, it's mostly a "crafts" group for people encapsulating flowers or stickers in store-bought molds. It's not *worse*, but it's certainly less interesting to the folks who participated early on.
Writing FAQ’s seems like a fine thing to do. Some people will read them, even if others won’t. You can quote answers from them as a starting point for a discussion.
Sure. I'm not describing it as a bad thing - I mean, on some level, it's not like there are better alternatives to most of what's described here.
That said, there's an important difference between having a FAQ and quoting it; and being rude to people because they didn't read it. The latter is way too common - sometimes it's not even about words, but actions (e.g., locking / deleting threads).
Interesting.
Any thoughts on Linkedin/Microsoft role in this ?
> I dread to call it a decline: it’s a metamorphosis that reflects the shifting priorities of the members of the community — and naturally makes room for new communities to thrive.
Thanks. There's naturally an assumption that "we have to keep this going forever, so how do we do that?" Your answer, if I may be so bold as to rephrase, is "why? organisms are born, they get old, they die. It's natural and there's nothing wrong with it."
Organisms need to die when they get older. Evolution has built it in. It's the mechanism by which the youngest generation, which will be the best adapted to an ever changing environment, has the best chance of surviving and reproducing. As Steve Jobs said in his Commencement Address at Stanford in 2005, "Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new." The same applies to organizations, as so well described by Nassim Taleb in "Antifragile".
I have whole posts inspired by "Antifragile" and "Skin in the Game"
I hung out with him at Google! That's me introducing him:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3REdLZ8Xis&t=3s
Your closing remarks are most observant - the original community was formed to serve the needs of some group of people early on that were at a compatible stage. As these people change and acquire knowledge their needs change. It’s a bit like packing ever more people into same year of school , where advanced topics are introduced but new people need the basics
"As these people change and acquire knowledge their needs change." This is the point!
I wonder if LLMs provide an opportunity for this arc to evolve in an interesting way. That is, by replacing the FAQ step with something substantially more valuable: an infinitely patient chat partner that "understands" the collective wisdom of the community.
Possibly. I suspect there would be a psychological barrier, though. If your community exists to offer expertise, it's probably uncomfortable to cede a part of that job to an LLM.
Plus, realistically, we're not there yet in terms of technical capabilities. LLMs are pretty great for looking up common answers to common problems, but if you present a less common scenario, they routinely make up plausibly-sounding gibberish that will send any novice on a wild goose chase.
I don't disagree in general, but aren't "common answers to common problems" exactly what FAQs are? I'm not suggesting LLMs are ready to replace the experts in expert communities. Just maybe to help experts and noobs coexist more harmoniously.
What I'm saying is that right now, LLMs aren't good at telling these situations apart. A newcomer interacting with a bot doesn't know if their question is common or not. A bot doesn't know either, and might give an answer that is completely off-base.
To build such a LLM right now, you'd have to use a retrieval approach, so including the retrieved data would inherently illustrate to what extent the chatbot summary is based on the community documents vs what it's making up.
Agree. I know there are plenty of researchers working on better epistemic modesty in LLMs. I'm not sure how heavy of a lift that is, but it doesn't *feel* like such a huge leap into scifi territory.
I guess it’s the "natural" life cycle for online communities that are solely based on expertise, and not on socializing, isn’t ? Or did you ever feel there was another way to handle the cycle? As a L&D professional, I must admit that skills and knowledge do have also some kind of life cycle, so I’m not surprised by what you describe. Great pov btw.
You can try actively resisting that "us-versus-them" mentality that creeps in between stages 2 and 3. Focus the community on the journey, not on on the mastery of the craft.
Of course, this has downsides. It means accepting lower content quality across the board, and can mean losing the identity of the group. To give you an example, in its early days, the /r/ResinCasting community on Reddit was a fairly advanced group for folks doing moldmaking and casting for mechanical assemblies, complex art projects, and so forth. Now, it's mostly a "crafts" group for people encapsulating flowers or stickers in store-bought molds. It's not *worse*, but it's certainly less interesting to the folks who participated early on.
Writing FAQ’s seems like a fine thing to do. Some people will read them, even if others won’t. You can quote answers from them as a starting point for a discussion.
Sure. I'm not describing it as a bad thing - I mean, on some level, it's not like there are better alternatives to most of what's described here.
That said, there's an important difference between having a FAQ and quoting it; and being rude to people because they didn't read it. The latter is way too common - sometimes it's not even about words, but actions (e.g., locking / deleting threads).