Like most of you, I used reddit as solely my only source for finding information. Looking to hear your guys’ thoughts on this topic, and hopefully explain and share some knowledge in a more sophisticated manner than I can describe. (also, I hope this is an appropriate place to post?)
I have ran into this discussion a few times across the fediverse, but I can’t for the life of my find those threads and comments lol
I believe that a non-corporate owned platform with user-generated information is most optimal, like wikipedia. I don’t know the technicalities, but I feel like AI can’t replace answers from human experiences - humans who are enthusiasts and care about helping each other and not making money. This is one of those things where I feel like I know the “best” way to find information, but I don’t know the deep answers of why, and what makes the other platforms worse (aside from the obvious ads, bloatware, and corporate greed)
I don’t know much about this topic, but I’m curious if you guys have actual real answers! Thread-based services like this and stack overflow (?) vs chatgpt vs bing vs google, etc.
EDIT: Wow, all your responses are fantastic. I’m not very knowledgeable about the subject so I can’t really continue everyone’s responses with a discussion, but I love and appreciate the insight in this thread! But I’ll try to think of some follow up questions :)
Bad. Chatbots can and has given out wrong, nonsense, and potentially dangerous info. All they do is synthesize info, and that includes the same bad info that made search engines less useful in the first place.
I’ve used a few here that were suggested by others in this thread - some of them gave sources and actually pointed to reddit. I had 2 recent questions I was trying to find information on this past week, and it passed 1/2 questions. But if I have a niche question, especially tech related, forget it lol
It seems to just give a list of all the possible answers for the question. But it doesn’t seem to pinpoint (unless I’m mistaken) arguably the most “optimal” method or answer (which users point out or endorse), and I assume wouldn’t also explain why or the experience. Because of that, I don’t think it’ll replace the value of finding information via thread-based platforms (especially if user-controlled)