sigi

Humans asking other humans is coming to an end, as the declining number of new questions on StackOverflow suggests. Weirdly, I just now realized that actual humans used their spare time to answer questions of strangers on StackOverflow. Awesome!

However, asking an LLM for help with programming issues is becoming much more popular these days. You trade waiting time and uncertainty for a clear, kind, and well-structured answer. Sure, sometimes the LLM hallucinates some function parameters or command-line options that do not exist, but mostly you get a good direction where to look. To me this trade is good enough to take it often, even though the energy consumption is bugging me a lot.

But what about future software where no Stack Overflow discussion exists, since nobody ever asked fellow humans? LLMs then rely on well-written documentation and source code. Their response quality depends on the availability of those. For many simple questions, the LLM might give a good enough answer from existing resources (if already trained on them). However, I believe, for more complex questions, you still need to fall back to asking other humans. Giving up on the instant answer and taking the slow manual path via a forum answer. I haven’t really encountered this path, but I wonder how this will shape future software development. I can imagine that people will use more “workarounds” suggested by LLMs, even though there exists a specialized function for it, which the LLM does not know about.

I’m a bit nostalgic now: I never appreciated the time that people put into their Stack Overflow answers. And now people don’t really ask anymore. But I think a baseline of new questions will remain. Maybe their complexity will increase, and they are actually new questions.

I can’t really remember when I first went into the “Small Web”, but I remember hearing about the Gopher protocol and exploring some websites with it. I came across James' Coffee Blog, read a few of his articles, and bookmarked his website. I go back to his website from time to time, but that concludes my exploration of the Gopher protocol and some part of the small web.

I continue with my usual online behavior: When bored, I read the popular posts on Reddit without following special subreddits or even having a user account. Or I open Hacker News and try to understand what the posts are about. Mostly, I’m just reading what strangers post and comment on such platforms. In a sense, I am interacting with “Big Web Communities”, which are not communities at all. I just consume what they type. I can not recognize someone by their username, and I don’t have a picture of their personality in my mind. It’s just anonymous..

Today, I was reading the submission of James for the March 2025 IndieWeb Carnival. From his previous posts, I have built a mental picture of James and learned about his interests. Reading his blog post feels like getting an update from someone I know. I can connect the content with things I have read in previous posts. And somehow it feels better to consume some content from him, a person I remember, than from a “stranger on Reddit”. Sure, I have never had direct contact with James, so he’s still a stranger on the web. But still, there is this feeling of knowing him a little better than any random person. I have a similar feeling towards two other bloggers I follow regularly on their self-hosted websites.

As you might guess, I have not really participated in small web communities, so my opinion might be way off. But, right now, I think of them as places where the feeling of knowing someone is ubiquitous. Maybe I’m romanticizing, but I imagine that interacting in a small web community feels like going for a walk through the neighborhood where you lived for many years: you meet people you haven’t seen for quite a while, see others that you never talked to but know for a long time, and meet some new people who just moved there or are just visiting. There is a feeling of being home, and this is what I also want for my online experience. When I read the line “An IndieWeb carnival will help motivate people to post more on their personal websites[…]" on the IndieWeb Carnival website, I took the opportunity to post my first blog entry. I hope this starts my journey into various small web communities.

This is my submission to the March 2025 IndieWeb Carnival. Thanks to Chris for hosting this carnival.