I think I can see their point. As they said, fragile isn’t meant as a slur here. If after the tenth time it happens, this kind of thing breaks you, then you’re fragile because the nine times before that made you fragile. Which obviously isn’t your fault but the fault of the people who were assholes to you.

Well, the thing is that they are right, and that’s what hurts.

Wait, I thought the decentralized version of Twitter was Mastodon

I don’t think it’s about laziness, but rather about having deadlines set by management that you can only possible meet by reusing stuff as much as possible - even if you only actually need 5 % of this stuff but got to package everything of it in your application for it to work.

I might be wrong but as far as I understand Google’s topics API only gives websites access to information like “here is a user who likes the topics IT and gardening”, which is a LOT less than what is possible with cookies. With cookies a website can get information like “here is a user who visited your website yesterday and two times last week. Also they recently visited websites A, B and C, and frequently visits website D. On website D they are logged in as X.” They make all your visits to a website and, with third-party cookies, also to other websites connectable. Google’s topics do not.

Classic “this is why we can’t have nice things” moment

The timing doesn’t really add up though. ChatGPT was published in November 2022. According to the graphs on the website linked, the traffic, the number of posts and the number of votes all already were in a visible downfall and at their lowest value of more than 2 years. And this isn’t even considering that ChatGPT took a while to get picked up into the average developer’s daily workflow.

Anyhow though, I agree that the rise of ChatGPT most likely amplified StackOverflow’s decline.

I don’t think that’s a non-issue. If you host an instance an can see everything on it, that’s one thing, but if everyone with an instance can see these things from all other instances, that’s a different story. That way literally everyone can see all your up and downvotes. That’s not the end of the world but that’s definitely an issue imo. I can already see people getting canceled not because of an old tweet but because they upvoted something controversial years ago lol.

Did qwant become better in the recent time? I tried it a few years back and the search results were meh