The moderators don't care about threads going off topic anymore

Fortune said:

I threw a load of questions at ChatGPT a few months ago on various subjects around managing personal finances in Ireland. All but one of the answers was wrong, and there wasn't exactly anything complicated in there.

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The internet is running out of places to factually accurate and reliable information. There was a time when you could comfortably recommend AAM as as an accurate source, but the integrity of the information is being undermined. As for Rule No. 4 of posts staying 'On Topic', no one seems to care anymore. Just stick your random post in some other post where you might get a bit of attention. You'll also note that no one has asked ChatGPT for an inaccurate reply to something like 'What's the best (cheapest) PRSA in Ireland'.

If Revenue are going to be fielding these nonsense questions because ChatGPT says something different, some GenZ head read a book or a pasty looking YouTuber, that demands a fee for his/her wisdom from the basement, has notions based on info gleaned from peers on Reddit, then that's some waste of our taxes.

GSheehy said:

As for Rule No. 4 of posts staying 'On Topic', no one seems to care anymore. Just stick your random post in some other post where you might get a bit of attention.

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Ironically enough, you took a thread off topic to complain about threads going off topic!

It is a constant battle for the moderators. We frequently delete or move off topic stuff and sometimes get abuse for it.

Most posters are guilty of going off topic by being distracted by an aside in a post.

They respond properly to a question and then throw in a side comment and people start responding to the side comment.

The moderators are not going to read every post - especially on page 7 of this


So, if you don't report it as going off topic, then it's not going to be dealt with.

If you wait until there are three pages off topic, it's very difficult and time consuming for the mods to separate out the on topic and off topic stuff.

The off topic content was two days old at that stage and my post got the desired result.

Win.

For you

But at the expense of a morning's work for me.

Had you reported it two days ago it would have been dealt with back then in a few minutes.

Brendan

That's the nature of human conversation and interaction they go off topic, we are not AI generated bots programmed to stay 100% to the question. Some of the most interesting information comes from that , if it goes organically off topic what's the harm, fair enough if someone deliberately moves it off topic but that's a different thing.

I was given mod privs for the UK Voluntary NI thread.

Over 2 years, we tried, & mostly failed, to get folks to post questions in specific threads.

It was like herding kittens.

Askaboutmoney is a fantastic resource for the folks who access it.

Sometimes mods might get it wrong, but most of the time they get it right.

Thats good enough for me.

The mods have my deepest sympathies & huge appreciation for what they do.

For everyone....

Huge amount of traffic on that thread and no mod saw it or no one reported it. Maybe it'll encourage posters to report more often so that there isn't a build up of undoing and it can be worked on immediately.

There are a few issues here including offopic replies and actual factual accuracy of information. Indeed it would be a boring site if some off topic situations were not allowed. But, I don’t expect the site to be 100% accurate in its information. That target will never be attained anywhere. Ask anybody working in finance or even the banks or even me with an inbuilt mistrust in financial advice.

For Ol’ Lep, I have learned that nearly every bit of advice here probably is the personal opinion of somebody of whom I’ll never meet. And that’s the way I think it should be.

We have free will (probably our greatest gift) and we can keep or reject any advice here. But keep the advice coming.

You have far too much trust in Chat GPT. We fed over a thousand pages of carefully correlated rules with questions and answers in to a private paid for GPT4 model and it still can spit out the wrong answer to questions. It makes strange basic assumptions, mixing up different terms or assuming they mean the same thing.

GSheehy said:

Huge amount of traffic on that thread and no mod saw it or no one reported it. Maybe it'll encourage posters to report more often so that there isn't a build up of undoing and it can be worked on immediately.

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Why didn't you report whatever you objected to?