8 ms·

Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

278 points by jlericson 3y ago

keskival 3y ago
Why don't they use LLM chatbots to encourage great questions and make it easier to ask them? Somehow adding LLMs to the side of the answers feels incorrect to me in this particular case.
jasfi 3y ago
Losing money while growing revenue isn't necessarily a bad thing. This can be caused by growth investing, and is often the right thing to do. Amazon is a famous example of this line of thinking.
- onion2k 3y ago
  Losing money while growing revenue isn't necessarily a bad thing. If you strongly believe that you have a viable long term plan to switch to a profitable model when the time is right, sure. When AI comes along and wrecks your business before you manage to extract the profit then you can say (with hindsight) you made a mistake by waiting too long. I'm not saying this is the case for SO, but it might be. Time will tell. Getting to profit quickly is a hedge against change. Nothing guarantees that your business will be around forever. If you don't take the money when its there you might lose the chance.
- cjfd 3y ago
  It becomes a bit less viable during these times of higher interest rates.
- nerdponx 3y ago
  But what's there to even invest in for SO? Ad tech? Selling some LLM trained on their data? I can think of a whole bunch of silly ideas here, but none of them seem anywhere near comparable to Amazon investing in a vertically integrated supply chain for e-commerce and cloud computing.
  - jasfi 3y ago
    I found an article: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200728005330/en/Stack-Overflow-raises-85M-in-Series-E-funding-to-further-accelerate-SaaS-business https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200728005330/en/Sta... They're investing in teams and knowledge management. Sounds like they're going after the Enterprise.
    - nerdponx 3y ago
      Best of luck to them, I know they've been trying to push a "for teams" product for years but I've never heard of anyone who has even expressed interest in it. Atlassian will be a tough nut to crack. Job board seems like a much better idea, but I'm not the CEO or investors so what do I know?
      - jasfi 3y ago
        The job board was also a finished product. They could have automated just about anything manual, and kept it going with a small team. For the brand promotion alone it was worth it to keep it going.
janalsncm 3y ago
> In May I wrote about Stack Overflow's business, which lost $42 million over 6 months and had just laid off 10% of its employees. Since then, the company's fiscal year-end results came out. Despite growing revenue, it lost $84 million over the year ending on March 31, 2023. Thank god Wikipedia isn’t run like Stack Overflow. As an end user, they have pretty much the same value proposition: user generated answers to my questions. Wikipedia is still doing well, meanwhile it seems SO is constantly being driven off a cliff by bimbos in management. Not everything needs to be a damn unicorn. SO is an information repository. They need to accept that stop trying to “enhance” it with more crap because they don’t realize their median user is a junior dev who really just needs to serialize a Java object and isn’t going to pay or put up with any LLM-generated nonsense. SO doesn’t need large language models. What they really need is a better model of what answers are good, what answers are outdated, and what answers should be expanded to include more info (and sometimes, what answers should be slimmed down a bit). Turn the top answer to popular questions into a wiki so that everyone can update it. And then add backlinks for questions which were closed for being “duplicates”. It solves so many problems SO has. Another thing. This “comments aren’t for extended discussion” nonsense needs to go too. Any question could easily include a Reddit-style discussion tab to facilitate discussion. I’m sure much of it would be at least as valuable as the answers themselves.
- mrweasel 3y ago
  > Not everything needs to be a damn unicorn. More people needs to understand this. It's fine being a small(ish) business that turns a profit and provides a service that's beneficial to society. You don't need to be a billion dollar company to be important or do great work. DHH talked about this 15 years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY
  - palata 3y ago
    > You don't need to be a billion dollar company to be important or do great work. And importantly: because you are a billion dollar company doesn't mean you bring good to the world. At all.
JimDabell 3y ago
I have a hard time feeling sorry for Stack Overflow. They had most developers in the world visiting frequently. They have detailed information on exactly which languages, libraries, toolchains, and platforms those developers use and their pain points. All of their content is given to them for free by volunteers. All of their moderation is done for them for free by volunteers. The only thing they have to serve is text. How can you fail to build a sustainable business on top of that‽
- luckystarr 3y ago
  I'm a senior dev. The only thing I found useful in the last years was the job market on SO. They closed that down recently. Now I don't even go there at all.
  - stingraycharles 3y ago
    Why.. why did they closed this down? I remember this was my single most successful place to find good software developers / run job ads. We spent thousands and thousands on these ads, and I always felt this was their chicken that laid golden eggs.
    - jkukul 3y ago
      Here's the post explaining their decision: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/415293/sunsetting-jobs-developer-story https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/415293/sunsetting-j... The main reason being stated as: > Exiting this space allows us to refocus on products that build on our core strengths: knowledge reuse and building communities at scale. A year has passed and I'm not sure what progress have we seen on the "knowledge reuse" and "building communities" front. The post has this quote from the CEO: > We are realigning the Talent business to focus more on customer employer branding and company awareness needs, and moving away from job slots and direct hiring. This will tie the product closer to what we offer through Stack Overflow Advertising [...] The article linked by OP (related to generative AI) has this quoute, on the other hand: > There's definitely a question around how we leverage [generative AI] technology to deliver on our mission of helping build technology through collective knowledge. This intersection between the power of community on one side and AI on the other side—from my standpoint, human-generated community content has taken us to this level, we have a large impact, but there are also so many problems we can solve by leveraging this technology. Reading these CEO's quotes filled with words like "realigning" and "leveraging" makes him sound like a typical MBA executive (yes, he's a Harvard MBA) who thinks that the same rules can be applied to a business in any industry. All while completely ignoring the feedback of a business's users/customers.
vouaobrasil 3y ago
The author is wrong. The CEO perfectly understands Stack Overflow. What the author of this blog doesn't understand is that the CEO is pursuing a perfectly valid strategy: maximize its short-term gains by squeezing it unsustainably with the latest hype, and take the money, and run. The good of the community and the well-being of the users are completely irrelevant in this strategy.
- pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
  You have a pretty strange definition of ‘valid’.
  - emptyfile 3y ago
    I'd say it's actually pretty typical of corporations operated by global investment groups.
  - palata 3y ago
    Well, 'rational', I guess.
    - dmvdoug 3y ago
      I’m glad you put it in quotes at least.
  - inopinatus 3y ago
    “not outright illegal in every jurisdiction”
  - brycewray 3y ago
    Classic Star Trek (TOS) exchange [0]... Anan 7: I'm glad you approve. Spock: I do *not* approve. I understand. [0]: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon_(episode)#Memorable_quotes https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon_(...
  - vouaobrasil 3y ago
    It was a poor choice of words. I didn't mean valid in terms of morally right. I meant valid in terms of economically rational in today's climate.
sudeeprg 3y ago
Stack overflow and AI can coexist. AI doesn't enforce rules on how a question has to be asked or downvote you. It will be helpful for stack overflow to have AI. The author wants a pur8st approach, i think it having a purist approach doesn't work because AI fills some gaps.
- Dah00n 3y ago
  If SO votes help train AI it will turn SO into the equivalent of how Google isn't a search company, but an advertisement company with a search engine.
- pasc1878 3y ago
  What will improve SO is if you had an AI that could downvote bad answers and questions and especially find duplicates and point the new question to the old question. This would save a lot of experienced users time This would make it easier to find the good answers.
  - BrentOzar 3y ago
    > What will improve SO is if you had an AI that could downvote bad answers and questions and especially find duplicates Yes, because if there's one thing Stack Overflow needed, it was more negativity. /s
bloopernova 3y ago
If I were the semi benevolent dictator of the world, I'd make a law that said: all middle managers up to the CEO must spend 20% of their time doing entry level work in the company. Same with politicians. If you are insulated from what your company does, or constituents do, you can't effectively wield the power granted to you. Which leads me to an even more unpopular "authoritarian" opinion: the richest people are the furthest out of touch and thus least qualified to wield so much power. There should be a cap on personal wealth. And generational wealth should be prevented from creating dynasties. There should be no billionaires.
- yard2010 3y ago
  How do I join the party where do I sign?
  - Dah00n 3y ago
    Lots of similar ideas exist in politics. Look for Socialist or Communist in the party name.
    - danparsonson 3y ago
      I guess that's intended to be snark but contrary to what a surprising number of people seem to think, socialist ideas make many countries nice places to live. Communism of course is a different matter, but you know that.
      - Dah00n 3y ago
        It did come out snarky but that wasn't my intention. I'm one of those who vote for "socialist ideas" and I'm also one of those who disagree that "communism is a different matter".
- stonecharioteer 3y ago
  https://kanbanzone.com/resources/lean/toyota-production-system/genchi-genbutsu/ https://kanbanzone.com/resources/lean/toyota-production-syst... Everyone needs to really learn what the Toyota Production system has taught manufacturing for decades.
qwertox 3y ago
I'd be fine with SO turning into the place where effectively useful AI based answers get posted, where humans have worked together with AI to obtain a valid result, proven to be correct. In that case I wouldn't care if someone posts an AI answer, as long as it is guaranteed to be valid. That's the place which SO can take in a world with AI assistants. SO should not use AI to generate content, but to organize it and make it searchable. It could shift towards the analysis of existing and generation of new content when AI is really ready for it, but I don't see it happen within the next couple of years. And at that point a LLM would probably be smart enough as to not have its user require the use of SO. Maybe limiting the posting of commented AI results to the top 5% or so, because from the content I've seen new users posting (specially the questions), the quality has degraded strongly over the last 10 years. There's close to zero effort in crafting good questions from many of them.
- Dah00n 3y ago
  I wouldn't use it if it means AI will be trained on my code unless they pay me per answer or vote. I already removed everything from GitHub etc. AI on SO smells like how Google's business strategy is advertising first, search second. SO will be in the same position soon.
  - worrycue 3y ago
    Frankly I can foresee reduced online participation on places like Stack Overflow. Why would anyone help train AI, that employers are eager to replace you with, without getting anything in return? The “work together with AI” is just a transitional phrase. The endgame is to completely replace the employee.
  - welshwelsh 3y ago
    I don't understand this attitude. If your code is used to train AI, then it would be used to help more people in a wider variety of contexts. So assuming that your goal is to help people (which I assume it is since SO doesn't pay for answers), wouldn't you be excited about AI learning from you?
usrusr 3y ago
Has stackoverflow ever had a bootstrappy phase of profitability or has it been a VC bonfire ever since inception? If the latter is closer to the truth, I find it a little too easy to talk down the person in charge of keeping investors happy for showing signs of desperation instead of continuing rose-tinted visions from the early days. (if it has been profitable, yeah, shame on you for cutting up the goose that laid golden eggs in search for more)
- moberley 3y ago
  I think that it did. It was initially created by only a few people in 2008 [1] but then Joel Spolsky wrote a blog post about seeking VC investment in early 2010 [2] and the series A was announced in May that year [3]. The VC investment round was around the same time as the company announced the free Stack Exchange network for other topics not covered by their original site [4]. 1. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-launches/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-lau... 2. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2010/02/14/raising-money-for-stackoverflow/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2010/02/14/raising-money-for-... 3. https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/05/04/announcing-our-series-a/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/05/04/announcing-our-series-... 4. https://web.archive.org/web/20100416154936/http://blog.stackexchange.com/post/518474918/stack-exchange-2-0 https://web.archive.org/web/20100416154936/http://blog.stack...
0dayz 3y ago
While reddit's failure with the whole strike was fruitless it does I think highlight that at the end of the day you cannot treat the community in a community oriented products as a second thought. With stack overflow it's very odd how chasing some flavor of the year is seen as preferable than expanding and enhancing the community aspect of stack overflow.
- nerdponx 3y ago
  > highlight that at the end of the day you cannot treat the community in a community oriented products as a second thought Reddit and the ongoing SO-vs-moderator conflicts show precisely that. I stopped using Reddit and mostly stopped using SO, but now what? There's no good alternative. I just help fewer people now.
theteapot 3y ago
[flagged]
- kramerger 3y ago
  Yes, but they don't want others using their data for training (without paying). The problem is that ChatGPT used SO data for training, and now they are eating the SO revenue. Its the equivalent of being shot by your own gun so I understand SO leadership panicking
- fabian2k 3y ago
  Right now the moderators are prohibited by SE to remove AI-generated answers unless the users admit using AI themselves unprompted. You can see the policy here (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/391626/historical-policy-on-the-use-of-gpt-generators https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/391626/historical-p...), and this policy is the main reason for the moderator strike. This policy is very likely to be replaced soon, but that isn't final and the details aren't public yet.
  - theteapot 3y ago
    Well that sucks. I've asked ChatGPT (v3) for help with a programming task a couple of times. It made weirdly specific shit up about how an API was structured, which is way worse than a plain wrong answer. Then it tried to gas light me when questioned the response declaring itself totally correct. Then it eventually backed down and apologized. Never solved my problems. It was a weird experience, but enough for me to conclude I'd prefer to just use a search engine on openly available human generated content than some weird rip-off transformation of that content.
bambax 3y ago
> It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it! — Upton Sinclair Slightly OT, but it's counter-productive to start a blog / an article with a well known quote that's been used and re-used ad nauseam. It makes the reader suspicious that they're not going to read something truly original, and tells them the author may have a thing for authority. I think it's best not to use quotes at all, but if you must, find quotes that are 1/ new and 2/ counter-intuitive, or at least funny. The above quote, in addition to being famous, isn't counter-intuitive; it's an interesting reformulation of a simple observation: of course people don't usually saw off the branch they're sitting on, even if it means ignoring some facts. Tell me something I don't know.
- jlericson 3y ago
  Author here and I agree actually. The quote was the first thing I wrote and I never went back to consider if it still made sense for the post as a whole. Given the title (which is maybe more combative than I intended?) I don't think I need it. I'm planning on watching the CEO's announcement today and updating the post. Unless there's a better use for the quote, it'll be gone in the next edit. Thanks for the feedback!
  - bambax 3y ago
    Thanks for taking it well and graciously... Sorry for the tone! (I really feel this specific quote is so used it's kind of meaningless now. But still, I could have said it better.)
axus 3y ago
As long as keep remembering to not do what Experts Exchange did, they'll get by.
andrefuchs 3y ago
ChatGPT and Discord communities replaced SO for me. It's way faster to get answers.
- cx0der 3y ago
  While that was a perfect outcome for you, but when someone else needs the same or similar question answered they have to ask ChatGPT or find a relevant Discord to ask again. This was the original problem that Stackoverflow was supposed to solve, and did do at the beginning.
  - jkukul 3y ago
    > or find a relevant Discord to ask again. and AFAIK Discord is not indexed by Google, so the answer is likely never to be found. This goes completely against the idea of the knowledge re-use
- mattw2121 3y ago
  Most large corporations block ChatGPT and Discord usage. Developers at those companies still have access to SO.
al_be_back 3y ago
>> which lost $42 million over 6 months and had just laid off 10% of its employees most tech companies lay offs have been around 10% mark - and it started before general public's orgasmic-adoption of A.I. like all platforms, Stack Overfloow, overflowed their market. layoffs and restructuring is a way to address that. if you account the rise of "tech streaming" platforms like youtube, twitch, and elearning orgs like udemy etc, it's no surprise that students & professionals choose alternatives to Stack.
sparrowInHand 3y ago
MBA CEOs as a risk for engineering companies and longterm value destroyers. The book.
dgan 3y ago
If you value answers on SO, this is your call to grab your local copy (kiwix allows that), which is immune to investors whims and CEOs mistakes.
littlestymaar 3y ago
A few years ago, Stackoverflow bragged about how they hosted their entire infrastructure on a dozen of servers. Today I learn that they are losing $80 million a year? What the hell are they doing with that money?
- IshKebab 3y ago
  Salaries presumably. Apparently they have 500 employees, probably on crazy SF salaries. Easily $1-200m/year.
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    > Apparently they have 500 employee Then it's a management problem: what were those people hired to do, given that the content is generated and curated by community alone? Given that the software running StackOverflow has been working for many years without signifiant changes, they could probably have stuck to ten times less employees and generate substantial profit, but eh that doesn't make a good exit valuation… > Easily $1-200m/year. What is this supposed to mean?
    - IshKebab 3y ago
      I agree. $100m-$200m/year on staff costs.
      - nerdponx 3y ago
        Right but the question remains: why do you need 500 people to run a Q&A site with mostly plain text, and some banner ads?
        IshKebab 3y ago
        I agree, it's a crazy number of staff.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
jacknews 3y ago
"from my standpoint, human-generated community content has taken us to this level, we have a large impact, but there are also so many problems we can solve by leveraging this technology." LOL. "All your free hard work answering questions powered our profits thus far, but y'know it's expensive to keep y'all in check, and now we need to make megabucks, so we're going to replace you with machines for the next stage of our journey."
travisporter 3y ago
Maybe he’s right. Maybe LLMs will also learn to waste 10 hours for me before I realize I typed torch.Tensor instead of torch.tensor and post on SO for my benefit. /s
ilaksh 3y ago
Well, I'm used to having unpopular opinions. So while I know that I will be crucified for saying this, I will say it anyway. Stack Overflow absolutely _has_ to integrate AI if there is any chance of it continuing as a viable business. How do we know this? For starters, a massive portion of users have already stopped asking questions on Stack Overflow and switched to asking ChatGPT. The situation with the moderators and politics and community interaction might have been botched. Maybe. But I suspect that there might not have been any way to shift direction without making the community extremely angry. It's not human equivalent. But it can provide useful info and is getting better at a rapid pace. They did not have a choice about integrating AI deeply. Part of this is people failing to understand the capabilities of the leading edge AI models and how that changes things.
deterministic 3y ago
It blows my mind that SO is loosing money. Seriously WTF? Is management simply incompetent or what gives?

278 points by jlericson 3y ago

Why don't they use LLM chatbots to encourage great questions and make it easier to ask them? Somehow adding LLMs to the side of the answers feels incorrect to me in this particular case.

jasfi 3y ago

Losing money while growing revenue isn't necessarily a bad thing. This can be caused by growth investing, and is often the right thing to do. Amazon is a famous example of this line of thinking.

onion2k 3y ago
Losing money while growing revenue isn't necessarily a bad thing. If you strongly believe that you have a viable long term plan to switch to a profitable model when the time is right, sure. When AI comes along and wrecks your business before you manage to extract the profit then you can say (with hindsight) you made a mistake by waiting too long. I'm not saying this is the case for SO, but it might be. Time will tell. Getting to profit quickly is a hedge against change. Nothing guarantees that your business will be around forever. If you don't take the money when its there you might lose the chance.
cjfd 3y ago
It becomes a bit less viable during these times of higher interest rates.
nerdponx 3y ago
But what's there to even invest in for SO? Ad tech? Selling some LLM trained on their data? I can think of a whole bunch of silly ideas here, but none of them seem anywhere near comparable to Amazon investing in a vertically integrated supply chain for e-commerce and cloud computing.
- jasfi 3y ago
  I found an article: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200728005330/en/Stack-Overflow-raises-85M-in-Series-E-funding-to-further-accelerate-SaaS-business https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200728005330/en/Sta... They're investing in teams and knowledge management. Sounds like they're going after the Enterprise.
  - nerdponx 3y ago
    Best of luck to them, I know they've been trying to push a "for teams" product for years but I've never heard of anyone who has even expressed interest in it. Atlassian will be a tough nut to crack. Job board seems like a much better idea, but I'm not the CEO or investors so what do I know?
    - jasfi 3y ago
      The job board was also a finished product. They could have automated just about anything manual, and kept it going with a small team. For the brand promotion alone it was worth it to keep it going.

janalsncm 3y ago

> In May I wrote about Stack Overflow's business, which lost $42 million over 6 months and had just laid off 10% of its employees. Since then, the company's fiscal year-end results came out. Despite growing revenue, it lost $84 million over the year ending on March 31, 2023. Thank god Wikipedia isn’t run like Stack Overflow. As an end user, they have pretty much the same value proposition: user generated answers to my questions. Wikipedia is still doing well, meanwhile it seems SO is constantly being driven off a cliff by bimbos in management. Not everything needs to be a damn unicorn. SO is an information repository. They need to accept that stop trying to “enhance” it with more crap because they don’t realize their median user is a junior dev who really just needs to serialize a Java object and isn’t going to pay or put up with any LLM-generated nonsense. SO doesn’t need large language models. What they really need is a better model of what answers are good, what answers are outdated, and what answers should be expanded to include more info (and sometimes, what answers should be slimmed down a bit). Turn the top answer to popular questions into a wiki so that everyone can update it. And then add backlinks for questions which were closed for being “duplicates”. It solves so many problems SO has. Another thing. This “comments aren’t for extended discussion” nonsense needs to go too. Any question could easily include a Reddit-style discussion tab to facilitate discussion. I’m sure much of it would be at least as valuable as the answers themselves.

mrweasel 3y ago
> Not everything needs to be a damn unicorn. More people needs to understand this. It's fine being a small(ish) business that turns a profit and provides a service that's beneficial to society. You don't need to be a billion dollar company to be important or do great work. DHH talked about this 15 years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY
- palata 3y ago
  > You don't need to be a billion dollar company to be important or do great work. And importantly: because you are a billion dollar company doesn't mean you bring good to the world. At all.

JimDabell 3y ago

I have a hard time feeling sorry for Stack Overflow. They had most developers in the world visiting frequently. They have detailed information on exactly which languages, libraries, toolchains, and platforms those developers use and their pain points. All of their content is given to them for free by volunteers. All of their moderation is done for them for free by volunteers. The only thing they have to serve is text. How can you fail to build a sustainable business on top of that‽

luckystarr 3y ago
I'm a senior dev. The only thing I found useful in the last years was the job market on SO. They closed that down recently. Now I don't even go there at all.
- stingraycharles 3y ago
  Why.. why did they closed this down? I remember this was my single most successful place to find good software developers / run job ads. We spent thousands and thousands on these ads, and I always felt this was their chicken that laid golden eggs.
  - jkukul 3y ago
    Here's the post explaining their decision: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/415293/sunsetting-jobs-developer-story https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/415293/sunsetting-j... The main reason being stated as: > Exiting this space allows us to refocus on products that build on our core strengths: knowledge reuse and building communities at scale. A year has passed and I'm not sure what progress have we seen on the "knowledge reuse" and "building communities" front. The post has this quote from the CEO: > We are realigning the Talent business to focus more on customer employer branding and company awareness needs, and moving away from job slots and direct hiring. This will tie the product closer to what we offer through Stack Overflow Advertising [...] The article linked by OP (related to generative AI) has this quoute, on the other hand: > There's definitely a question around how we leverage [generative AI] technology to deliver on our mission of helping build technology through collective knowledge. This intersection between the power of community on one side and AI on the other side—from my standpoint, human-generated community content has taken us to this level, we have a large impact, but there are also so many problems we can solve by leveraging this technology. Reading these CEO's quotes filled with words like "realigning" and "leveraging" makes him sound like a typical MBA executive (yes, he's a Harvard MBA) who thinks that the same rules can be applied to a business in any industry. All while completely ignoring the feedback of a business's users/customers.

vouaobrasil 3y ago

The author is wrong. The CEO perfectly understands Stack Overflow. What the author of this blog doesn't understand is that the CEO is pursuing a perfectly valid strategy: maximize its short-term gains by squeezing it unsustainably with the latest hype, and take the money, and run. The good of the community and the well-being of the users are completely irrelevant in this strategy.

pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
You have a pretty strange definition of ‘valid’.
- emptyfile 3y ago
  I'd say it's actually pretty typical of corporations operated by global investment groups.
- palata 3y ago
  Well, 'rational', I guess.
  - dmvdoug 3y ago
    I’m glad you put it in quotes at least.
- inopinatus 3y ago
  “not outright illegal in every jurisdiction”
- brycewray 3y ago
  Classic Star Trek (TOS) exchange [0]... Anan 7: I'm glad you approve. Spock: I do *not* approve. I understand. [0]: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon_(episode)#Memorable_quotes https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon_(...
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  It was a poor choice of words. I didn't mean valid in terms of morally right. I meant valid in terms of economically rational in today's climate.

sudeeprg 3y ago

Stack overflow and AI can coexist. AI doesn't enforce rules on how a question has to be asked or downvote you. It will be helpful for stack overflow to have AI. The author wants a pur8st approach, i think it having a purist approach doesn't work because AI fills some gaps.

Dah00n 3y ago
If SO votes help train AI it will turn SO into the equivalent of how Google isn't a search company, but an advertisement company with a search engine.
pasc1878 3y ago
What will improve SO is if you had an AI that could downvote bad answers and questions and especially find duplicates and point the new question to the old question. This would save a lot of experienced users time This would make it easier to find the good answers.
- BrentOzar 3y ago
  > What will improve SO is if you had an AI that could downvote bad answers and questions and especially find duplicates Yes, because if there's one thing Stack Overflow needed, it was more negativity. /s

bloopernova 3y ago

If I were the semi benevolent dictator of the world, I'd make a law that said: all middle managers up to the CEO must spend 20% of their time doing entry level work in the company. Same with politicians. If you are insulated from what your company does, or constituents do, you can't effectively wield the power granted to you. Which leads me to an even more unpopular "authoritarian" opinion: the richest people are the furthest out of touch and thus least qualified to wield so much power. There should be a cap on personal wealth. And generational wealth should be prevented from creating dynasties. There should be no billionaires.

yard2010 3y ago
How do I join the party where do I sign?
- Dah00n 3y ago
  Lots of similar ideas exist in politics. Look for Socialist or Communist in the party name.
  - danparsonson 3y ago
    I guess that's intended to be snark but contrary to what a surprising number of people seem to think, socialist ideas make many countries nice places to live. Communism of course is a different matter, but you know that.
    - Dah00n 3y ago
      It did come out snarky but that wasn't my intention. I'm one of those who vote for "socialist ideas" and I'm also one of those who disagree that "communism is a different matter".
stonecharioteer 3y ago
https://kanbanzone.com/resources/lean/toyota-production-system/genchi-genbutsu/ https://kanbanzone.com/resources/lean/toyota-production-syst... Everyone needs to really learn what the Toyota Production system has taught manufacturing for decades.

qwertox 3y ago

I'd be fine with SO turning into the place where effectively useful AI based answers get posted, where humans have worked together with AI to obtain a valid result, proven to be correct. In that case I wouldn't care if someone posts an AI answer, as long as it is guaranteed to be valid. That's the place which SO can take in a world with AI assistants. SO should not use AI to generate content, but to organize it and make it searchable. It could shift towards the analysis of existing and generation of new content when AI is really ready for it, but I don't see it happen within the next couple of years. And at that point a LLM would probably be smart enough as to not have its user require the use of SO. Maybe limiting the posting of commented AI results to the top 5% or so, because from the content I've seen new users posting (specially the questions), the quality has degraded strongly over the last 10 years. There's close to zero effort in crafting good questions from many of them.

Dah00n 3y ago
I wouldn't use it if it means AI will be trained on my code unless they pay me per answer or vote. I already removed everything from GitHub etc. AI on SO smells like how Google's business strategy is advertising first, search second. SO will be in the same position soon.
- worrycue 3y ago
  Frankly I can foresee reduced online participation on places like Stack Overflow. Why would anyone help train AI, that employers are eager to replace you with, without getting anything in return? The “work together with AI” is just a transitional phrase. The endgame is to completely replace the employee.
- welshwelsh 3y ago
  I don't understand this attitude. If your code is used to train AI, then it would be used to help more people in a wider variety of contexts. So assuming that your goal is to help people (which I assume it is since SO doesn't pay for answers), wouldn't you be excited about AI learning from you?

usrusr 3y ago

Has stackoverflow ever had a bootstrappy phase of profitability or has it been a VC bonfire ever since inception? If the latter is closer to the truth, I find it a little too easy to talk down the person in charge of keeping investors happy for showing signs of desperation instead of continuing rose-tinted visions from the early days. (if it has been profitable, yeah, shame on you for cutting up the goose that laid golden eggs in search for more)

moberley 3y ago
I think that it did. It was initially created by only a few people in 2008 [1] but then Joel Spolsky wrote a blog post about seeking VC investment in early 2010 [2] and the series A was announced in May that year [3]. The VC investment round was around the same time as the company announced the free Stack Exchange network for other topics not covered by their original site [4]. 1. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-launches/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-lau... 2. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2010/02/14/raising-money-for-stackoverflow/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2010/02/14/raising-money-for-... 3. https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/05/04/announcing-our-series-a/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/05/04/announcing-our-series-... 4. https://web.archive.org/web/20100416154936/http://blog.stackexchange.com/post/518474918/stack-exchange-2-0 https://web.archive.org/web/20100416154936/http://blog.stack...

0dayz 3y ago

While reddit's failure with the whole strike was fruitless it does I think highlight that at the end of the day you cannot treat the community in a community oriented products as a second thought. With stack overflow it's very odd how chasing some flavor of the year is seen as preferable than expanding and enhancing the community aspect of stack overflow.

nerdponx 3y ago
> highlight that at the end of the day you cannot treat the community in a community oriented products as a second thought Reddit and the ongoing SO-vs-moderator conflicts show precisely that. I stopped using Reddit and mostly stopped using SO, but now what? There's no good alternative. I just help fewer people now.

theteapot 3y ago

[flagged]

kramerger 3y ago
Yes, but they don't want others using their data for training (without paying). The problem is that ChatGPT used SO data for training, and now they are eating the SO revenue. Its the equivalent of being shot by your own gun so I understand SO leadership panicking
fabian2k 3y ago
Right now the moderators are prohibited by SE to remove AI-generated answers unless the users admit using AI themselves unprompted. You can see the policy here (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/391626/historical-policy-on-the-use-of-gpt-generators https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/391626/historical-p...), and this policy is the main reason for the moderator strike. This policy is very likely to be replaced soon, but that isn't final and the details aren't public yet.
- theteapot 3y ago
  Well that sucks. I've asked ChatGPT (v3) for help with a programming task a couple of times. It made weirdly specific shit up about how an API was structured, which is way worse than a plain wrong answer. Then it tried to gas light me when questioned the response declaring itself totally correct. Then it eventually backed down and apologized. Never solved my problems. It was a weird experience, but enough for me to conclude I'd prefer to just use a search engine on openly available human generated content than some weird rip-off transformation of that content.

bambax 3y ago

> It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it! — Upton Sinclair Slightly OT, but it's counter-productive to start a blog / an article with a well known quote that's been used and re-used ad nauseam. It makes the reader suspicious that they're not going to read something truly original, and tells them the author may have a thing for authority. I think it's best not to use quotes at all, but if you must, find quotes that are 1/ new and 2/ counter-intuitive, or at least funny. The above quote, in addition to being famous, isn't counter-intuitive; it's an interesting reformulation of a simple observation: of course people don't usually saw off the branch they're sitting on, even if it means ignoring some facts. Tell me something I don't know.

jlericson 3y ago
Author here and I agree actually. The quote was the first thing I wrote and I never went back to consider if it still made sense for the post as a whole. Given the title (which is maybe more combative than I intended?) I don't think I need it. I'm planning on watching the CEO's announcement today and updating the post. Unless there's a better use for the quote, it'll be gone in the next edit. Thanks for the feedback!
- bambax 3y ago
  Thanks for taking it well and graciously... Sorry for the tone! (I really feel this specific quote is so used it's kind of meaningless now. But still, I could have said it better.)

axus 3y ago

As long as keep remembering to not do what Experts Exchange did, they'll get by.

andrefuchs 3y ago

ChatGPT and Discord communities replaced SO for me. It's way faster to get answers.

cx0der 3y ago
While that was a perfect outcome for you, but when someone else needs the same or similar question answered they have to ask ChatGPT or find a relevant Discord to ask again. This was the original problem that Stackoverflow was supposed to solve, and did do at the beginning.
- jkukul 3y ago
  > or find a relevant Discord to ask again. and AFAIK Discord is not indexed by Google, so the answer is likely never to be found. This goes completely against the idea of the knowledge re-use
mattw2121 3y ago
Most large corporations block ChatGPT and Discord usage. Developers at those companies still have access to SO.

al_be_back 3y ago

>> which lost $42 million over 6 months and had just laid off 10% of its employees most tech companies lay offs have been around 10% mark - and it started before general public's orgasmic-adoption of A.I. like all platforms, Stack Overfloow, overflowed their market. layoffs and restructuring is a way to address that. if you account the rise of "tech streaming" platforms like youtube, twitch, and elearning orgs like udemy etc, it's no surprise that students & professionals choose alternatives to Stack.

sparrowInHand 3y ago

MBA CEOs as a risk for engineering companies and longterm value destroyers. The book.

dgan 3y ago

If you value answers on SO, this is your call to grab your local copy (kiwix allows that), which is immune to investors whims and CEOs mistakes.

littlestymaar 3y ago

A few years ago, Stackoverflow bragged about how they hosted their entire infrastructure on a dozen of servers. Today I learn that they are losing $80 million a year? What the hell are they doing with that money?

IshKebab 3y ago
Salaries presumably. Apparently they have 500 employees, probably on crazy SF salaries. Easily $1-200m/year.
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  > Apparently they have 500 employee Then it's a management problem: what were those people hired to do, given that the content is generated and curated by community alone? Given that the software running StackOverflow has been working for many years without signifiant changes, they could probably have stuck to ten times less employees and generate substantial profit, but eh that doesn't make a good exit valuation… > Easily $1-200m/year. What is this supposed to mean?
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    I agree. $100m-$200m/year on staff costs.
    - nerdponx 3y ago
      Right but the question remains: why do you need 500 people to run a Q&A site with mostly plain text, and some banner ads?
      - IshKebab 3y ago
        I agree, it's a crazy number of staff.
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jacknews 3y ago

"from my standpoint, human-generated community content has taken us to this level, we have a large impact, but there are also so many problems we can solve by leveraging this technology." LOL. "All your free hard work answering questions powered our profits thus far, but y'know it's expensive to keep y'all in check, and now we need to make megabucks, so we're going to replace you with machines for the next stage of our journey."

travisporter 3y ago

Maybe he’s right. Maybe LLMs will also learn to waste 10 hours for me before I realize I typed torch.Tensor instead of torch.tensor and post on SO for my benefit. /s

ilaksh 3y ago

Well, I'm used to having unpopular opinions. So while I know that I will be crucified for saying this, I will say it anyway. Stack Overflow absolutely _has_ to integrate AI if there is any chance of it continuing as a viable business. How do we know this? For starters, a massive portion of users have already stopped asking questions on Stack Overflow and switched to asking ChatGPT. The situation with the moderators and politics and community interaction might have been botched. Maybe. But I suspect that there might not have been any way to shift direction without making the community extremely angry. It's not human equivalent. But it can provide useful info and is getting better at a rapid pace. They did not have a choice about integrating AI deeply. Part of this is people failing to understand the capabilities of the leading edge AI models and how that changes things.

deterministic 3y ago

It blows my mind that SO is loosing money. Seriously WTF? Is management simply incompetent or what gives?