8 ms·

StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site

44 points by stefankuehnel 6mo ago

wxw 6mo ago
I wasn’t aware there was a beta. For those familiar, what were its issues?
- lloydatkinson 6mo ago
  My problem with it was that it looked truly disgusting and I don’t say that lightly. They had essentially cloned the Reddit “new” theme that has the all too common obnoxious overuse of white space over content.
  - busymom0 6mo ago
    That's the very first thing which came to my mind too. I thought "wow, they really did copy Reddit design which I hate".
    - Noumenon72 6mo ago
      I don't care about the visuals of Reddit, but copying the design of "this is a site for commenting, answers are just top-level comments with no distinction" seemed like they did not see the difference between Stack Overflow and a subreddit.
gigatexal 6mo ago
every *Overflow site other than the main one for asking coding questions has been very good to me. StackOverflow was a terrible experience. What LLMs got right was when asking seemingly stupid questions, or simple questions, or RTFM-answerable questions didn't get responses of "RTFM", or "Duplicate", or the like. If for want of the Astronomy overflow and math overflow and others to remain I will not wish that StackOverflow go the route of Ask Jeeves (and wither away into irrelevance) but I'm hoping they take a look inside and see why they failed.
- skeeter2020 6mo ago
  They destroyed this experience years ago because they couldn't monetize or own 3rd party networks, and when they shut them down and stole those with any traction, people who cared stopped participating, and the community left or more commonly just evaporated. The parenting one is a good example.
Brajeshwar 6mo ago
The Beta Site is at https://beta.stackoverflow.com https://beta.stackoverflow.com To me, it looks like more like Digg from the old days.
- rorylawless 6mo ago
  It looks like a clone of present-day Reddit to me.
tripdout 6mo ago
The beta site was a horrible redesign. It hid information that was previously visible, the layout was confusing, comments were harder to read, and it just made no sense.
dgrin91 6mo ago
Here is a hard question - how could Stack Overflow succeed in a post-chatgpt eta? I mean obviously the new CEO and leadership has been total trash and has squandered their goodwill and user loyalty, but if I was CEO instead I don't know how I would save the ship. Doubling down on how it was done in the 'good old days' probably wouldn't work because you would slowly bleed user to AI. Selling data to AI companies might work for a bit, but I would guess that the sales value of SO's data has quickly diminishing returns. So what is their path forward?
- grim_io 6mo ago
  It will turn into a meme subreddit and/or die. What else is there?
- schmorptron 6mo ago
  That's a hard one. SO's hostile community to newbies, like any expert community, comes from the longstanding users having seen the basic questions 1000s of times and understandably not wanting to answer variations of them over and over, while for the newbies those questions genuinely are there and they don't have the routine knowledge yet of where to look or how to even look for solutions in the first place. In an ideal world, LLMs would take all of the basic RTFM style questions, and leave SO for the harder, but still general enough to be applicable to others-questions. LLMs seem to be getting pretty good at those as well though, so I don't know where that leaves us. SO for discussions of taste? I have these two options to build this, how should i approach this? They tried to sell their own GPT wrapper for a while, didn't they? The use case I can see for that is: User asks question - LLM answers it - user is unsure about the answer - it gets posted as a SO thread and the rest of the userbase can nitpick or correct the LLM response. Edit: I also seem to remember they had a job portal in the sidebar for a while, what happened to that? Seems like a reasonable revenue stream that is also useful to users.
  - dfabulich 6mo ago
    > In an ideal world, LLMs would take all of the basic RTFM style questions, and leave SO for the harder, but still general enough to be applicable to others-questions. I think the deeper question is how SO would get paid for that. Historically, SO has been funded by advertising. Users would google their question, land on SO, get an answer, and SO would get paid by advertisers. (The job portal was a variation on the advertising product.) Even in your ideal world, newbies and experts would first ask their questions to an LLM. The LLM might search SO and find the answer there, but the user would get the answer without viewing an ad, so SO wouldn't get paid for that. The same issue is facing Wikipedia. Wikipedia isn't funded by commercial advertisers, but they are funded by donations, which are driven by ads. If LLMs just answer the questions based on Wikipedia data, the user won't see the Wikipedia ad asking them to donate; they may not even know that Wikipedia was the source of the information, so they may not even develop a fondness for Wikipedia that's necessary to get users excited to donate. This is why you see people shouting about how LLMs are "killing the web." I think it's more correct to say that LLMs are killing free web resources. Without advertising, not even donation-funded resources can remain available for free.
renewiltord 6mo ago
The site is populated exclusively with die-hard fanatics with no real-world third space using that community to fulfill their personal social needs. They'll do that all the way to its complete and utter death due to uselessness. Change would be anathema to them so there is no path for the site but death. There is no utility it fulfills except as a watering hole for those unfortunate souls who built their village there.
dvh 6mo ago
I remember the switch from random discussion forum that preceded it to stack overflow, the problem with random forums were that the answer was hidden somewhere down or on page 3. Stack overflow was significant improvement in this regard (to a point that I only searched programming question with site:stackoverflow.com to filter out other methods), the question was curated and updated. Now we have new thing that is even better so there is no going back. The progression was roughly: 1. Random website 2. Random thematic blog, seo'd 3. Random forum 4. Curated question portal like SO 5. Thematic subreddit when it became impossible to ask on SO 6. LLM
- cpcallen 6mo ago
  > when it became impossible to ask on SO Can you explain what you mean by that?
  - ratg13 6mo ago
    At some point they got ultra aggressive about "duplicate" questions. Technology changes at a fast pace .. so new questions would get asked, and then closed by moderators and pointed to similar questions that might be 5 or 6 years old and no longer relevant.. essentially ending the discussion on many topics and actively preventing progress in certain areas.
    - anakaine 5mo ago
      Absolutely this. Later in the piece I learned that one of the mods in a place I'd occasionally asking questions on SO was from my local town and would occasionally attend industry social events. It was amusing to let a few people know and watch the "why did you close that question as a duplicate? That vendor module was only released 6 months ths ago but the duplicate was from 5 years back. Make it make sense!".
  - Viliam1234 6mo ago
    Some people took SO too competitively. They tried to be the first to answer your question (even if by a single sentence that would be edited to a longer answer later), but when they could not, they at least tried to get your question closed (presumably so that their competitors couldn't get points for answering it). At some moment it just stopped making sense for me to ask questions on SO, because if you can google the answer then what's the point, but if you can't google the answer, then some angry competitive user is likely to close your question for some reason.
not_your_vase 6mo ago
I love how SO lets itself being bullied by 25-30 high-rep users - the very same users who have chased away all the other users from the website. While AI definitely took away a lot of people from SO, most people are relieved that they don't have to interact with that literally garbage community when they have an IT/CS question. They didn't leave because of the website design, but I also believe that the new design wouldn't have chased many away either. These users' rule hasn't really worked out so far, as demonstrated by the current state of SO. Maybe it is time to ignore that very small, but very vocal group? Though probably that should have happened years ago, maybe it's just time to cut their losses.
- zahlman 6mo ago
  You are complaining about counterfactuals. Nobody is bullying anyone; the people active on meta aren't "chasing away" users (almost no users actually come to meta in the first place, the big names don't do a lot of personal interaction and when they do they don't leave comments unless they can be exceedingly polite about it); all that's happening is that with LLMs people finally have the thing they wanted all along[0] so they no longer have to keep coming to SO demanding it to be that thing when it was very explicitly designed the entire time not to be that thing, specifically so that experts wouldn't have to waste their time when they try to make the world better on a volunteer basis[1]. But most importantly: the site does not even remotely in any imaginable way empower those users. It actively hinders them, the staff have berated them over the years over alleged "unfriendliness"[2] and they constantly dump their ideas on the meta site, then ignore all feedback and push their ideas through anyway. The main site is noticeably slower now. As far as I can tell, this is because they've taken code paths that the beta uses (especially whatever it is they use to load the code boxes and put a little JS widget at the top of them) and applied them back to the main site that worked perfectly well before. [0] Basically: a magic robot that can listen to them and try to suggest an answer one on one, without caring about whether literally anyone else on the planet could benefit from that exchange, because the robot can tirelessly do that for the next person. [1] I.e., so that humans could say something once and actually have it be relevant to many people. [2] I.e.: the company makes money from views and a lot of people don't want to view a site where they have to actually meet any kind of standard whatsoever to participate; so it's the fault of people who have an actual vision for the site being useful.
moralestapia 6mo ago
Lol, what a massive trainwreck. There's a big chance SO is used more by AIs than real humans, nowadays. Out with the old, in with the new.

44 points by stefankuehnel 6mo ago

wxw 6mo ago

I wasn’t aware there was a beta. For those familiar, what were its issues?

lloydatkinson 6mo ago
My problem with it was that it looked truly disgusting and I don’t say that lightly. They had essentially cloned the Reddit “new” theme that has the all too common obnoxious overuse of white space over content.
- busymom0 6mo ago
  That's the very first thing which came to my mind too. I thought "wow, they really did copy Reddit design which I hate".
  - Noumenon72 6mo ago
    I don't care about the visuals of Reddit, but copying the design of "this is a site for commenting, answers are just top-level comments with no distinction" seemed like they did not see the difference between Stack Overflow and a subreddit.

gigatexal 6mo ago

every *Overflow site other than the main one for asking coding questions has been very good to me. StackOverflow was a terrible experience. What LLMs got right was when asking seemingly stupid questions, or simple questions, or RTFM-answerable questions didn't get responses of "RTFM", or "Duplicate", or the like. If for want of the Astronomy overflow and math overflow and others to remain I will not wish that StackOverflow go the route of Ask Jeeves (and wither away into irrelevance) but I'm hoping they take a look inside and see why they failed.

skeeter2020 6mo ago
They destroyed this experience years ago because they couldn't monetize or own 3rd party networks, and when they shut them down and stole those with any traction, people who cared stopped participating, and the community left or more commonly just evaporated. The parenting one is a good example.

Brajeshwar 6mo ago

The Beta Site is at https://beta.stackoverflow.com https://beta.stackoverflow.com To me, it looks like more like Digg from the old days.

rorylawless 6mo ago
It looks like a clone of present-day Reddit to me.

tripdout 6mo ago

The beta site was a horrible redesign. It hid information that was previously visible, the layout was confusing, comments were harder to read, and it just made no sense.

dgrin91 6mo ago

Here is a hard question - how could Stack Overflow succeed in a post-chatgpt eta? I mean obviously the new CEO and leadership has been total trash and has squandered their goodwill and user loyalty, but if I was CEO instead I don't know how I would save the ship. Doubling down on how it was done in the 'good old days' probably wouldn't work because you would slowly bleed user to AI. Selling data to AI companies might work for a bit, but I would guess that the sales value of SO's data has quickly diminishing returns. So what is their path forward?

grim_io 6mo ago
It will turn into a meme subreddit and/or die. What else is there?
schmorptron 6mo ago
That's a hard one. SO's hostile community to newbies, like any expert community, comes from the longstanding users having seen the basic questions 1000s of times and understandably not wanting to answer variations of them over and over, while for the newbies those questions genuinely are there and they don't have the routine knowledge yet of where to look or how to even look for solutions in the first place. In an ideal world, LLMs would take all of the basic RTFM style questions, and leave SO for the harder, but still general enough to be applicable to others-questions. LLMs seem to be getting pretty good at those as well though, so I don't know where that leaves us. SO for discussions of taste? I have these two options to build this, how should i approach this? They tried to sell their own GPT wrapper for a while, didn't they? The use case I can see for that is: User asks question - LLM answers it - user is unsure about the answer - it gets posted as a SO thread and the rest of the userbase can nitpick or correct the LLM response. Edit: I also seem to remember they had a job portal in the sidebar for a while, what happened to that? Seems like a reasonable revenue stream that is also useful to users.
- dfabulich 6mo ago
  > In an ideal world, LLMs would take all of the basic RTFM style questions, and leave SO for the harder, but still general enough to be applicable to others-questions. I think the deeper question is how SO would get paid for that. Historically, SO has been funded by advertising. Users would google their question, land on SO, get an answer, and SO would get paid by advertisers. (The job portal was a variation on the advertising product.) Even in your ideal world, newbies and experts would first ask their questions to an LLM. The LLM might search SO and find the answer there, but the user would get the answer without viewing an ad, so SO wouldn't get paid for that. The same issue is facing Wikipedia. Wikipedia isn't funded by commercial advertisers, but they are funded by donations, which are driven by ads. If LLMs just answer the questions based on Wikipedia data, the user won't see the Wikipedia ad asking them to donate; they may not even know that Wikipedia was the source of the information, so they may not even develop a fondness for Wikipedia that's necessary to get users excited to donate. This is why you see people shouting about how LLMs are "killing the web." I think it's more correct to say that LLMs are killing free web resources. Without advertising, not even donation-funded resources can remain available for free.

renewiltord 6mo ago

The site is populated exclusively with die-hard fanatics with no real-world third space using that community to fulfill their personal social needs. They'll do that all the way to its complete and utter death due to uselessness. Change would be anathema to them so there is no path for the site but death. There is no utility it fulfills except as a watering hole for those unfortunate souls who built their village there.

dvh 6mo ago

I remember the switch from random discussion forum that preceded it to stack overflow, the problem with random forums were that the answer was hidden somewhere down or on page 3. Stack overflow was significant improvement in this regard (to a point that I only searched programming question with site:stackoverflow.com to filter out other methods), the question was curated and updated. Now we have new thing that is even better so there is no going back. The progression was roughly: 1. Random website 2. Random thematic blog, seo'd 3. Random forum 4. Curated question portal like SO 5. Thematic subreddit when it became impossible to ask on SO 6. LLM

cpcallen 6mo ago
> when it became impossible to ask on SO Can you explain what you mean by that?
- ratg13 6mo ago
  At some point they got ultra aggressive about "duplicate" questions. Technology changes at a fast pace .. so new questions would get asked, and then closed by moderators and pointed to similar questions that might be 5 or 6 years old and no longer relevant.. essentially ending the discussion on many topics and actively preventing progress in certain areas.
  - anakaine 5mo ago
    Absolutely this. Later in the piece I learned that one of the mods in a place I'd occasionally asking questions on SO was from my local town and would occasionally attend industry social events. It was amusing to let a few people know and watch the "why did you close that question as a duplicate? That vendor module was only released 6 months ths ago but the duplicate was from 5 years back. Make it make sense!".
- Viliam1234 6mo ago
  Some people took SO too competitively. They tried to be the first to answer your question (even if by a single sentence that would be edited to a longer answer later), but when they could not, they at least tried to get your question closed (presumably so that their competitors couldn't get points for answering it). At some moment it just stopped making sense for me to ask questions on SO, because if you can google the answer then what's the point, but if you can't google the answer, then some angry competitive user is likely to close your question for some reason.

not_your_vase 6mo ago

I love how SO lets itself being bullied by 25-30 high-rep users - the very same users who have chased away all the other users from the website. While AI definitely took away a lot of people from SO, most people are relieved that they don't have to interact with that literally garbage community when they have an IT/CS question. They didn't leave because of the website design, but I also believe that the new design wouldn't have chased many away either. These users' rule hasn't really worked out so far, as demonstrated by the current state of SO. Maybe it is time to ignore that very small, but very vocal group? Though probably that should have happened years ago, maybe it's just time to cut their losses.

zahlman 6mo ago
You are complaining about counterfactuals. Nobody is bullying anyone; the people active on meta aren't "chasing away" users (almost no users actually come to meta in the first place, the big names don't do a lot of personal interaction and when they do they don't leave comments unless they can be exceedingly polite about it); all that's happening is that with LLMs people finally have the thing they wanted all along[0] so they no longer have to keep coming to SO demanding it to be that thing when it was very explicitly designed the entire time not to be that thing, specifically so that experts wouldn't have to waste their time when they try to make the world better on a volunteer basis[1]. But most importantly: the site does not even remotely in any imaginable way empower those users. It actively hinders them, the staff have berated them over the years over alleged "unfriendliness"[2] and they constantly dump their ideas on the meta site, then ignore all feedback and push their ideas through anyway. The main site is noticeably slower now. As far as I can tell, this is because they've taken code paths that the beta uses (especially whatever it is they use to load the code boxes and put a little JS widget at the top of them) and applied them back to the main site that worked perfectly well before. [0] Basically: a magic robot that can listen to them and try to suggest an answer one on one, without caring about whether literally anyone else on the planet could benefit from that exchange, because the robot can tirelessly do that for the next person. [1] I.e., so that humans could say something once and actually have it be relevant to many people. [2] I.e.: the company makes money from views and a lot of people don't want to view a site where they have to actually meet any kind of standard whatsoever to participate; so it's the fault of people who have an actual vision for the site being useful.

moralestapia 6mo ago

Lol, what a massive trainwreck. There's a big chance SO is used more by AIs than real humans, nowadays. Out with the old, in with the new.