Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow
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Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow
#2Losing 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.
Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow
#3> 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 What they really need is a better model of what answers are good, what answers are outdated, and what answers should be expanded to include more info (and sometimes, what answers should be slimmed down a bit).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.
Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow
#4I 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‽
Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow
#5Losing 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.
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.
Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow
#6> 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 m…
> 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
Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow
#7The 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.
Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow
#8I 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…
Was coming here to comment the same. It's not like they're serving high bandwidth content here. What are they spending their money on?
Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow
#9> 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 m…
> Any question could easily include a Reddit-style discussion tab to facilitate discussion.
This exists in the form of chat, and extended comment discussions migrate there. That being said, any question that requires extensive discussion is likely not a very good fit for SO because it's probably ambiguous, unclear or otherwise hard to answer exactly.
Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow
#10> 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 m…
Agreed, stack overflow is the place where we stop to find an answer to a question. They should stay focused on that instead of adding useless features.
But I don't entirely agree on LLMs being useless. An LLM could help with avoiding duplicate questions. It could analyze the content of the question and point out stuff like missing logs before the question is submitted to guide beginners through the basics.
If someone manages to turn an LLM into a good context-aware search engine, that would also make sense for SO.
But somehow no one seems to actually use LLMs given how much bullshit they talk about them.