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Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

jlericson.com

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Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#271

Post by nerdponx »

teh_klev wrote: post #264
JimDabell wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, “trolling” is actually correct. It’s less widely used than the meaning you refer to these days though. > the act of searching among a large number or many different places in order to find people or information you want > It takes me 45 minutes of trolling on the internet and I’m still confused. — https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/trolling

"Mainly US" though which explains a lot ;) I see as well that the US English spelling for "trawl" (as in fishing) is troll. Again, mainly US.

I would bet $30 that "weary" is listed as an alternative spelling for "wary" in Merriam Webster by 2030.

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#272

Post by nerdponx »

mcv wrote: post #77
starbugs wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's about time that we no longer accept this strategy as valid.

Valid according to the type of capitalist economy the rich, powerful and money hungry want: one where everything revolves around shareholder value, rather than societal value. In that economy, it doesn't matter how destructive your business model is, as long as the shareholders get value out of it. Friedman's idea that corporations that maximising shareholder value has clearly been the single most destructive ideal t…

People were doing this long before Friedman was even born. People were doing it before capitalism as we know it even existed. Friedman's idea is just retroactive justification for one of the fundamental evils in human nature.

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#273

Post by nerdponx »

somenameforme wrote: post #56
bloopernova wrote: post #14

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…

I don't think the problem is ignorance, but different motivations. Executive leadership often wants to maximize profit and growth. Everybody else [generally] wants to maximize the company's performance at what it does. In an ideal world the two should be pretty much the same thing, in reality they're often very disconnected, especially in any product that is offered for free. Free products completely distort normal o…

Everyone wants what's best for themselves.

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#274

Post by nerdponx »

0dayz wrote: post #32

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.

> 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.

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#275

Post by nerdponx »

jasfi wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#276

Post by nerdponx »

IshKebab wrote: post #212
littlestymaar wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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… >…

I agree. $100m-$200m/year on staff costs.

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?

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#277

Post by ahartman00 »

mrweasel wrote: post #6
janalsncm wrote: post #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 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

> Despite growing revenue, it lost $84 million over the year ending on March 31, 2023

Its not possible to run a business that loses $84 million. You will run out of money.

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#278

Post by orwin »

refurb wrote: post #215
raincole wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDP isn't money. It's production. There is an assumption behind GDP: people generally pay production for a fair amount of money. The more untrue this assumption is, the less meaningful GDP is.

I’m talking in the example ” let's pay a company X that will pay the gardeners. It'll cost 95k.” Where does that 95k come from?

City budget or loans. Easy enough if your mayor have a friend who want to start a gardening company !

I'm joking: even without corruption, you can find an ideological reason, as a company will surely be more efficient than public servants!

But more likely because of incertitude: what do we do if a gardener resign? Paying an existing company 95k/year instead of spending 75k/year directly isn't a huge expense increase, and if 20k/year is the price for peace of mind (no new equipment to buy, no HR issues...) it can very well be worth it.

I'm not saying this is good or bad by the way, i'm saying this is how GDP work. It's factual. Yes, there is a left-wing slant about how i presented it, but it wasn't heavy, and a liberal could use the same example in the same way and justifying a better distribution of work and concerns (while still finding that GDP is worthless in this case)

This is interesting as an indicator, it's meaningless as a target.

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#279

Post by cyanydeez »

janalsncm wrote: post #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 m…

They probably could use the LLM to do a lot of things:

Imagine sanity checking old answers for new versions of language or Library. Adding probabilistic merit to new user answers. Asking the question asker to review machine generated answers in troubleshooting questions with little traction.

Obviously, enshittiffication is at work in how these social0-esque sites try to use tech.

Re: Stack Overflow's CEO Doesn't Understand Stack Overflow

#280

Post by refurb »

orwin wrote: post #278
refurb wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m talking in the example ” let's pay a company X that will pay the gardeners. It'll cost 95k.” Where does that 95k come from?

City budget or loans. Easy enough if your mayor have a friend who want to start a gardening company ! I'm joking: even without corruption, you can find an ideological reason, as a company will surely be more efficient than public servants! But more likely because of incertitude: what do we do if a gardener resign? Paying an existing company 95k/year instead of spending 75k/year directly isn't a huge expense increase,…

But borrowing that money has implications for the economy and other businesses.

This is the mistake the OP made. You can't "goose" GDP by borrowing because that money has to come from somewhere. And the money used to "goose" GDP is money that doesn't go to other productive uses.

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