21–30 of 298 posts
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.
> 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…
If you want answers from a computer, you can get them from chat GPT. The best SO is going to do with that is spend a lot of money to repackage it into a feature people probably weren’t looking for on SO to begin with.
I agree there are other indirect applications of ML models than just generating answers. And I hope ML can help to soften some of the “edges” in UX. A lot of that can be done with BERT or even more primitive statistical methods though.
> 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.
So basically SO isn't a tool to improve your skills but one to turn you into a copy/paste monkey?
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.
You have a pretty strange definition of ‘valid’.
> 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…
(Un?)Ironically, one of my main uses of ChatGPT is to replace StackOverflow (it's great at turning vague guesses about what I want into fast ideas, and when it's wrong it's still less wrong than the combination of SO content and the search engines connected to it); and also for turning undocumented and badly documented examples of JSON into a collection of (swift) `Codable` structs.
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…
> 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…
While I mostly agree with your point, I want to point out that on a financial level Wikipedia is really not that well handled. They keep increasing expenses into project that are not core to the experience, or that will never see the light of day (like when they had two different teams working on two different new text editor for the site). I have a belief that they're caught in a very bureaucratic "we need to use yo…
Maybe its time for a leaner alternative?
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…
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?
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…
Everyone needs to really learn what the Toyota Production system has taught manufacturing for decades.