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.
StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site
21–30 of 42 posts
Re: StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site
#22Here 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…
Be chatbot first ig. I had envisioned a portal where you land on the front page and drop your question in the box. It would do some rag thing over the SO question database then try to answer your question. You could chat back and forth with it. If you figured out your problem then you would have the option to turn it into a question answer pair with help from the ai. If you didn't figure out your problem, then it would turn it into just a question, which would then show up for the experts of SO to answer. Something like that.
Re: StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's the very first thing which came to my mind too. I thought "wow, they really did copy Reddit design which I hate".
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.
Re: StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site
#24Here 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…
I’m not aware of SO’s plans to remain profitable and relevant, but I do know they have an enterprise offering. I’ve seen ads on LinkedIn recently for MCP functionality tied to the enterprise SO offering that lets you use it as a knowledge base. I could see that potentially being a path to stay relevant.
Re: StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site
#25Here 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…
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 id…
> 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.
Re: StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site
#26Here 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…
They should focus on high-quality expert answers.
Now that we have LLMs I don't need basic questions answered. I do still need hard questions answered by experts and AI has normalized paying money for QA.
I would definitely pay for a "human ChatGPT" service where the answers are written by experts who get paid per answer, e.g. grad students. Then they can resell this data to AI companies. Or maybe the economics are such that they can take enough money from AI companies to pay the experts and I don't need to pay anything at all.
This won't bring in as much money as advertising used to, but that business model is dead anyway. There's no future for a QA site at the low end.
Re: StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site
#27Here 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…
ideally, slowly grinding down duplicates into canonicals, keeping the ones whose answers are subject to change (with developments in languages and tools) up-to-date, removing cruft and making it more like a library (à la Rosetta Code) that's easy to find things in
and a change of form from (questions being asked primarily as a means to an end for one person) to (Q&A pairs being written as reference materials)
and requests for comment on which approach would be the most idiomatic or whether one has fallen into an XY trap or other things that rely on human 'taste' rather than LLMs' blithe march of obedience
Re: StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site
#28I 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 wo…
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The downfall was long before ChatGPT (personally, I’d burnt out answering the same questions again and again)
https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1926661#g...
The stackoverflow was better than what was before it (*sexchange site). Time will tell how it compares to the AI slop of the dead internet (current generation of LLMs based on human-generated data are great. Let’s see what happens when most of the data is created by bots).
Re: StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site
#29I 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 eve…
> when it became impossible to ask on SO
Can you explain what you mean by that?
Re: StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site
#30I 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 wo…
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…
As someone who had a fast high engagement for some time and then have dropped away, asking very few questions in that time, I disagree. I have seen far to many marked as duplicate for things that aren’t, nagging about rules and unsuitable questions instead of helpfulness and general allowing of some users to despise beginners without any consequences.