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Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

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Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#211

Post by selcuka »

chiph wrote: post #168
bhouston wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stack Overflow was acquired in June 2021 by Prosus, a Dutch private equity firm., That is great to hear. I am glad that the original creators of StackOverflow got their liquidity event and are well off financially I suspect.

That would be Joel Spolsky (Fog Creek Software) and Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror), mostly. Jeff has gone on to make several large philanthropic gifts. Joel probably has too but I don't have info on them.

Joel Spolsky sold Trello to Atlassian in 2017, so he was already rich before the Stack Exchange exit.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#212

Post by selcuka »

senordevnyc wrote: post #67
andomar wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A firm is sold when its owners believe they will get the best price. The selling itself is more of a symptom than a cause.

Businesses (and any other kind of asset) are sold for all kinds of reasons, and trying to time the market to maximize the price is only one of them. Probably not even the most common one.

Correct. I believe the desire to start a new company or to retire would be higher on the list.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#213

Post by crazygringo »

nitwit005 wrote: post #165
crazygringo wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of documentation, and plenty of code that the AI can read itself. E.g. if a library has a bug that has a common workaround, it can learn that from open source code using the library that uses the workaround.

That assumes there is documentation or examples. A big reason Stack Overflow took off was people struggling with things like the Android API documentation. Some of those discussions made people go figure out how to do it, and then post it as an answer. The knowledge didn't exist anywhere until they did.

When I talk about code it can learn from, I'm talking about GitHub etc.

Even if stuff isn't in the official documentation, eventually there are projects that use it.

And if the library in question is open-source, then the LLM's can just ingest and read that directly.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#214

Post by keithnz »

scotty79 wrote: post #136
Animats wrote: post #30

Wow. It declined all the way to zero? I'd have expected it to tail off. That's scary. What else can AI make decline all the way to zero? Customer support?

> What else can AI make decline all the way to zero? Human facing web search. Most SaS.

Not sure about SaaS, For nearly all our SaaS AI's just made it easier to work with, we haven't got rid of a single SaaS product, but via APIs, we've integrated and automated a LOT more of our existing SaaS products.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#215

Post by Waterluvian »

kstrauser wrote: post #179
crispyambulance wrote: post #173

Good riddance! I've used it a lot, like everybody else, and it helped me many times. Unfortunately, it developed a serious culture problem that would not go away. I suspect the gamification attracted many rigid-thinking, rule-obsessed personality types that weren't self-aware enough to realize when they hurt others. Yes, of course, they wanted good questions and useable answers. That's a good intention but it does no…

"How do I do this thing in Django 6?" Closed: duplicate of question 1234, "How do I do some vaguely related thing in Django 1.3?", August 2011 The mods there sucked all the joy out of interacting with the site. If you run a site with moderators, let this be a reminder to keep them reined in lest they Stack Overflow it.

Poetic how they were so ridiculous about meticulously curating a database of answers where the ultimate consumer would be LLMs that really don’t care about duplicates.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#217

Post by kstrauser »

torben-friis wrote: post #202
kstrauser wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"How do I do this thing in Django 6?" Closed: duplicate of question 1234, "How do I do some vaguely related thing in Django 1.3?", August 2011 The mods there sucked all the joy out of interacting with the site. If you run a site with moderators, let this be a reminder to keep them reined in lest they Stack Overflow it.

What I hated was posting a question and then receiving updates because a rando decided to change my wording "for clarity". It is infuriating that there are blocks of text in there signed by me that contain whatever someone else hoped I had written, instead of what I did write.

OMG, so much. I was quite ruthless about rolling back those vandalisms. If I’d have meant X, I’d have said X in the first place. I didn’t, so I didn’t.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#218

Post by sshine »

legitster wrote: post #82

Stack Overflow might be the greatest receptacles of human knowledge on programming. But I would argue that it usefulness only extends to its body of knowledge. As a service and/or community it has been pretty terrible for a long time: If you were a new user trying to learn programming, it was maybe one of the most toxic resources available. I don't think I have posted a question since 2019. And even there, the only t…

Like the Internet, it got less friendly the more popular it got. And there were no measures in place to retain and reward the friendliness.

Jeff Atwood thought a lot about this when he subsequently created Discourse. Nudge people to treat their community members nice.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#219

Post by insane_dreamer »

where is all the future SO-type content for LLMs going to come from, with all the little "gotchas" that people discovered, or, more importantly, corrections of incorrect info

I never posted on SO, but I did search it a lot; great resource

I never looked at it as a "community", just a place to find info

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#220

Post by insane_dreamer »

crazygringo wrote: post #73
hintymad wrote: post #6

Wouldn't this be worrisome? People used StackOverflow and generated new knowledge along the way. Without such medium for discussion, how can we feed models with up-to-date quality knowledge?

Plenty of documentation, and plenty of code that the AI can read itself. E.g. if a library has a bug that has a common workaround, it can learn that from open source code using the library that uses the workaround.

lots of undocumented gotchas that only surfaced because someone used it and posted about it
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