Does anyone even remember that foursquare was once a social media app?
People pivot and leverage what they previously were to become something new all the time.
Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking
261–267 of 267 posts
Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
StackExchange is pretty friendly to beginners in my experience. I used to post straight-forward questions on math and stats on math SE and stats SE. I got answers within hours and sometimes minutes, and the answers were spot on.
I'm curious about the other Stack Exchange sites. Have they seen the same decline as Stack Overflow? Stack Overflow was the "flagship" product of the Stack Exchange company, and if the company pivots to AI, I wonder what the future holds for the other Q&A sites on the SE network.
All the sites are seeing huge drops in activity. Today only five or six sites get 10 questions per day or more, which was SO Inc's minimum activity level for a beta site before they would "graduate" it. Now most of the network fails that test. (You can see stats for all SE sites at https://stackexchange.com/sites#questionsperday.)
Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah yes, programming: the discipline which famously only has singular right answers to problems, such that programmers never get in arguments with each other about the correct approach to solving a given problem, and there are no long running disputes that have ossified into intractable disagreements.
That basic 90's sitcom level-1 sarcasm is not helpful in any adult discussion, it's very common on engineers and technical people, and it's probably the reason SO and similar sites were being abandoned by the regular internet users before LLMs. Just say what you intent to communicate, dude. If funny is not your forte, don't force it.
This isn't an adult discussion it's an internet comment forum and cringe policing it is also childish.
Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I think it's like with everything. One one hand you can replace some SaaS with in-house developed services, but on the other hand, it makes integrations with SaaS that provide functionalities you can't or don't want to deal with way easier.
So you are probably right. It won't go to zero. Just shift towards more infrastructural and access services.
Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've felt the same about Reddit subs, the few times I tried asking something. Very discouraging when you're having some trouble in life and looking for help online.
I mostly frequent smaller subreddits with at most a handful of mods for niche subjects and it's great. Then when I occasionally need to ask a question in a bigger one... out come the mods who live for the rules.
That's dangerous. If you get banned from a large subreddit you often get banned from the site, even if you mod other subreddits, which are then banned for being unmoderated.
Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reason that duplicates were treated as dangerous was that SO viewed their most important user not as anyone you have mentioned but instead they prized the lurker most- the person who typed their problem into Google and got brought to SO, and never asked or answered a question because they got what they wanted from that one page load. The entire structure of SO was built around this user. So why does that mean tha…
Did they consider removing old questions?
Or editing them to say "in Python 2"? There's historical value in a historical knowledge base.