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StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site

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Re: StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site

#31

Post by david_allison »

dgrin91 wrote: post #7

Here 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…

> How could Stack Overflow succeed in a post-chatgpt eta?

As a data source for LLMs, and by becoming the place someone goes where ChatGPT can't produce a sufficient answer.

Re: StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site

#32

Post by ratg13 »

cpcallen wrote: post #29
dvh wrote: post #10

I 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?

At some point they got ultra aggressive about "duplicate" questions.

Technology changes at a fast pace .. so new questions would get asked, and then closed by moderators and pointed to similar questions that might be 5 or 6 years old and no longer relevant.. essentially ending the discussion on many topics and actively preventing progress in certain areas.

Re: StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site

#33

Post by ack_complete »

cebert wrote: post #24
dgrin91 wrote: post #7

Here 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.

The place I work at tried using an SO enterprise instance and it was quite ineffective. We didn't have the toxicity of the public instance, but generally having a Q&A forum double as a knowledge base is an oddball format that doesn't work out. Adding AI integration is not likely to compensate for that.

Re: StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site

#34

Post by Viliam1234 »

cpcallen wrote: post #29
dvh wrote: post #10

I 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?

Some people took SO too competitively. They tried to be the first to answer your question (even if by a single sentence that would be edited to a longer answer later), but when they could not, they at least tried to get your question closed (presumably so that their competitors couldn't get points for answering it).

At some moment it just stopped making sense for me to ask questions on SO, because if you can google the answer then what's the point, but if you can't google the answer, then some angry competitive user is likely to close your question for some reason.

Re: StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site

#35

Post by schmorptron »

dfabulich wrote: post #25
schmorptron wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Oh, I was thinking more of user enters question into SO -> LLM answer on SO -> user evaluates whether LLM answer was sufficient (or system itself judges whether answer is also interesting to other users?) -> question + answer combo made public, judged by other users.

There are of course several huge issues with this, but thats why I prefaced it with ideal world hahaha

the biggest of which is why most users would want their questios publicized if the ChatGPT answer not on the stackoverflow platform will be enough or even better

Or how existing users and question-answering volunteers feel about just being cleanup and training data after LLMs

Re: StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site

#36

Post by apple4ever »

not_your_vase wrote: post #11

I 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…

I one time had an actual answer for a question that nobody else had answered in 5 years... but because I didn't have enough ridiculous "reputation" I couldn't post it, so everyone else couldn't actually be helped. That's when I was done with SO.

Re: StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site

#37

Post by zahlman »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #34
cpcallen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when it became impossible to ask on SO Can you explain what you mean by that?

Some people took SO too competitively. They tried to be the first to answer your question (even if by a single sentence that would be edited to a longer answer later), but when they could not, they at least tried to get your question closed (presumably so that their competitors couldn't get points for answering it). At some moment it just stopped making sense for me to ask questions on SO, because if you can google t…

I can absolutely say that "I couldn't answer the question first" is not a motive people had for closing questions. That would have been abusive and definitely something that moderators would follow up on and deal with to whatever tiny extent it happened.

I can say extremely confidently from years of experience that the people who were always "trying to be the first to answer your question" were, overwhelmingly, the ones trying hardest not to let anyone ever close anything, even harder than the most aggrieved newbies asking questions and not caring about the underlying community. Nobody sits around answering multiple questions a day for years on end, purely on intrinsic motivation. I joined in late 2010 and posted answers all the way until mid-2023, but fully half of those were before the end of 2012. There are reasons for that. Meanwhile, there are people with reputation scores in the seven digits, even though the site awards no further privileges past 25,000. The obvious conclusion is that we're primarily talking about people primarily motivated by Number Go Up, and closing questions is an impediment to Number Go Up, so it must be prevented at all costs.

Questions get closed for the reasons that are listed in the interface for closing questions, which are also described in the Help Center and also explained in detail on meta (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476). When questions don't meet the expected standards, it's important to close them as quickly as possible; because when people answer questions that should be closed, they are actively making the site worse (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808). And since there will always be people around who are motivated by Number Go Up, there was value in preempting them.

Really the system was poorly designed. The Staging Ground was the one shining beacon of hope, because it inherently prevented answers by default, providing only a comment thread with the explicit purpose of fixing issues with the question so that it could meet site standards.

Re: StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site

#38

Post by zahlman »

apple4ever wrote: post #36
not_your_vase wrote: post #11

I 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…

I one time had an actual answer for a question that nobody else had answered in 5 years... but because I didn't have enough ridiculous "reputation" I couldn't post it, so everyone else couldn't actually be helped. That's when I was done with SO.

> a question that nobody else had answered in 5 years... but because I didn't have enough ridiculous "reputation" I couldn't post it

This is frankly impossible. By default, anyone with an account can post an answer to a question (https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/create-posts).

Question protection sets a barrier at 10 reputation, which you can get from a single upvote on an existing answer, or from five approved edits to existing questions or answers. Further, it would only be applied to questions that had already been answered repeatedly, specifically because the question was attracting redundant answers that weren't adding any more value.

Re: StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site

#39

Post by zahlman »

gexla wrote: post #17
not_your_vase wrote: post #11

I 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…

I never had a desire to post questions there. Comments or answers only if it were something I felt a personal stake in (community that we were trying to bring up) or the rare case where I would come across something uncommon that was unanswered that I had recently ran into and figured out. It's not the users there who kept me away, I just that I like quiet (high signal to noise) developer spaces. ;) I imagine a huge…

Yes, and it's good that you found some quick answers. That was the point of the expectations placed on questions. A good question that can help other people is often fundamentally hard to ask, even for trivial topics.

Re: StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site

#40

Post by zahlman »

dgrin91 wrote: post #7

Here 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…

Depends what you mean by "succeed". Commercial viability for anything remotely approaching the design intent of SO is probably impossible. But anyone can just start building a useful Q&A database and hope others stumble on it. The point is that experts, who have been through many years of trying to help beginners in the pre-LLM era, also know what questions to ask, and how to phrase them, and how to disentangle the concerns that beginners have.

Or at least they should. I think too many people get into a routine of letting themselves get angry about the repetitiveness of the questions they're answering, and then somehow getting addicted to that.

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