StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site
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StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site
1–10 of 42 posts
Re: StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site
#2I wasn’t aware there was a beta. For those familiar, what were its issues?
Re: StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site
#3every *Overflow site other than the main one for asking coding questions has been very good to me. StackOverflow was a terrible experience. What LLMs got right was when asking seemingly stupid questions, or simple questions, or RTFM-answerable questions didn't get responses of "RTFM", or "Duplicate", or the like.
If for want of the Astronomy overflow and math overflow and others to remain I will not wish that StackOverflow go the route of Ask Jeeves (and wither away into irrelevance) but I'm hoping they take a look inside and see why they failed.
Re: StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site
#4I wasn’t aware there was a beta. For those familiar, what were its issues?
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.
Re: StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site
#5The Beta Site is at https://beta.stackoverflow.com
To me, it looks like more like Digg from the old days.
Re: StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site
#6The beta site was a horrible redesign. It hid information that was previously visible, the layout was confusing, comments were harder to read, and it just made no sense.
Re: StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site
#7Here 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 work for a bit, but I would guess that the sales value of SO's data has quickly diminishing returns. So what is their path forward?
Re: StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site
#8The site is populated exclusively with die-hard fanatics with no real-world third space using that community to fulfill their personal social needs. They'll do that all the way to its complete and utter death due to uselessness. Change would be anathema to them so there is no path for the site but death.
There is no utility it fulfills except as a watering hole for those unfortunate souls who built their village there.
Re: StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site
#9Here 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…
It will turn into a meme subreddit and/or die. What else is there?
Re: StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site
#10I 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 even better so there is no going back. The progression was roughly:
1. Random website
2. Random thematic blog, seo'd
3. Random forum
4. Curated question portal like SO
5. Thematic subreddit when it became impossible to ask on SO
6. LLM