> The key to Stack Overflow’s future and growth are the millions of developers from around the world who find the site useful, but who haven’t yet been welcomed into the community. We need to expand our reach and engagement to ensure these developers join the conversation and push their own learning to new heights.
The key to stack overflow's future is providing useful answers to various programming questions, facilitating the asking and answering of these questions, and providing an easy way to find the answers to your questions.
Most annoying to me is when I find someone asking a question that's exactly what I'm looking for, but it's locked and says "This question is too specific and is unlikely to be useful to anyone else." Last time that happened was with gdb, and looking through the code wasn't helpful because all it said was "unless you're a gdb developer, these header files are unlikely to be useful".
FWIW that reason for closing has been removed for a long while, so new questions asking those lines should get answers (if the question itself is answerable).
The first half of the article contains a huge amount of gloating about the size and reach of Stack Overflow. Then the second half of the article has gems like
> in order to continue to fuel our growth
Why does it have to be this way? SO is an immensely useful resource and a sustainable business. Why does every company need to continue to grow until they lose the essence of what made them good? Why can't companies be satisfied with making a decent chunk of change, paying their employees a fair wage and delivering value to their customer base?
The company took VC money, growing in a sensible and sustainable way isn't an option. They're targeting an IPO according to the former CEO and co-founder Joel Spolsky, which means they need to grow 10X in the near future.
They're making around 70 million a year now, 44 million from the job platform, 16 million from ads and the rest from the private SO Teams/Enterprise software (28 large corporations are paying 1 million+, I know this doesn't add up entirely, but that's the only information publicly available that I know of). The numbers are all from the following interview with Joel:
I hate how hard it would be for a competitor to come into the market now and attempt to build the same knowledge bank StackOverflow can now gatekeep. We've commercialized data hoarding and segregation... is the end game for StackOverflow to become Elsevier for programming?
At least until current leadership kills it. But it was one of the things Jeff and Joel did to convince the community that that was not their goal, and the previous market leader, experts exchange was fresh in people's minds at that time for hiding answers behind signup walls.
They can't really kill it, right? The content itself is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, Version... uh... well it's definitely Creative Commons.
Someone else can create a front end to the dumped data, similar to how you can run Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap locally (or from anywhere, really).
Good timing considering Distributed Web efforts [1]. Internet Archive is having a Dweb meetup tonight FYI if you're in SF [2], word is Twitter's team focused on the same goals will be in attendence.
They can only kill the license for future content, not for the existing content. And that would be a very clear sign that they're going to put up a paywall, and create a huge amount of pushback.
But the most convincing argument that they won't put up a paywall to me is that there simply isn't enough money in it. You won't get enough people to pay for it, and it will cripple the amount of answerers.
When googling for stuff I've sometimes come across other sites which make use of StackOverflow questions/answers. It feels tacky.
I don't know the chances of another site killing SO/SE the same way SO killed EE.. but I've noticed recently I visit SO less frequently than e.g. GitHub issues.
People said the same about expertsexchange until SO did it.
If they make it suck badly enough, something else will gain momentum and replace it. Get the Jon Skeets of the world onboard and you're most of the way there.
Quora had the right idea initially, by subsidizing quality answerers, but they went too broad, and it devolved to Yahoo Answers quality.
For those unaware of the context, StackExchange fired a (volunteer) moderator in September causing a wave of moderator resignations. Now in January they fired two Community Managers (ie. employees) and a third CM resigned.
Tesla owners once famously banded together to help Tesla through 'delivery hell' [0]. They did this for the love of the company and the company mission, despite not being paid and their actions only benefiting Tesla's bottom line.
Is it not fair to say that volunteers have autonomy, and that we should respect that autonomy? In other words, if they don't feel they are being exploited, then why should it bother us? Why should we create an issue out of X when those who are actually involved don't see X as an issue?
In some cases (helping a favoured enterprise grow) the inevitable outcome of the effort is the desired result (Tesla increases revenue, remains solvent).
In other cases the inevitable outcome is not desired (cddb sold to private interest, required subscription for continued use, no recognition of contributions by volunteers).
I am not bothered when someone promotes their favorite brands or products. I am however bothered when companies encourages and promotes such a mindset.
Thank the volunteers, that's fine. Incite regular consumers to become proselyting agents for free? A bit too close to manipulation, exploitation and cultish behaviors for me.
Almost every company-sponsored hackathon is like that. And every Google prompt to help them feed their recommendation database "to help improve their products" is the same.
StackExchange content is published under a liberal language. There's nothing wrong with making money by orchestrator value creation for the general public, at no charge to consumers. Benjamin Franklin called this "doing well by doing good".
A lot of times the trade-off for volunteers is having power and influence in important communities (see Reddit, Wikipedia and StackOverflow itself), which they can (and often have) leveraged for money, propagating their own views and suppressing others, or just to get themselves off. So you can't always paint them as exploited.
I used to contribute to Stack Overflow (from around 2014-2017). I did it because it was fun — answering questions was like solving programming puzzles, and moderation tasks were rewarding as well. Eventually, I joined a couple teams of users (called SOBotics and Charcoal [1]) where we wrote bots that used the Stack Exchange API to automate moderation tasks. This was an awesome hobby, and my teammates were a group of really awesome people I considered friends.
At that time, even though I knew SO was a for-profit corporation, it really didn’t feel like one. Nearly all of the staff (including the CEO) were regular users (often since long before they were hired) who were well-respected and made great decisions, and a lot of them hung out on Meta and in chat and were a lot of fun to interact with. (That’s why Shog9 and Robert Catarino’s firing is such a big deal: they were among the few remaining staff members who were from this era and still had this level of trust, respect, and friendship with the community).
My participation tapered off in 2018 because I became busy with school, but I still dropped by every now and then, and I kept up with Meta. Around this time was when the company started deteriorating — at first, we started to notice that they had pretty much stalled on improving moderator tooling (leading to serious growing pains and a lot of the “unfriendliness”). Then, they started making a series of bad decisions [2] which hinted that the company no longer understood or cared about their community. For the most part, everyone wrote these off as just mistakes or unfortunate business decisions, but our patience wore thin after repeated violations. The firing of Monica Cellio was the straw that broke the camel’s back — we realized SO was no longer the lightweight, friendly company it used to be, and a lot of high-profile users left as a result [3].
I haven’t looked much into non-profit alternatives, but a bunch of high-profile users have launched a project called Codidact [4]. We’ll see if it takes off — that’s a pretty lofty goal, but they are some pretty impressive people. I don’t plan to go back to SO, but I might join the Codidact project — after all, I was ok SO because of the community, not the corporation.
I don't really get objections like that. The entire business model of Stack Overflow is, and always has been, the provision of a platform for people to help each other. They provide all of the infrastructure that allows this all to happen. Everyone who participates knows that they are a for profit company. Nobody is being forced to participate against their will. I don't see how retaining the ability to sell their product to corporations and to sell advertising space on the site in exchange for providing a completely free platform for people to help each other on a voluntary basis can be called evil or wrong in any way.
Stack Overflow is a bait-and-switch. They tricked volunteers into writing all their valuable content but now those contributors are finding that the bait of community participation and prestige was just a sham. SO will extract as much value as they can from having the critical mass but without volunteers creating new content (answers) they will soon become a tumbleweed site of people “facing an issue” asking plaintively how to “do the needful” into the vacuum.
There is a non-profit, open source alternative being built now: Codidact [0]. Many of the people building it are former members of SO, including Monica Cellio.
Stack Overflow has been trying VERY aggressively to monetize the site lately. In just the past 12 months:
- They’ve backpedaled on their formerly strict ad policy, now allowing animated ads [0] and trackers [1], and their quality control has become very poor [2].
- They changed the homepage to market their new SaaS product instead of the Q&A site [3]
- They replaced their CEO (who was a cofounder) with a new one who they described as “ someone who could foster the community while accelerating the growth of our businesses, especially Teams, where we are starting to close many huge deals and becoming a hyper-growth enterprise software company very quickly” [4]
- They fired and defamed a well-liked and well-respected volunteer moderator without cause, in a misguided attempt at virtue signaling, and refused to make any attempt to rectify their mistakes until the moderator in question got a lawyer [5]
- They fired/laid off two longtime and very well-respected Community Managers (employees whose job was to manage and work alongside with community) [6]
> What became apparent in my conversations is that software development has evolved rapidly, and successful companies are evolving their own cultures and practices to keep pace.
In the fourth quarter of 2019, we created a large task force made up of passionate community advocates from across the company to propose solutions to this core problem. The team’s mission is to improve our feedback loop and working relationship with our community. We added a member of our Community team to our leadership team and restructured the organization to invest in Product leadership to build Community-centric features. We are also forming a moderator council, which will include a group of users with diverse experience levels and backgrounds who can help guide our processes. We’re making hard choices and treating no assumptions as sacred in considering ways to evolve the community.
... We want to serve all of the millions of people who use Stack Overflow, not just those who know the most about how the site has worked in the past. To be clear, this does not mean channels like Meta will go away, but they need to grow to ensure that users are heard and responded to in a timely fashion.
We’ve completed the process of defining how our moderator council will be structured, shared an internal framework for asking coworkers tough community questions, defined the important functions that would be best served by more scalable solutions than Meta, and built outlines of our new moderator training modules. By the end of this quarter, all of these initiatives will be shared publicly with you, our users.
We're generally happy to replace bland corporate press release titles, which always bury the lede, with something that gets to the point. But who knows what the point is? "Stack Overflow is forming a moderator council", maybe? Let's try that. It can't be worse than "Scripting the Future of Stack Overflow".
Suggestions for better titles are welcome. Try to use representative language from the article if you can find it.
That's not the goal of titles on HN. If you want to say why a post is interesting, that's great, but put it in a comment in the thread. Which you just did!
What a pitiful congeries of overweening, delusional, self-important absurdities. I often wonder if I can come to loathe the tech sector any more than I do, and it consistently meets my challenge.
A desire to acquire shitloads of overconsumption rights is broadly functional within the mythological system of capitalism, but it is not a grand mission, however blogged up.
Although as someone who has been a part of a few volunteer moderation efforts. I've found that moderators don't always act in the best interests of the community (even when they think they are doing so) and sometimes become greatly detached from the non moderating community.
It's a sad truth that those who REALLY want to moderate, are often pretty bad at it.
A moderator council could be it's own field of landmines.
You have a great Q and A platform, that works well where most people use aliases.
And for whatever reason they had to introduce gender as a core concept. Whereas before nobody gave a crap if the asker or the replier was male/female or whatever, it was about the questions. Now you have to make sure your question is addressing the other person correctly. Putting the actual answer in second place..
It's just so absurd. And to think they did this after taking VC money as a means to grow faster. I can't fathom having less business IQ.
56 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadThe key to stack overflow's future is providing useful answers to various programming questions, facilitating the asking and answering of these questions, and providing an easy way to find the answers to your questions.
Cabbages just sneak up on you like that.
I've had plenty of genuinely unique questions marked as "duplicate".
> in order to continue to fuel our growth
Why does it have to be this way? SO is an immensely useful resource and a sustainable business. Why does every company need to continue to grow until they lose the essence of what made them good? Why can't companies be satisfied with making a decent chunk of change, paying their employees a fair wage and delivering value to their customer base?
They're making around 70 million a year now, 44 million from the job platform, 16 million from ads and the rest from the private SO Teams/Enterprise software (28 large corporations are paying 1 million+, I know this doesn't add up entirely, but that's the only information publicly available that I know of). The numbers are all from the following interview with Joel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1275&v=zMfxd9y0c...
At least until current leadership kills it. But it was one of the things Jeff and Joel did to convince the community that that was not their goal, and the previous market leader, experts exchange was fresh in people's minds at that time for hiding answers behind signup walls.
Good timing considering Distributed Web efforts [1]. Internet Archive is having a Dweb meetup tonight FYI if you're in SF [2], word is Twitter's team focused on the same goals will be in attendence.
[1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/07/introducing-the-d-web/
[2] https://www.eventbrite.com/e/dweb-sf-meet-up-january-tickets...
I'm not even being flippant here, this is an earnest piece of feedback.
Please don't call yourselves `dwebs`. That's just asking for people to not take you seriously.
only if SO allows them to (by licensing the contents of SO liberally as they are currently doing). But they can stop at any time.
But the most convincing argument that they won't put up a paywall to me is that there simply isn't enough money in it. You won't get enough people to pay for it, and it will cripple the amount of answerers.
I don't know the chances of another site killing SO/SE the same way SO killed EE.. but I've noticed recently I visit SO less frequently than e.g. GitHub issues.
If they make it suck badly enough, something else will gain momentum and replace it. Get the Jon Skeets of the world onboard and you're most of the way there.
Quora had the right idea initially, by subsidizing quality answerers, but they went too broad, and it devolved to Yahoo Answers quality.
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/342039/firing-commu...
StackExchange wouldn’t be anywhere near as big as they are without its volunteers and yet they only care about their bottom line.
Are there any non-profit alternatives?
Is it not fair to say that volunteers have autonomy, and that we should respect that autonomy? In other words, if they don't feel they are being exploited, then why should it bother us? Why should we create an issue out of X when those who are actually involved don't see X as an issue?
[0]: https://www.autonews.com/article/20181008/RETAIL01/181009775...
In other cases the inevitable outcome is not desired (cddb sold to private interest, required subscription for continued use, no recognition of contributions by volunteers).
Thank the volunteers, that's fine. Incite regular consumers to become proselyting agents for free? A bit too close to manipulation, exploitation and cultish behaviors for me.
At that time, even though I knew SO was a for-profit corporation, it really didn’t feel like one. Nearly all of the staff (including the CEO) were regular users (often since long before they were hired) who were well-respected and made great decisions, and a lot of them hung out on Meta and in chat and were a lot of fun to interact with. (That’s why Shog9 and Robert Catarino’s firing is such a big deal: they were among the few remaining staff members who were from this era and still had this level of trust, respect, and friendship with the community).
My participation tapered off in 2018 because I became busy with school, but I still dropped by every now and then, and I kept up with Meta. Around this time was when the company started deteriorating — at first, we started to notice that they had pretty much stalled on improving moderator tooling (leading to serious growing pains and a lot of the “unfriendliness”). Then, they started making a series of bad decisions [2] which hinted that the company no longer understood or cared about their community. For the most part, everyone wrote these off as just mistakes or unfortunate business decisions, but our patience wore thin after repeated violations. The firing of Monica Cellio was the straw that broke the camel’s back — we realized SO was no longer the lightweight, friendly company it used to be, and a lot of high-profile users left as a result [3].
I haven’t looked much into non-profit alternatives, but a bunch of high-profile users have launched a project called Codidact [4]. We’ll see if it takes off — that’s a pretty lofty goal, but they are some pretty impressive people. I don’t plan to go back to SO, but I might join the Codidact project — after all, I was ok SO because of the community, not the corporation.
[0]: https://sobotics.org/
[1]: https://charcoal-se.org
[2]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/331513/258777
[3]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/333965/258777
[4]: https://codidact.org/
Just my personal opinion.
[0] https://codidact.org/
Wow. SO's response to the (IMO very justified) revolt of its volunteers is to simply suppress news of the disappearances.
- They’ve backpedaled on their formerly strict ad policy, now allowing animated ads [0] and trackers [1], and their quality control has become very poor [2].
- They changed the homepage to market their new SaaS product instead of the Q&A site [3]
- They replaced their CEO (who was a cofounder) with a new one who they described as “ someone who could foster the community while accelerating the growth of our businesses, especially Teams, where we are starting to close many huge deals and becoming a hyper-growth enterprise software company very quickly” [4]
- They fired and defamed a well-liked and well-respected volunteer moderator without cause, in a misguided attempt at virtue signaling, and refused to make any attempt to rectify their mistakes until the moderator in question got a lawyer [5]
- They fired/laid off two longtime and very well-respected Community Managers (employees whose job was to manage and work alongside with community) [6]
[0]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/213770/258777
[1]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/332297/258777
[2]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=“Inappropriate+ad”+i...
[3]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/386505/3476191
[4]: https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/09/24/announcing-stack-overf...
[5]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/333965/258777
[6]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/342039/258777
Clearly a discerning eye
In the fourth quarter of 2019, we created a large task force made up of passionate community advocates from across the company to propose solutions to this core problem. The team’s mission is to improve our feedback loop and working relationship with our community. We added a member of our Community team to our leadership team and restructured the organization to invest in Product leadership to build Community-centric features. We are also forming a moderator council, which will include a group of users with diverse experience levels and backgrounds who can help guide our processes. We’re making hard choices and treating no assumptions as sacred in considering ways to evolve the community.
... We want to serve all of the millions of people who use Stack Overflow, not just those who know the most about how the site has worked in the past. To be clear, this does not mean channels like Meta will go away, but they need to grow to ensure that users are heard and responded to in a timely fashion.
We’ve completed the process of defining how our moderator council will be structured, shared an internal framework for asking coworkers tough community questions, defined the important functions that would be best served by more scalable solutions than Meta, and built outlines of our new moderator training modules. By the end of this quarter, all of these initiatives will be shared publicly with you, our users.
Suggestions for better titles are welcome. Try to use representative language from the article if you can find it.
But thank you, this title is way more informative!
On that note, I've always found the continual survival of 4chan rather suspicious.
A desire to acquire shitloads of overconsumption rights is broadly functional within the mythological system of capitalism, but it is not a grand mission, however blogged up.
The more SO ask for Pardon or try to appease worse it gets.
Just stop the notification "From the CEO".
And continue to provide value.
That is it.
Although as someone who has been a part of a few volunteer moderation efforts. I've found that moderators don't always act in the best interests of the community (even when they think they are doing so) and sometimes become greatly detached from the non moderating community.
It's a sad truth that those who REALLY want to moderate, are often pretty bad at it.
A moderator council could be it's own field of landmines.
Diversity young coders
When I see someone pandering i stop reading.
I met Shog9 on another forum over a decade ago. I had no idea he was a community manager on stackoverflow.
You have a great Q and A platform, that works well where most people use aliases.
And for whatever reason they had to introduce gender as a core concept. Whereas before nobody gave a crap if the asker or the replier was male/female or whatever, it was about the questions. Now you have to make sure your question is addressing the other person correctly. Putting the actual answer in second place..
It's just so absurd. And to think they did this after taking VC money as a means to grow faster. I can't fathom having less business IQ.