It's incredible how this community here, which is mostly against Discord as a Forum because it's not indexed and publically searchable, are so into ChatGPT as opposed to an indexable platform like SO.<p>Yeah, as someone who moderates a 200,000 member community, moderation is difficult. They do a pretty good job considering what amount of shitty, low value, googleable questions they get.<p>What do you all do if ChatGPT's prices rise? Or you're using a technology it knows nothing about? Back to IRC channels and reading docs? Where will you copy paste your code from? Cling to it and hope an alternative comes along, all the while shoving more money into closed models?
Really feels like Stack Overflow lost a huge bet for their cultural relevance in how late they were to embracing AI. An idea I saw at the time when ChatGPT was picking up steam was to generate an automatic AI to every question, then have contributors edit/vote up/vote down the AI response - basically treat it like any other response but have it built in. Wonder where it would be if that approach was taken.<p>Instead of anything that, they let mods use a bullshit sniff test, then changed their mind on that and got into an embarrassing war with their mods. Obviously there's a little bit of empathy to be had for the mods in terms of dealing with generated answers, but the answer of banning them outright seemed very kneejerky and a plainly bad idea and entirely ignorant of where the winds were blowing. An awareness of how the mods were responsible for turning SO into the... interesting place it was at the time and being prophylactic about fixing the culture they had created towards the end of the 2010s would have helped prevent this.<p>Instead here we are, a year removed from the beginning of this and it really feels like the Stack Overflow is a much, much smaller part of my life than it once was. Sure, in a few years the training data for GPT will be worse, but it's not like I don't still find Python 2.x answers when clicking on SO links, and I can paste in the new docs, and not worry about whether some random moderator is having a good day or not.<p>It's sad, really. In time we'll see Stack Overflow's decline as preventable (at least to an extent), and view it as a case of what happens when the strong leadership that's needed to disagree with a loud minority is absent. Whatever you think SO should have done, I'm sure that you think what they <i>did</i> end up doing was not what was the best play for them.
It looks like they've had quite a few large scale rounds of layoffs: 15% in 2020 (<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/stack-overflow-reduces-workforce-furloughs-layoffs-2020-5" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.businessinsider.com/stack-overflow-reduces-workf...</a>), 10% in March this year (<a href="https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/05/10/a-message-from-prashanth-chandrasekar-ceo-stack-overflow/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/05/10/a-message-from-prashan...</a>) and now another 28%. That seems like far more than other companies that their employees could choose to work at in total.<p>I imagine that people are now going to demand a premium to work there - they might only be able to attract the kind of people that want to treat it like contract work and expect a premium for insecure work to cover their expenses while they look for the next contract. I imagine this will put the company at a significant disadvantage compared to where it was before. Finding any marginally profitable use for their surplus employees (even if it is building a different product or even taking on some contracting) while they wait for the workforce to shrink through attrition would probably have been better for their company long term.
The story of SO is pretty interesting. Looks like they only had raised $153M with the last round prior to the acquisition at $1.8billion. I was not even aware that Prosus has purchased them, must have missed it during Covid. Given that news by, I don't find this entirely surprising. Time to squeeze out as much performance as possible from the purchase.
I sometimes teach those new to software development. ChatGPT seems to have supplanted Stack Overflow.<p>It's the same behaviour of course, blindly copy/pasting errors into ChatGPT, unquestioningly copying output back, and as far as I can tell the results don't seem to be that much better, just quicker.
Just like "the war in [insert country], is responsible for our woes", I feel that "AI™ is making StackOverflow redundant" is very incorrect and short-sighted. Even before this renewed AI frenzy StackOverflow has been failing to build a solid business. They tried ( and apparently failed ) to capitalize on job postings, which IMO is a miss on their part because given the traffic and eyeballs it's the perfect place for that. But either way..<p>The anal retentive people that we complain about, are the same ones who fed the AI. When they don't have a home to torment us, where will the AI get the answers? Training on code is "cute", but not enough.
Every time I read something like this I am wondering if I am just missing out or using products the wrong way.<p>Sorry to anyone from SO reading this, but I have been using the site for.. probably 10 years (or how long it has existed) as mostly a reader and there are 2 features. Have the answer to my google search ready. (It's two and not one because I also need to find it)<p>Why the hell does this company even have so many employees? It's a forum and I've not used any new feature. Person A asks questions, Persons B-Z answer. Someone fixes the bugs, updates the dependencies and someone else keeps the hardware and network running.<p>I suppose it's me. I don't need exciting new features, I don't need growth, I don't need an experience. For my needs SO could be run by 3 dude(tte)s in a basement, and as long as it's profitable enough for them, all is fine.
Instead of just iterating on a solid business another case of promising infinite growth, which in reality is just a different form of pump and dump. Fire the executives.
> Over the last 15 years, _we’ve_ built Stack Overflow into an industry-crucial knowledge base for millions of developers and technologists.<p>If you continue reading, he doesn't mention the community as the most important part of the "we" at all.<p>Added as a side-note to not be so obviously greedy:<p>> To our community members and customers reading this note: you are foundational to our success.
You would think that companies would take the easy step of not using internal company nicknames in these press releases (Stackers.)<p>Just “employees” would make it sound less tone deaf.
I've noticed searching the recent questions, the answer count and views are really low, there just seems to be not a lot of people on the site answering questions anymore<p>There is a big message telling users not to use AI generated content for answers<p>I'm starting to wonder if the no AI answers rule is a good idea
> To our community members and customers reading this note: you are foundational to our success.<p>I love SO, but I really wish it would have become some community funded / non profit entity. Who wants to help these private equity firms?
The post mentions the "successful launch of OverflowAI" which is something I had forgotten existed. For context the HN post for it is below, in which most people here are cynically dismissive of it or just confused about what it is supposed to offer.<p>Is it cynical to wonder what "successful launch" means in this context, or just HN being overly dismissive or out of touch?<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36892311">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36892311</a>
Am I reading this properly?<p>> As we finish this fiscal year and move into the next, we are focused on investing in our product. As such, we are significantly reducing the size of our go-to-market organization while we do so. Supporting teams and other teams across the organization are impacted as well.<p>This means they're cutting down on new product introductions, and are focusing on generating profit from their existing/deployed products?
Marketing in 2023 is truly hilarious. I can't decide whether it's better to get ahead of the news media by announcing your own failure, or to just be as good as you can be to the employees that you have to let go, and not write blog post about it. I know it's the current trend to make a big fuss with a tweet and everything about how much we're going to miss you and all. Somehow I don't think it's really helpful for the newly unemployed.<p>If someone can offer some insight on why we're paying somebody to spend a week thinking about what to call the layoffs ("headcount reduction" lmao), and not continue to pay the actual contributing members of a software team, and especially what the angle is in writing a blog like this instead of quietly taking care of your people, I'm all ears. Is it marketing trying to justify their continued existence? Are we helping the people we're letting go by announcing the flood of (probably experienced) talent into the marketplace? I'm only disparaging this practice a little bit. I genuinely am curious about what the psychologists and market analysts have found about how this is beneficial to the company.
On other news copilot is uneconomic [1] so one wonders where all this will land.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ais-costly-buildup-could-make-early-products-a-hard-sell-bdd29b9f" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ais-costly-buildup-could-make-ea...</a>
Is this a canary in the coal mine?<p>I've been following layoffs for the last few years, and it generally seems like ~10% is normal, with larger companies doing a smaller percentage, while startups often layoff 10% or slightly more.<p>28% is a scary number.<p>I'm betting that everyone on this site has visited StackOverflow at least once. If they cannot figure out a way to weather an incoming storm, then this makes me even less hopeful about tech employment in general.<p>But, then again, SO did get purchased in 2021 by Prosus (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosus" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosus</a>).<p>Scary times ahead? Or, just more evidence that private equity ruins everything good? Or, an entirely new story that AI is going to rapidly destroy all businesses?
For some OSS projects, Q&A has moved to its issues system. Some recommend to ask in SO, but the number of others that are ok with questions seems to be increasing.<p>ChatGPT 3.5 started giving me wrong or not so good answers. So I rarely use it these days.
How much did the Stack Overflow corpus contribute to the training of GPT-4?<p>(I'm thinking contributed directly, not indirectly, from all the copy&pasting answers into Git repos.)
Stackoverflow not having a public whitelabled version was their demise, not having something for a public community that is sellable without having to go through the Area51 provess was their demise. Discourse has been eating their lunch. <a href="https://www.discourse.org/customers" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.discourse.org/customers</a>
They could deny any of the AI bots crawling their content and build their own AI.<p>The way things are going, there’ll be islands of content and AI trained on it.<p>Like how Reddit and Twitter closed crawling of data.
"The CEO of Stack Overflow reassures the millions of developers who rely on it to do their jobs that its $1.8 billion sale to an investment firm will only help it grow and 'take things up a notch.'"<p><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/stack-overflow-acquisition-prosus-tencent-shareholder-2021-6" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.businessinsider.com/stack-overflow-acquisition-p...</a><p>Whew! I was really worried that selling out to private equity was going to hurt the company in the relatively-short term.<p>Seriously, American capitalism is increasingly persuading me to be a socialist.