CEO Update: Paving the road forward with AI and community at the center

Overall, a bad sign for Stack Overflow. When executives write gobbledygook paragraphs such as:<p>“ Since my last quarterly update, companies across nearly every sector have experienced significant transformation—whether it’s a more aggressive focus on profitability or a shift in product strategy due to the acceleration of generative AI (GenAI). Thematically, however, one thing has remained the same: companies are committed to driving productivity and efficiency throughout their organizations. At Stack Overflow, we continue to help our customers and community deliver both.”<p>The unclear and muddy writing reveals that their thinking is likewise unclear.<p>Generalities instead of specifics. Vague platitudes. This is poor writing.<p>StackExchange is facing an existential threat and there is nothing in this letter that names it, identifies steps they’ll take to address, or how they will thrive in the new future.<p>It is not unexpected, but a confirmation of what we all might fear.

&gt; “They are creating this culture on Stack Overflow where it’s become a really safe place to ask a question, a safe place to provide an answer, and try to get people closer to their solution, and I think that’s part of what’s made it really successful and where we found a lot of value.”<p>Is this satire? Stack Overflow is infamous for how hostile its culture is towards people asking questions. And I&#x27;m sure that the CEO is well aware of that. The fact that they&#x27;re dropping a quote like this one into the post without a single word even <i>attempting</i> to address SO&#x27;s well-known culture problems is a slap in the face to anyone familiar with the platform.

&gt; We want to be able to continue to invest back into our community, and that’s why we’re also exploring what data monetization looks like in the future. LLMs are trained off Stack Overflow data, which our massive community has contributed to for nearly 15 years. We should be compensated for that data so we can continue to invest back in our community.<p>How exactly are you planning on investing that back into the community? It sounds like it just wants to be YOU who captures the value of 15 years of community investment. It&#x27;s fine, SO is a business, and people agreed to the TOS, but this is laughably blatant bs.

The blog post is entirely marketing and tries to obfuscate or ignore the trouble AI-generated content is causing on SO. The company has enacted a deeply unpopular policy this week that essentially makes it impossible to moderate most AI-generated posts on Stack Overflow.<p>Laying off 10% of the company after putting another 10% of the company on developing AI-anything do look more like panic to me. AI-generated content is threatening one half of their business model, and additionally causing moderation issues as well on the public sites.

Nothing here directly addresses the issue of users migrating away from the flow of `Google search -&gt; SO` to `ChatGPT&#x2F;Phind`.<p>Maybe SO should just acquihire Phind. Use Phind as the gatekeep to filter out questions with well established answers before another doe-eyed user make the fatal mistake of asking a non well-formed question before they are excoriated by the poweruser #44956.

It is funny to read all this &quot;SO is doomed and AI is good enough&quot;. It shows that people have basically no clue how LLM&#x27;s work, ascribing superpowers (which is ofcourse congruent with the hype)<p>If the free humam labor solving diverse coding problems in public repositories stops, any such trained LLM solution will gradually degrade, e.g it will have no material around new libraries, new languages etc.

If they monetize content, it would be nice for the community to get a revenue share for its content authorship and moderation.

In my opinion, SO doesn’t really have much of a choice here. Not only has the quality of questions and answers been on the decline, the entire SO experience is notoriously hostile for new comers. I find that ChatGPT&#x2F;GitHub Copilot tend to give much better answers for the vast majority of programming related questions. It’s much faster, easier, and less intimidating to ask your tools questions knowing that you’ll most likely get a high quality answer and not get admonished for having asked the question in the first place.

Anyone else think Stackoverflow has been in a decline the past decade?<p>Stackoverflow hardly surfaces when I am searching for help and when I find answers it&#x27;s usually a blog or a hosted blog somewhere. Most Stackoverflow answers are usually 4-5 years old and outdated.<p>Perhaps it&#x27;s simply my engineering has improved in the last decade and I no longer search for help very often and when I do it&#x27;s outside the scope of Stackoverflow..

Funny ancedota, I use a chrome extension that adds chatgpt to all of stack overflow posts.<p>You get answers to unanswered posts with 0 replys that are useful that way<p>Stack Overflow is doomed

I feel kinda less sad that I didn&#x27;t get the job at SO that I interviewed for last summer.<p>With tools that allow you to download pre-trained models and run them on premises, I start to doubt the future of SO for Teams.

I was expecting an expensive data export feature and updated ToS

Here is an example page I made inspired by StackOverflow and Quora.<p>I think StackOverflow could do something like that; have a bot account owned by StackOverflow that would respond to posts.<p>Here is the example I made: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doc.nstr.no&#x2F;bitcoin_background" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doc.nstr.no&#x2F;bitcoin_background</a>