<story><title>Stack Overflow&apos;s CEO Doesn&apos;t Understand Stack Overflow</title><url>https://jlericson.com/2023/07/26/not_understanding.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mrweasel</author><text>&amp;gt; Not everything needs to be a damn unicorn.&lt;p&gt;More people needs to understand this. It&amp;#x27;s fine being a small(ish) business that turns a profit and provides a service that&amp;#x27;s beneficial to society. You don&amp;#x27;t need to be a billion dollar company to be important or do great work.&lt;p&gt;DHH talked about this 15 years ago. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>janalsncm</author><text>&amp;gt; In May I wrote about Stack Overflow&amp;#x27;s business, which lost $42 million over 6 months and had just laid off 10% of its employees. Since then, the company&amp;#x27;s fiscal year-end results came out. Despite growing revenue, it lost $84 million over the year ending on March 31, 2023.&lt;p&gt;Thank god Wikipedia isn’t run like Stack Overflow. As an end user, they have pretty much the same value proposition: user generated answers to my questions. Wikipedia is still doing well, meanwhile it seems SO is constantly being driven off a cliff by bimbos in management.&lt;p&gt;Not everything needs to be a damn unicorn. SO is an information repository. They need to accept that stop trying to “enhance” it with more crap because they don’t realize their median user is a junior dev who really just needs to serialize a Java object and isn’t going to pay or put up with any LLM-generated nonsense.&lt;p&gt;SO doesn’t need large language models. What they really need is a better model of what answers are good, what answers are outdated, and what answers should be expanded to include more info (and sometimes, what answers should be slimmed down a bit). Turn the top answer to popular questions into a wiki so that everyone can update it. And then add backlinks for questions which were closed for being “duplicates”. It solves so many problems SO has.&lt;p&gt;Another thing. This “comments aren’t for extended discussion” nonsense needs to go too. Any question could easily include a Reddit-style discussion tab to facilitate discussion. I’m sure much of it would be at least as valuable as the answers themselves.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mrtksn</author><text>But the whole &amp;quot;Tech&amp;quot; economy is based on the premise that everything must grow indefinitely and indefinitely means that at some point will be a unicorn.&lt;p&gt;Europe is considered economical failure because there are not enough unicorns, there are lists on Twitter with list of unicorns per country that are supposed to show the decline of Europe. No matter if Europe has some of the best living condition for large group of people.&lt;p&gt;IMHO this thing is ideological, I even feel uneasy mentioning this because it is something we are not supposed to talk since it can start a flamewar and flamewars are how you get your account restricted.</text></comment>
<story><title>Stack Overflow&apos;s CEO Doesn&apos;t Understand Stack Overflow</title><url>https://jlericson.com/2023/07/26/not_understanding.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mrweasel</author><text>&amp;gt; Not everything needs to be a damn unicorn.&lt;p&gt;More people needs to understand this. It&amp;#x27;s fine being a small(ish) business that turns a profit and provides a service that&amp;#x27;s beneficial to society. You don&amp;#x27;t need to be a billion dollar company to be important or do great work.&lt;p&gt;DHH talked about this 15 years ago. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>janalsncm</author><text>&amp;gt; In May I wrote about Stack Overflow&amp;#x27;s business, which lost $42 million over 6 months and had just laid off 10% of its employees. Since then, the company&amp;#x27;s fiscal year-end results came out. Despite growing revenue, it lost $84 million over the year ending on March 31, 2023.&lt;p&gt;Thank god Wikipedia isn’t run like Stack Overflow. As an end user, they have pretty much the same value proposition: user generated answers to my questions. Wikipedia is still doing well, meanwhile it seems SO is constantly being driven off a cliff by bimbos in management.&lt;p&gt;Not everything needs to be a damn unicorn. SO is an information repository. They need to accept that stop trying to “enhance” it with more crap because they don’t realize their median user is a junior dev who really just needs to serialize a Java object and isn’t going to pay or put up with any LLM-generated nonsense.&lt;p&gt;SO doesn’t need large language models. What they really need is a better model of what answers are good, what answers are outdated, and what answers should be expanded to include more info (and sometimes, what answers should be slimmed down a bit). Turn the top answer to popular questions into a wiki so that everyone can update it. And then add backlinks for questions which were closed for being “duplicates”. It solves so many problems SO has.&lt;p&gt;Another thing. This “comments aren’t for extended discussion” nonsense needs to go too. Any question could easily include a Reddit-style discussion tab to facilitate discussion. I’m sure much of it would be at least as valuable as the answers themselves.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mschuster91</author><text>The problem is ambitious management on &lt;i&gt;all&lt;/i&gt; levels. When you&amp;#x27;re running a billion dollar business, you can extract far better compensation (base, bonus, stock options) than if you&amp;#x27;re running a hundred million dollar business.&lt;p&gt;The obvious solution is a compensation cap, not just because CEO comp has &lt;i&gt;exploded&lt;/i&gt; while lower rung compensation has virtually stagnated, but also because it might put an end to the constant drive of companies to just gobble up competitors.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.epi.org&amp;#x2F;publication&amp;#x2F;ceo-pay-in-2020&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.epi.org&amp;#x2F;publication&amp;#x2F;ceo-pay-in-2020&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>