<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>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 What they really need is a better model of what answers are good, what answers are outdated, and what answers should be expanded to include more info (and sometimes, what answers should be slimmed down a bit).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>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></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>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>nolok</author><text>While I mostly agree with your point, I want to point out that on a financial level Wikipedia is really not that well handled. They keep increasing expenses into project that are not core to the experience, or that will never see the light of day (like when they had two different teams working on two different new text editor for the site).&lt;p&gt;I have a belief that they&amp;#x27;re caught in a very bureaucratic &amp;quot;we need to use your budget otherwise it would be put into question&amp;quot;, but it also means when I give 1 euro to them it goes less and less to their core mission I want to sustain.</text></comment>