<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></parent_chain><comment><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 What they really need is a better model of what answers are good, what answers are outdated, and what answers should be expanded to include more info (and sometimes, what answers should be slimmed down a bit).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></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></parent_chain><comment><author>vouaobrasil</author><text>The author is wrong. The CEO perfectly understands Stack Overflow. What the author of this blog doesn&amp;#x27;t understand is that the CEO is pursuing a perfectly valid strategy: maximize its short-term gains by squeezing it unsustainably with the latest hype, and take the money, and run.&lt;p&gt;The good of the community and the well-being of the users are completely irrelevant in this strategy.</text></comment>