2y ago

Stack Overflow's CEO doesn't understand Stack Overflow

jlericson.com

Programming @programming.dev

outhold @lemmy.world

2y ago

Stack Overflow's CEO doesn't understand Stack Overflow

jlericson.com /2023/07/26/not_understanding.html

55 comments

It's almost as if there's an entire class of (inordinately wealthy) people who have no reason to exist in the capacity that they do.
CEO's are so important to the functioning of a product that they don't even have to fucking understand the product itself. Why not give them shitloads of money?
- I never pass up an opportunity to link this article: CEOs are hugely expensive. Why not automate them?
- This is always relevant
Stack Overflow has a CEO? WTF for? It's a repository of information. All the LLMs have already ripped a copy of the site, so where were they planning to generate revenue?
I hope someone starts a version and integrates it with activitypub and then users can donate towards the hosting costs.
Stack Overflow is supposed to be the wiki of developers, not a fucking business. I hate these greedy fucks. "let's make money from other people's time and effort" 🤮🤮🤮
- There is https://codidact.com/ which is an open source alternative to Stack Overflow
  
  Thanks for sharing
  
  Have they incorporated the data from StackExchange?
- It seems you're unclear on what a CEO is. Even non profit organizations have CEOs (though stackoverflow is very much a for-profit company). A CEO is just the head decision maker in an organization.
  At the end of the day, SO has server hosting costs, and they have to cover those costs somehow. That makes them a business.
  
  Ah, wonderful capitalism working as intended. Everything comes down to money.
- Stack Overflow is supposed to be the wiki of developers, not a fucking business.
  Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood founded it, and it was sold to Prosus, a Netherlands-based consumer internet conglomerate, on 2 June 2021 for $1.8 billion.
  I guess someone would like some of that money back.
  
  lol almost $2 billion for a website with almost no ads and that makes almost no revenue? Especially now that they closed the (paid) jobs section?
  ROI in 10000 years?
  
  Oh, I didn't realize that it was sold, but that would explain a lot. Where do we go after it crashes and burns?
- And now they also have to pay back like 2 billion dollar of investor money... What sense does this make?
- I wish resources like this were a public benefit corporation vs a for profit.
  Federated also works.
- That will become necessary soon, since their "business model" lost it's meaning after the LLM's
  
  Lol I doubt it. LLMs are useless for the kinds of questions stack overflow is useful for.
I've found that the case for most CEOs in technology which is why I call them techbros. Arguably, they don't even know business all that well either.
- Of course not. They aren't technologists, they're capitalists. Their primary concern is capital.
Didn’t even know there was a stack overflow strike.
This one actually I don't understand. SO has a robust voting system to turn down bad answers. Also, many questions suffer from no answer. So, from the OP's perspective AI assistance is a positive.
The resistance indeed comes from human moderators and answer-ers. And they are ridiculed by (often novice) OPs on Reddit etc.
- Because the established elite on SO are fucking dicks. You can't ask a question anymore. It's literally impossible to open a new thread. Yeah, a lot of troubleshooting has been answered, but do you really think the burden should be on the new user to know literally every single existing thread on the site? No, that's absolutely absurd, and when some moderator or poweruser comes in and tells the newbie to go fuck himself for lack of research it's pretty obvious why nobody wants to use the platform when the moderatorship is basically actively antagonistic to anybody seeking information, which is literally the point of the site.
  I'm glad it's been crawled by GPT. I'm glad because the bot gives me no sass at all when I ask it to audit my code. It does it without any malice or bullshit and it saves me time from doing the research because everything is in the LLM DB already.
  
  Closing garbage is one of the best features of SO. When I began answering questions on Reddit I was literally answering the same shit every few days. It's insane. People asking the same shit without doing any research prior is creating a ton of pointless work for people who can answer. Reddit, as well as Lemmy have no better ways to resolve this problem. SO does it via strict moderation. I guess if ChatGPT can find you a good answer from the bajillion duplicates without having to waste a SME's time, that's a positive. But yeah, I thank SO's moderators for keeping it clean. I'd lose my mind as an asker and especially answerer if I had to keep doing this over and over again. I also have feelings and sifting through mountains of duplicates or having to answer the same questions over and over again hurts me.
  
  Not to mention the fact that even if a similar question were answered, if that thread is from 2012, the answer will, with 99% certainty, be totally irrelevant now.
  SO has always been a bastion of power hungry dickbags who get off on acting superior and putting others down. They way it's structured reinforces this. It turned what should have been a great place to help each other into a fucking bloodsport arena.
  Also, fuck LLMs.
  
  I'm with you. It's amazing how fast ChatGPT has replaced SO for me.
  I'm not sure how this will work long term. How will the model get new training data?
  But honestly? SO can eat a bag of dicks. It doesn't matter if you're asking a question that's nowhere on the site (or the first 3 pages of Google results). It's going to get closed and ignored.
  I think most people moved to Reddit and Discord a while ago, which is also problematic. We need to get these conversations happening on the open Fediverse.

55 comments