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Stack Overflow's CEO doesn't understand Stack Overflow
(jlericson.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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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.
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?
I'm unsure of many people know that StackOverflow also had enterprise offerings. Our company has their own StackOverflow instance with very specific content to our tech stacks.
Yes but they stopped offering that years ago.
So, no more job classifieds, no saas, only ads from views... I don't see where it can be profitable like that
No they didn't? My company just recently introduced it.
wasn't it like 7-8 years ago an offer to host a custom community? Like $250 per site (while now i see their enteprise offer is only intranet and is priced per user)
Valuation is usually based on potential revenue, not actual revenue. A $2 billion valuation would have been about $50 per user. It seems reasonable Stack Exchange should be able to make that much money per user somehow over the entire future existence of the company... if it's run well. Which doesn't seem to be happening from where I'm sitting.
How similar this is to how capitalists look at natural "resources". "This website[wetland] sure is great. Lots of people[animals] are loving it. And it's a vital part of the development[water] cycle... But it's just not making me any money!"
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.
And no SO means worse LLMs. Chatgpt relies on scrapes of SO, reddit, forums and GitHub discussion pages.
And the scrapping stage already happened. A new one will be useful only after enough human-made content is added, or it a major change in tech happen.
It's not like ChatGPT is the only LLM. GPT is pretty broad and general. Remember that MS has Co-Pilot which is literally entirely built on GitHub's codebase knowledge. Different data sets will produce different kinds of useful predictors.
I've had great success with LLMs troubleshooting my code independently without needing to consult a peer.
It's easier than looking on StackOverflow because it already crawled the answers there and it's been programmed to drop the sass unless you ask it to be sassy specifically. All the knowledge without the elitism.