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Stack Overflow's CEO doesn't understand Stack Overflow (jlericson.com)

submitted 11 months ago by mastermind@lemm.ee to c/technology@beehaw.org

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[-] prole@beehaw.org 121 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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?

[-] Arkham@beehaw.org 26 points 11 months ago

I never pass up an opportunity to link this article: CEOs are hugely expensive. Why not automate them?

[-] iammike@programming.dev 2 points 11 months ago

This is always relevant

[-] sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf 99 points 11 months ago

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" 🤮🤮🤮

[-] Tywele@lemmy.dbzer0.com 71 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

There is https://codidact.com/ which is an open source alternative to Stack Overflow

[-] Blaze@sopuli.xyz 16 points 11 months ago

Thanks for sharing

[-] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 3 points 11 months ago

Have they incorporated the data from StackExchange?

[-] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 56 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] lucien@beehaw.org 1 points 11 months ago

Ah, wonderful capitalism working as intended. Everything comes down to money.

[-] HeartyBeast@kbin.social 43 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] Moonrise2473@feddit.it 19 points 11 months ago

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?

[-] Rakn@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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.

[-] Moonrise2473@feddit.it 1 points 11 months ago

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

[-] Rakn@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 11 months ago

No they didn't? My company just recently introduced it.

[-] Moonrise2473@feddit.it 1 points 11 months ago

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)

[-] abhibeckert@beehaw.org 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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.

[-] SavinaRoja@beehaw.org 1 points 11 months ago

Valuation is usually based on potential revenue, not actual revenue

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!"

[-] OneRedFox@beehaw.org 4 points 11 months ago

Oh, I didn't realize that it was sold, but that would explain a lot. Where do we go after it crashes and burns?

[-] SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org 10 points 11 months ago

I wish resources like this were a public benefit corporation vs a for profit.

Federated also works.

[-] arthur@lemmy.zip 3 points 11 months ago

That will become necessary soon, since their "business model" lost it's meaning after the LLM's

[-] rainh@kbin.social 19 points 11 months ago

Lol I doubt it. LLMs are useless for the kinds of questions stack overflow is useful for.

[-] fuzzywolf23@beehaw.org 9 points 11 months ago

And no SO means worse LLMs. Chatgpt relies on scrapes of SO, reddit, forums and GitHub discussion pages.

[-] arthur@lemmy.zip 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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.

[-] canis_majoris@lemmy.ca 3 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] canis_majoris@lemmy.ca 5 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] housepanther@lemmy.goblackcat.com 66 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] Quexotic@beehaw.org 42 points 11 months ago

Of course not. They aren't technologists, they're capitalists. Their primary concern is capital.

[-] mateomaui@reddthat.com 17 points 11 months ago

Didn’t even know there was a stack overflow strike.

[-] bedrooms@kbin.social 6 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] canis_majoris@lemmy.ca 20 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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.

[-] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 12 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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.

[-] canis_majoris@lemmy.ca 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Yeah stringent moderation is great but you can do it without being absolutely terrible about every interaction. You can run a clean shop without needing to be a dick about everything. When every close is filled with malice and vitriol it doesn't benefit literally anybody. It's not healthy for the poster being vindictive, it's not healthy for the newbies getting into the business, and it's not healthy for the community overall when the normal thing is berating and belittling.

Engineers are not good with customers...

[-] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 1 points 11 months ago

Speculative

[-] davehtaylor@beehaw.org 11 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] canis_majoris@lemmy.ca 10 points 11 months ago

I don't like the way that LLMs have gathered their information with zero credit to anybody. It's totally bullshit.

[-] JunkMuffler@lemmy.one 8 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] canis_majoris@lemmy.ca 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

What will happen long term is more specialized models for specific applications. MS already has coder facing resources through GitHub Co-Pilot, and they were the key funders for most of OpenAI's work with GPT so they have also deployed GPT4 inline for Bing, which I find actually pretty useful even though it's been neutered to all hell.

The problem with GPT is the G. Generalized. We've been building more specific models though. Co-Pilot is already trained on the entire codebase and discussion boards on GitHub. Eventually that's going to be the tool you want to use over GPT because it's specifically designed for code above all else.