16 ms·

“New home page seems like Stack Overflow doesn't allow free use any more”

277 points by nsoonhui 7y ago

wpietri 7y ago
I get it, and I'm sure that if SO hadn't driven me away from contributing years ago, I might be upset too. But for me this is in the category of "cows realizing that all that grain wasn't free after all". That these people are expert SO users doesn't make them experts in marketing and revenue maximization.
- lucb1e 7y ago
  You're being a little condescending and are not exactly making a good comparison. Stackoverflow was (is?) a really cool company and website, and as far as I knew they were making a reasonable profit. Consider that they allow visitors to post questions and answer, edit other people's questions and answers, and even query the database for any info that's public (e.g. not user passwords, but pretty much anything else), all without having an account. That's unique.The moderation model (that it's based on reputation except for a few elected members) is also also very unique. It's really a site by programmers for programmers, moderated by everyone who spends time there. Having them change the site completely, solely for making more profit, is unexpected. It would be similar to Linux announcing that the kernel will have a license fee from now on - you can be snarky about the cows and the grain, and indeed the kernel project is of huge value so it would make sense from a commercial perspective, but the kernel becoming paid and stackoverflow using annoying UI patterns are both not in line with their previous ways.
  - marktangotango 7y ago
    It's really a site by programmers for programmers, Indeed, I think many, many people share the same complaint about SO moderation, and this is the best explanation imo. Physician heal thyself!
  - dooglius 7y ago
    It's worth pointing out that the Linux kernel cannot do this due to the GPL, by design
    - klez 7y ago
      They can absolutely do this. It would not be useful, but they certainly can. The FSF itself used to sell copies of the GNU operating system for a fee. The problem with the license is just that when it's out there (i.e., one person paid for it) it's out there for everyone else if the paying person decides to release it for free for everybody else.
      - lucb1e 7y ago
        Of course, they can refuse to sell to the person leaking it, denying them access unless there is another mole. I heard this is how GRSecurity works, which makes a hardened Linux kernel. Also, the bulk of StackOverflow's data is creative commons. A similar argument goes here as for the Linux kernel.
        andreareina 7y ago
        Bruce Perens argues[1] (HN comments[2]) that a penalty for exercising the right to redistribute is de facto a restriction on redistribution, which the GPL prohibits. [1] https://perens.com/2017/06/28/warning-grsecurity-potential-contributory-infringement-risk-for-customers/ https://perens.com/2017/06/28/warning-grsecurity-potential-c... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14731955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14731955
        lucb1e 7y ago
        Interesting, I did not know that anyone opposed this on legal grounds. Thanks for sharing!
  - pmoriarty 7y ago
    "Consider that they allow visitors to post questions and answer, edit other people's questions and answers, and even query the database for any info that's public (e.g. not user passwords, but pretty much anything else), all without having an account." This is not unique. Wikipedia's Reference desk[1] allows asking/answering any question by anyone -- even unregistered users. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk
    - dwaltrip 7y ago
      Does anyone use it? By some combination of skill and luck, stackoverflow was clearly better positioned to fill this role, at least for software related content.
  - wpietri 7y ago
    > It's really a site by programmers for programmers I question your use of "really" here. If it were really that, this wouldn't have happened. As far as I can tell, what it really is is a for-profit business, where the owners are the ones who decide things like what "a reasonable profit" is. I agree, of course, that this is (somewhat) out of line with their previous ways. But almost any for-profit social site is an elaborate bait-and-switch, where it starts free and lovely and gradually moves in the direction of profit maximization. You'll find veterans of almost every social site saying how it just isn't like the good old days. If you don't like that, maybe you shouldn't do a lot of free work for people who are making money from it. Wikipedia, for all its flaws, is much more accountable to its community than any for-profit site will be.
- Hello71 7y ago
  it's almost like not everything should be about marketing and revenue maximization.
  - wpietri 7y ago
    I agree not everything should be. Which is why people should build more non-profits. And why they shouldn't do a lot of free work for for-profits. But here we are.
jasonhansel 7y ago
To be honest: I think SO is in a difficult position here. They're absolutely essential to the software dev community, but their service is incredibly hard to monetize without alienating users.
- everyone 7y ago
  "They're absolutely essential to the software dev community" Posting a question there has been pointless for years. I also dont think I've seen any answers there via duckduckgo useful to me in a long time. I dont think I'd even notice if it disappeared tomorrow. (I am not a web dev btw)
  - jasonhansel 7y ago
    I think it's more useful for new devs than for experienced ones. I've also found it a useful source for snippets of code that I have trouble remembering on my own.
  - lordnacho 7y ago
    > Posting a question there has been pointless for years. Isn't that mainly because it's already been answered? (Apart from new tags) I've got dozens of questions on my SO account, but it's been quite a while since I wrote one now.
    - everyone 7y ago
      No, The trend I noticed starting years ago, which according to various articles Ive seen is now complete and institutionalized there, is that: High ranked mod/troll types, who seem to spend all day there trying to get more karma for some reason, constantly cruise for new questions. They dont know much about programming in general, and have zero knowledge of my specialist field for example. If they see a question that superficialy resembles or shares certain keywords with another one they will close it as being answered already (pretty much acting like particularly dumb bots) even if it has nothing to do with the existing question, or if the existing question is massively out of date and irrelevant because of updates to the software in question.
softwaredoug 7y ago
Depressing, hopefully it gets remedied. Yet another reason to share your knowledge on a blog you control and not give your invaluable content over to someone else’s business. Do these kids of communities all become just crowdsourced content farms in the end?
- ghevshoo 7y ago
  The problem with personal blogs is that they are likely to get labeled as a “personal” site and blocked by some stupid corporate filter.
  - paulryanrogers 7y ago
    How common is this? At the smaller companies I've worked for the only filtering was of the big, distracting sites like Facebook.
    - mrkstu 7y ago
      I run our corporate proxy and security made the call to block ‘personal’ sites since it was basically the Wild West of content...
    - alxlaz 7y ago
      At one of the large companies I've worked before, the corporate filter barred access to https://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html https://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html because it was a hacking website. Which it cleverly determined, you've guessed it, by checking the URL and seeing it had "hack" in there. Everything with "hack" in the URL was banned. Pretty sure all those JavaScript ninja hackers they'd hired were a little baffled that they hire hackers but don't let them view nasty hacker pages...
      - zrobotics 7y ago
        I also take it that this company didn't have any offices in essex?
japhyr 7y ago
I don't quite get this. I'm not logged into SO at the moment. I went to the home page, and the first thing I see is "For developers" and "For businesses". I clicked "For developers", and under "Public Q&A" There's a big button "Browse questions". I click that button, and I'm on a page that looks exactly like SO always looks: questions, answers, and a big blue "Ask Question" button. To ask a question you have to log in, but that's standard practice. Am I missing something?
- fabian2k 7y ago
  That button was "Create an account" when this post was originally written.
- Kiro 7y ago
  They must have changed it. "Browse questions" was not there before and said "Create account" instead (see other answers for screenshots).
- snazz 7y ago
  The answer with a score of -49 on the linked thread is a response from SE staff telling us that they’ve made the change to address the immediate concern.
AviationAtom 7y ago
Sounds like an argument for a decentralized knowledgebase, similar to how P2P social networking services work (ala Matrix?)
- billfruit 7y ago
  It was already there, the usenet newsgroups.
kull 7y ago
Based on my own experience, the way I find answered on SO is by searching on Google. Maybe they just see all the traffic coming to them from the search engines, nobody, unless already logged in, really go to SO.com and type a question. Maybe not logged in users on the homepage are usually people trying to buy a software for their team or more business, finance people, stockholders?
- biesnecker 7y ago
  Same. I had to go into incognito mode and specifically navigate to the page to see what the fuss was about. I don't think I'd ever seen the SO homepage before that.
  - bscphil 7y ago
    I'll add another same here. I still can't figure out exactly what the fuss is about, after reading the linked question and many of the comments here. Is it that the SO home page doesn't offer any way to search questions, instead giving you links to either sign in or purchase one of their products? If so, I really don't get the problem. Has anyone without a SO account ever gone to their home page to try to look up an issue? Surely it's overwhelmingly more common to just search for an issue directly in a search engine and check the SO links in the results if they turn out to be relevant. And right now, visiting https://stackoverflow.com/ https://stackoverflow.com/ in a private browsing window, I still see a search bar right at the top. I really have no idea what anyone could have a problem with here.
  - manigandham 7y ago
    You've probably been there before because it was just the questions browsing page.
- matwood 7y ago
  TIL SO has a home page. Joking aside, I have only ever visited SO through a search engine.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
wombatpm 7y ago
There is a big search box at the top of the page. Type in what is foo? and see answers.
adventured 7y ago
Every profit-driven knowledge service that has ever existed has lost this battle in time. About.com, Answers.com, Quora, Genius, and so on. You can serve one pursuit as the primary - knowledge or profit - but not both. They're inherently in conflict. Given enough time, the profit pursuit as a primary driver will always destroy a knowledge service. It leads to decisions that are not solely about being the best knowledge service possible (whether that's commercial abuse through ads, features that exist solely for commercial exploit, dark patterns, or forced volume content aka spam). The only alternative that is viable to maintain a very high quality service over time is to ensure that being true to the pursuit and presentation of knowledge is the highest goal of the service (not making money). That requires aggressive commercial minimalism, operating very thin, never taking venture capital, and or a non-profit route. Anything else results in corruption that inevitably leads to a decay in quality over time. Stack Exchange has made it longer than most with only a few for-profit cavities to show for it. I applaud them for that, it has been a tremendous service. Their venture backers will want a big fat return eventually however, and the clock is ticking. I'd expect their behavior to get worse in the coming years.
- rambojazz 7y ago
  > never taking venture capital, and or a non-profit route What else remains outside "company or non-profit"?
- bigfailwhale 7y ago
  Or maybe they actually sell things that are useful to companies that allows them to invest in making the public website more valuable? But because they always put the community first, they have until this recent change been hesitant to even mention anything that they sell for fear that users would revolt. Of all the services I have used, SO has been consistently the best at being user and community centric. Without SO, I am pretty sure I would spend 5x longer to get any useful coding done, that is how much value SO has given me and I suspect the same is true for millions of other developers. By the way, Quora and Genius are both super useful. I really do not understand what you mean by "lost the battle".
snazz 7y ago
Given the fact that Stack Exchange has been community vs. company for years now, and all SE answers are Creative Commons licensed, I wonder how hard it would be to create a clone, import all the old questions and answers, allow the existing (community, not SE staff) moderators to moderate, and create accounts for everyone who had one on SE. Appearing as high in Google search seems impossible, but if the community got behind it this could fix the SE problems once and for all.
- luckylion 7y ago
  > Appearing as high in Google search seems impossible, but if the community got behind it this could fix the SE problems once and for all. There would also be very little traffic, because "the community" are generally the people answering questions and explaining things, they aren't asking questions. Without the people needing help finding the site (Google rankings), nothing happens.
- eitland 7y ago
  I think it would be wise to leave a good chunk of the mods behind. It has been an idea for me for a while to create a site where - questions are answered - and useful answers rewarded. Note there is no "good" in front of questions, and answers are rated by their usefullness, primarily to the person asking the question and secondary to everyone else, not by how well they conform to a site script. In particular, if someone wants to ask what JavaScript framework should I choose in 2020 and someone finds it worth answering and the asker of the question likes the answer, then: Fine! Duplicate questions? Fine! Answering by pointing to a previous question? Fine! Answering again without mentioning the previous question? Fine! It should be a site for people wanting to ask or answer questions, not a site for people who want to be mods. Now, since that would be the purpose of the site and not something abstract like: make a repository of everything we know, all these questions and answers will be fine. There should also be some inflation or maybe even better "karma tax" so both accounts and questions lose something like 10% (or a dynamically calculated percent) of their value each year, so we aren’t stuck with "Top JavaScript libraries for 2019" on top of the lists forever. Another thing I would consider is making it harder to create accounts as soon as possible.
jasode 7y ago
First, it looks like the StackOverflow homepage was changed to not require a sign-in. The heavily downvoted (about -50) answer[0] by Cesar M at the bottom of the page also shows the screenshot of the change. Second, I'm guessing that revenue from job postings (Careers section) and banner ads did not bring enough money. From what I remember reading, I think SO also had high hopes of the other StackExchange specialty sites using the same Q&A engine would be more successful (i.e. more banner ads, more money, etc) but it turns out they were only a modest impact on revenue. (E.g. MathOverflow is an interesting community with Fields Medal mathematics PhDs but it probably doesn't bring much revenue.) Therefore, this leaves the "enterprise sales" revenue idea of licensing the Q&A engine to private teams. (Hey, Slack just had their IPO and some companies pay for Gitlab and Github -- so let's push for selling SO Q&A for enterprises.) This monetization pressure leads to using the SO landing page as a giant billboard for their enterprise product. (I'm not making a personal complaint but just observing that they seem to be in a difficult monetization dilemma and their actions to improve their financial situation just irritates the users.) IMO, I'm skeptical that internal Q&A platforms would actually be useful for companies and I made a previous comment explaining why.[1] [0] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/386566 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/386566 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14804834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14804834
- ryanmarsh 7y ago
  I’ve had a few clients running SO enterprise. I too questioned it’s usefulness until I had some company/environment specific questions and immediately got answers. I think everyone needs something like this.
  - simpss 7y ago
    seemed like a good trial idea until I got onto the pricing page... to get SSO, we'd have to start out with the 11$/user/month plan, in my current company(~1000 users) that would mean roughly 132 000$ a year making it a pretty tough sell.
    - msaharia 7y ago
ken 7y ago
"I will start off by saying that I'm a bit of an oddball. I browse exclusively in private browsing mode." I don't think this is odd at all. I do most browsing in private mode, and I think that should be the default. Letting every random link I click get added to my URL history is just distraction bait later. Password managers and autofill make it easy to log in when I need to. When I'll need to come back to a page later, it's easy to bookmark. Persisting cookies and recording every URL clicked is one of those ideas that was neat 10 years ago, but on the modern web it causes more problems than it solves.
- skybrian 7y ago
  I think the point is that most people don't do this. (Though it may be common among the sort of people who post on Hacker News.)
  - ken 7y ago
    And my point is that it's a better way, so no apology should be needed. It's true most people just go with the defaults, which is why I said it ought to be the default. The "better but oddball" way today has a way of becoming the "default and therefore common" way tomorrow. It'd only take one person at Apple/Google/Microsoft to change this and every website would update their landing page within the week. Anyway, what's the overlap between HN and SO? This used to be exactly the sort of thing where replies would say something like "Most non-technical people don't do this" (or some self-deprecating or pejorative synonym for that), except SO is clearly for highly technical people so we're having to try to slice that pie even thinner to keep it from collapsing into a tautology.
    - skybrian 7y ago
      I think it's mostly a matter of good-enough UI. I got in the habit of opening incognito windows, but I'm not going to teach my relatives to do this.
- fortran77 7y ago
  _Most_ people in the real world don't. You do realize this, don't you?
evncr 7y ago
In all my years, this is literally the first time I see the Stack Overflow home page. Why would I ever want to go there? All the information is in the pages with questions and answers.
- nemanjaboric 7y ago
  I used to go to stackoverflow.com to check for the new questions and write answers.
known 7y ago
This is like Google not allowing free use of its search
GordonS 7y ago
I visit StackOverflow on a daily basis so I haven't seen this - I just tried in incognito mode, and wow, this wasn't an exaggeration! I've always felt like the owners of SO have had good intentions, and for the most part felt like I trusted them. But there are now some worrying signs - first they allowed obtrusive ads onto SO, and now this looks like a PI data-grab. Clamouring for PI is always worrying, because it means that PI has value to them - but why?
- chii 7y ago
  because the questions and answers have not made them enough money. Engagement on the platform is declining due to strict editors and lazy question askers. and with a majority developer audience, the ad blockers are stopping advertising revenue. this is when a site start compromising its stated morals. not out of greed, but out of necessity.
  - GordonS 7y ago
    But what of Jobs? Their cheapest package (which allows max 1 job ad at any time) is around $7,500/year. They have 5572 jobs advertised right now, so I guess it's pulling in 30-41M a year.
  - Nextgrid 7y ago
    They can solve the adblocker problem by serving developer-relevant ads directly from their domain instead of third-party cancer. Read The Docs do this and I’ve never ever minded their ads. It also helps that the ads RTD serve are for trustworthy products (that I already had good experiences with) so it helps me in trusting them when they advertise something I don’t yet know about.
sklivvz1971 7y ago
"We <3 people who code" ...so we'll remove a useful home page and replace it with a marketing junk page which confuses everyone.
- baud147258 7y ago
  > We less that 3 people who code No wonder there's no progress on moderation tools and the new ask question page has just been rolled out /s
tylermauthe 7y ago
Running a business is hard. It takes cash. As others have said (and better) it is likely that they're doing this in the hopes of raising cash. Not because they are jerks, but because they need to. So they can eat. I worry this tactic may kill the golden goose eventually, though! Newcomers may be daunted by this experience, but I'm sure they thought of that and have tested it. Easy enough to pay some college kids for an afternoon. I suspect that SO is enough of a (hacker) "household name" that newcomers will already know the legends with no help from any marketing team. As others have said, primary access is by way of search engine results. It would be tricky to do it well and proper, but perhaps they could introduce monetary rewards for question. Take a cut of transactions, pass on cash to recipients. Could obfuscate the % of the cut by using tokens or similar. I've definitely received answers so good I'd have paid for them! I've also had questions that were difficult enough to warrant attaching a real monetary bounty. Perhaps another angle would be something like CodeMentor. A system where you could pay someone to mentor you, but buying from a user profile backed by the credibility of answering questions on the subject at hand.
kadira 7y ago
Should have moved all those crap to a new domain. business.so ... maybe
rev12 7y ago
Favorite quotes from the answers: > You're alienating the product that makes you big. But that's okay, all companies do that eventually, giving rise to the competition that appeals to the alienated user base. Tschallacka is right, it seems the be part of the normal lifecycle of most online sites/apps. Perhaps SO's expiration date is near, for those users who made it popular enough to be "ruined" by the devs.
- larkeith 7y ago
  It seems you could make a law out of this - something like, "The amount a site values its community is inversely proportional to the community's size." Anywho, seems it's time to look at federating Q&A.
  - luckylion 7y ago
    Or maybe rather "to the accumulated value the community has created"? I don't even think the community at SO is that large, or has grown that much recently. At some point, the users are committed having sunken so much time and effort into making the site great, and the company knows it and wants to squeeze more money out of the user contributions. I wouldn't be that surprised if they introduced a "pro user, only $7,99 per month" package in 2020 that gives some small perks ("your questions cannot be downvoted", "add a 100 points reward to three questions per month", "animated avatar", "special highlighting of your very important questions").
- jordanpg 7y ago
  As with most American enterprises, they must continue to grow -- indefinitely. They cannot be content to exist statically, even with whatever profit margins they currently have (if any). I'm no economist, but this precept is obvious nonsense in the sense that nothing can grow indefinitely. And so things are subsumed by other things which therefore grow, or they morph into things that can continue to grow indefinitely. SO is morphing into some other thing -- a quasi social/hiring/Q&A/team thing. Something, no doubt, that they can more easily monetize.
  - 7y ago
nurettin 7y ago
Not sure where SO would have been without google obviously giving it a leg up for all these years. I literally cannot for the life of me find another search engine that brings me to the correct question no matter how vague my search terms are.
- toddh 7y ago
  Exploiting Google's SEO was the plan from the very beginning. They just did an excellent job of it.
eaurouge 7y ago
The response here is over the top. SO have been building Teams for some three years now. I know because I signed my company up for the beta, but we weren’t in a position to try it when it became available. The value prop should be obvious. It would archive and surface institutional knowledge. Many companies are currently using Slack for this, but then your search terms have to be precise to reveal what you’re looking for. And if you’re on the free plan, your data will eventually get deleted. Obviously this doesn’t affect the free product.
- shagie 7y ago
  How does that value proposition for an organization of 100 compare to Confluence? Comparing it to slack, I believe, is a apples to oranges. Slack isn't a knowledge management system and was never meant to be.
  - eaurouge 7y ago
    I haven’t used Confluence but I imagine one advantage SO Teams would have is familiarity. Many developers/engineers already know about its benefits and how it works. Yes, apples and oranges with Slack. But if you’ve ever found yourself searching Slack for some piece of knowledge from a colleague then you’ve used it for that off label use case.
  - Nextgrid 7y ago
    All else being equal, I’d take Stack Overflow over Confluence for 2 reasons: speed and Markdown support.
losthobbies 7y ago
They need to do more with the World building section. It’s fun and educational
Havoc 7y ago
Sounds like quora implosion v2
malinens 7y ago
Lately I have seen many SO clones on google which show crawled SO content or translated copies. Maybe google does not care ir actively try to sink SO?

277 points by nsoonhui 7y ago

I get it, and I'm sure that if SO hadn't driven me away from contributing years ago, I might be upset too. But for me this is in the category of "cows realizing that all that grain wasn't free after all". That these people are expert SO users doesn't make them experts in marketing and revenue maximization.

lucb1e 7y ago
You're being a little condescending and are not exactly making a good comparison. Stackoverflow was (is?) a really cool company and website, and as far as I knew they were making a reasonable profit. Consider that they allow visitors to post questions and answer, edit other people's questions and answers, and even query the database for any info that's public (e.g. not user passwords, but pretty much anything else), all without having an account. That's unique.The moderation model (that it's based on reputation except for a few elected members) is also also very unique. It's really a site by programmers for programmers, moderated by everyone who spends time there. Having them change the site completely, solely for making more profit, is unexpected. It would be similar to Linux announcing that the kernel will have a license fee from now on - you can be snarky about the cows and the grain, and indeed the kernel project is of huge value so it would make sense from a commercial perspective, but the kernel becoming paid and stackoverflow using annoying UI patterns are both not in line with their previous ways.
- marktangotango 7y ago
  It's really a site by programmers for programmers, Indeed, I think many, many people share the same complaint about SO moderation, and this is the best explanation imo. Physician heal thyself!
- dooglius 7y ago
  It's worth pointing out that the Linux kernel cannot do this due to the GPL, by design
  - klez 7y ago
    They can absolutely do this. It would not be useful, but they certainly can. The FSF itself used to sell copies of the GNU operating system for a fee. The problem with the license is just that when it's out there (i.e., one person paid for it) it's out there for everyone else if the paying person decides to release it for free for everybody else.
    - lucb1e 7y ago
      Of course, they can refuse to sell to the person leaking it, denying them access unless there is another mole. I heard this is how GRSecurity works, which makes a hardened Linux kernel. Also, the bulk of StackOverflow's data is creative commons. A similar argument goes here as for the Linux kernel.
      - andreareina 7y ago
        Bruce Perens argues[1] (HN comments[2]) that a penalty for exercising the right to redistribute is de facto a restriction on redistribution, which the GPL prohibits. [1] https://perens.com/2017/06/28/warning-grsecurity-potential-contributory-infringement-risk-for-customers/ https://perens.com/2017/06/28/warning-grsecurity-potential-c... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14731955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14731955
        lucb1e 7y ago
        Interesting, I did not know that anyone opposed this on legal grounds. Thanks for sharing!
- pmoriarty 7y ago
  "Consider that they allow visitors to post questions and answer, edit other people's questions and answers, and even query the database for any info that's public (e.g. not user passwords, but pretty much anything else), all without having an account." This is not unique. Wikipedia's Reference desk[1] allows asking/answering any question by anyone -- even unregistered users. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk
  - dwaltrip 7y ago
    Does anyone use it? By some combination of skill and luck, stackoverflow was clearly better positioned to fill this role, at least for software related content.
- wpietri 7y ago
  > It's really a site by programmers for programmers I question your use of "really" here. If it were really that, this wouldn't have happened. As far as I can tell, what it really is is a for-profit business, where the owners are the ones who decide things like what "a reasonable profit" is. I agree, of course, that this is (somewhat) out of line with their previous ways. But almost any for-profit social site is an elaborate bait-and-switch, where it starts free and lovely and gradually moves in the direction of profit maximization. You'll find veterans of almost every social site saying how it just isn't like the good old days. If you don't like that, maybe you shouldn't do a lot of free work for people who are making money from it. Wikipedia, for all its flaws, is much more accountable to its community than any for-profit site will be.
Hello71 7y ago
it's almost like not everything should be about marketing and revenue maximization.
- wpietri 7y ago
  I agree not everything should be. Which is why people should build more non-profits. And why they shouldn't do a lot of free work for for-profits. But here we are.

jasonhansel 7y ago

To be honest: I think SO is in a difficult position here. They're absolutely essential to the software dev community, but their service is incredibly hard to monetize without alienating users.

everyone 7y ago
"They're absolutely essential to the software dev community" Posting a question there has been pointless for years. I also dont think I've seen any answers there via duckduckgo useful to me in a long time. I dont think I'd even notice if it disappeared tomorrow. (I am not a web dev btw)
- jasonhansel 7y ago
  I think it's more useful for new devs than for experienced ones. I've also found it a useful source for snippets of code that I have trouble remembering on my own.
- lordnacho 7y ago
  > Posting a question there has been pointless for years. Isn't that mainly because it's already been answered? (Apart from new tags) I've got dozens of questions on my SO account, but it's been quite a while since I wrote one now.
  - everyone 7y ago
    No, The trend I noticed starting years ago, which according to various articles Ive seen is now complete and institutionalized there, is that: High ranked mod/troll types, who seem to spend all day there trying to get more karma for some reason, constantly cruise for new questions. They dont know much about programming in general, and have zero knowledge of my specialist field for example. If they see a question that superficialy resembles or shares certain keywords with another one they will close it as being answered already (pretty much acting like particularly dumb bots) even if it has nothing to do with the existing question, or if the existing question is massively out of date and irrelevant because of updates to the software in question.

softwaredoug 7y ago

Depressing, hopefully it gets remedied. Yet another reason to share your knowledge on a blog you control and not give your invaluable content over to someone else’s business. Do these kids of communities all become just crowdsourced content farms in the end?

ghevshoo 7y ago
The problem with personal blogs is that they are likely to get labeled as a “personal” site and blocked by some stupid corporate filter.
- paulryanrogers 7y ago
  How common is this? At the smaller companies I've worked for the only filtering was of the big, distracting sites like Facebook.
  - mrkstu 7y ago
    I run our corporate proxy and security made the call to block ‘personal’ sites since it was basically the Wild West of content...
  - alxlaz 7y ago
    At one of the large companies I've worked before, the corporate filter barred access to https://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html https://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html because it was a hacking website. Which it cleverly determined, you've guessed it, by checking the URL and seeing it had "hack" in there. Everything with "hack" in the URL was banned. Pretty sure all those JavaScript ninja hackers they'd hired were a little baffled that they hire hackers but don't let them view nasty hacker pages...
    - zrobotics 7y ago
      I also take it that this company didn't have any offices in essex?

japhyr 7y ago

I don't quite get this. I'm not logged into SO at the moment. I went to the home page, and the first thing I see is "For developers" and "For businesses". I clicked "For developers", and under "Public Q&A" There's a big button "Browse questions". I click that button, and I'm on a page that looks exactly like SO always looks: questions, answers, and a big blue "Ask Question" button. To ask a question you have to log in, but that's standard practice. Am I missing something?

fabian2k 7y ago
That button was "Create an account" when this post was originally written.
Kiro 7y ago
They must have changed it. "Browse questions" was not there before and said "Create account" instead (see other answers for screenshots).
snazz 7y ago
The answer with a score of -49 on the linked thread is a response from SE staff telling us that they’ve made the change to address the immediate concern.

AviationAtom 7y ago

Sounds like an argument for a decentralized knowledgebase, similar to how P2P social networking services work (ala Matrix?)

billfruit 7y ago
It was already there, the usenet newsgroups.

kull 7y ago

Based on my own experience, the way I find answered on SO is by searching on Google. Maybe they just see all the traffic coming to them from the search engines, nobody, unless already logged in, really go to SO.com and type a question. Maybe not logged in users on the homepage are usually people trying to buy a software for their team or more business, finance people, stockholders?

biesnecker 7y ago
Same. I had to go into incognito mode and specifically navigate to the page to see what the fuss was about. I don't think I'd ever seen the SO homepage before that.
- bscphil 7y ago
  I'll add another same here. I still can't figure out exactly what the fuss is about, after reading the linked question and many of the comments here. Is it that the SO home page doesn't offer any way to search questions, instead giving you links to either sign in or purchase one of their products? If so, I really don't get the problem. Has anyone without a SO account ever gone to their home page to try to look up an issue? Surely it's overwhelmingly more common to just search for an issue directly in a search engine and check the SO links in the results if they turn out to be relevant. And right now, visiting https://stackoverflow.com/ https://stackoverflow.com/ in a private browsing window, I still see a search bar right at the top. I really have no idea what anyone could have a problem with here.
- manigandham 7y ago
  You've probably been there before because it was just the questions browsing page.
matwood 7y ago
TIL SO has a home page. Joking aside, I have only ever visited SO through a search engine.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

wombatpm 7y ago

There is a big search box at the top of the page. Type in what is foo? and see answers.

adventured 7y ago

Every profit-driven knowledge service that has ever existed has lost this battle in time. About.com, Answers.com, Quora, Genius, and so on. You can serve one pursuit as the primary - knowledge or profit - but not both. They're inherently in conflict. Given enough time, the profit pursuit as a primary driver will always destroy a knowledge service. It leads to decisions that are not solely about being the best knowledge service possible (whether that's commercial abuse through ads, features that exist solely for commercial exploit, dark patterns, or forced volume content aka spam). The only alternative that is viable to maintain a very high quality service over time is to ensure that being true to the pursuit and presentation of knowledge is the highest goal of the service (not making money). That requires aggressive commercial minimalism, operating very thin, never taking venture capital, and or a non-profit route. Anything else results in corruption that inevitably leads to a decay in quality over time. Stack Exchange has made it longer than most with only a few for-profit cavities to show for it. I applaud them for that, it has been a tremendous service. Their venture backers will want a big fat return eventually however, and the clock is ticking. I'd expect their behavior to get worse in the coming years.

rambojazz 7y ago
> never taking venture capital, and or a non-profit route What else remains outside "company or non-profit"?
bigfailwhale 7y ago
Or maybe they actually sell things that are useful to companies that allows them to invest in making the public website more valuable? But because they always put the community first, they have until this recent change been hesitant to even mention anything that they sell for fear that users would revolt. Of all the services I have used, SO has been consistently the best at being user and community centric. Without SO, I am pretty sure I would spend 5x longer to get any useful coding done, that is how much value SO has given me and I suspect the same is true for millions of other developers. By the way, Quora and Genius are both super useful. I really do not understand what you mean by "lost the battle".

snazz 7y ago

Given the fact that Stack Exchange has been community vs. company for years now, and all SE answers are Creative Commons licensed, I wonder how hard it would be to create a clone, import all the old questions and answers, allow the existing (community, not SE staff) moderators to moderate, and create accounts for everyone who had one on SE. Appearing as high in Google search seems impossible, but if the community got behind it this could fix the SE problems once and for all.

luckylion 7y ago
> Appearing as high in Google search seems impossible, but if the community got behind it this could fix the SE problems once and for all. There would also be very little traffic, because "the community" are generally the people answering questions and explaining things, they aren't asking questions. Without the people needing help finding the site (Google rankings), nothing happens.
eitland 7y ago
I think it would be wise to leave a good chunk of the mods behind. It has been an idea for me for a while to create a site where - questions are answered - and useful answers rewarded. Note there is no "good" in front of questions, and answers are rated by their usefullness, primarily to the person asking the question and secondary to everyone else, not by how well they conform to a site script. In particular, if someone wants to ask what JavaScript framework should I choose in 2020 and someone finds it worth answering and the asker of the question likes the answer, then: Fine! Duplicate questions? Fine! Answering by pointing to a previous question? Fine! Answering again without mentioning the previous question? Fine! It should be a site for people wanting to ask or answer questions, not a site for people who want to be mods. Now, since that would be the purpose of the site and not something abstract like: make a repository of everything we know, all these questions and answers will be fine. There should also be some inflation or maybe even better "karma tax" so both accounts and questions lose something like 10% (or a dynamically calculated percent) of their value each year, so we aren’t stuck with "Top JavaScript libraries for 2019" on top of the lists forever. Another thing I would consider is making it harder to create accounts as soon as possible.

jasode 7y ago

First, it looks like the StackOverflow homepage was changed to not require a sign-in. The heavily downvoted (about -50) answer[0] by Cesar M at the bottom of the page also shows the screenshot of the change. Second, I'm guessing that revenue from job postings (Careers section) and banner ads did not bring enough money. From what I remember reading, I think SO also had high hopes of the other StackExchange specialty sites using the same Q&A engine would be more successful (i.e. more banner ads, more money, etc) but it turns out they were only a modest impact on revenue. (E.g. MathOverflow is an interesting community with Fields Medal mathematics PhDs but it probably doesn't bring much revenue.) Therefore, this leaves the "enterprise sales" revenue idea of licensing the Q&A engine to private teams. (Hey, Slack just had their IPO and some companies pay for Gitlab and Github -- so let's push for selling SO Q&A for enterprises.) This monetization pressure leads to using the SO landing page as a giant billboard for their enterprise product. (I'm not making a personal complaint but just observing that they seem to be in a difficult monetization dilemma and their actions to improve their financial situation just irritates the users.) IMO, I'm skeptical that internal Q&A platforms would actually be useful for companies and I made a previous comment explaining why.[1] [0] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/386566 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/386566 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14804834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14804834

ryanmarsh 7y ago
I’ve had a few clients running SO enterprise. I too questioned it’s usefulness until I had some company/environment specific questions and immediately got answers. I think everyone needs something like this.
- simpss 7y ago
  seemed like a good trial idea until I got onto the pricing page... to get SSO, we'd have to start out with the 11$/user/month plan, in my current company(~1000 users) that would mean roughly 132 000$ a year making it a pretty tough sell.
  - msaharia 7y ago

ken 7y ago

"I will start off by saying that I'm a bit of an oddball. I browse exclusively in private browsing mode." I don't think this is odd at all. I do most browsing in private mode, and I think that should be the default. Letting every random link I click get added to my URL history is just distraction bait later. Password managers and autofill make it easy to log in when I need to. When I'll need to come back to a page later, it's easy to bookmark. Persisting cookies and recording every URL clicked is one of those ideas that was neat 10 years ago, but on the modern web it causes more problems than it solves.

skybrian 7y ago
I think the point is that most people don't do this. (Though it may be common among the sort of people who post on Hacker News.)
- ken 7y ago
  And my point is that it's a better way, so no apology should be needed. It's true most people just go with the defaults, which is why I said it ought to be the default. The "better but oddball" way today has a way of becoming the "default and therefore common" way tomorrow. It'd only take one person at Apple/Google/Microsoft to change this and every website would update their landing page within the week. Anyway, what's the overlap between HN and SO? This used to be exactly the sort of thing where replies would say something like "Most non-technical people don't do this" (or some self-deprecating or pejorative synonym for that), except SO is clearly for highly technical people so we're having to try to slice that pie even thinner to keep it from collapsing into a tautology.
  - skybrian 7y ago
    I think it's mostly a matter of good-enough UI. I got in the habit of opening incognito windows, but I'm not going to teach my relatives to do this.
fortran77 7y ago
_Most_ people in the real world don't. You do realize this, don't you?

evncr 7y ago

In all my years, this is literally the first time I see the Stack Overflow home page. Why would I ever want to go there? All the information is in the pages with questions and answers.

nemanjaboric 7y ago
I used to go to stackoverflow.com to check for the new questions and write answers.

known 7y ago

This is like Google not allowing free use of its search

GordonS 7y ago

I visit StackOverflow on a daily basis so I haven't seen this - I just tried in incognito mode, and wow, this wasn't an exaggeration! I've always felt like the owners of SO have had good intentions, and for the most part felt like I trusted them. But there are now some worrying signs - first they allowed obtrusive ads onto SO, and now this looks like a PI data-grab. Clamouring for PI is always worrying, because it means that PI has value to them - but why?

chii 7y ago
because the questions and answers have not made them enough money. Engagement on the platform is declining due to strict editors and lazy question askers. and with a majority developer audience, the ad blockers are stopping advertising revenue. this is when a site start compromising its stated morals. not out of greed, but out of necessity.
- GordonS 7y ago
  But what of Jobs? Their cheapest package (which allows max 1 job ad at any time) is around $7,500/year. They have 5572 jobs advertised right now, so I guess it's pulling in 30-41M a year.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  They can solve the adblocker problem by serving developer-relevant ads directly from their domain instead of third-party cancer. Read The Docs do this and I’ve never ever minded their ads. It also helps that the ads RTD serve are for trustworthy products (that I already had good experiences with) so it helps me in trusting them when they advertise something I don’t yet know about.

sklivvz1971 7y ago

"We <3 people who code" ...so we'll remove a useful home page and replace it with a marketing junk page which confuses everyone.

baud147258 7y ago
> We less that 3 people who code No wonder there's no progress on moderation tools and the new ask question page has just been rolled out /s

tylermauthe 7y ago

Running a business is hard. It takes cash. As others have said (and better) it is likely that they're doing this in the hopes of raising cash. Not because they are jerks, but because they need to. So they can eat. I worry this tactic may kill the golden goose eventually, though! Newcomers may be daunted by this experience, but I'm sure they thought of that and have tested it. Easy enough to pay some college kids for an afternoon. I suspect that SO is enough of a (hacker) "household name" that newcomers will already know the legends with no help from any marketing team. As others have said, primary access is by way of search engine results. It would be tricky to do it well and proper, but perhaps they could introduce monetary rewards for question. Take a cut of transactions, pass on cash to recipients. Could obfuscate the % of the cut by using tokens or similar. I've definitely received answers so good I'd have paid for them! I've also had questions that were difficult enough to warrant attaching a real monetary bounty. Perhaps another angle would be something like CodeMentor. A system where you could pay someone to mentor you, but buying from a user profile backed by the credibility of answering questions on the subject at hand.

kadira 7y ago

Should have moved all those crap to a new domain. business.so ... maybe

rev12 7y ago

Favorite quotes from the answers: > You're alienating the product that makes you big. But that's okay, all companies do that eventually, giving rise to the competition that appeals to the alienated user base. Tschallacka is right, it seems the be part of the normal lifecycle of most online sites/apps. Perhaps SO's expiration date is near, for those users who made it popular enough to be "ruined" by the devs.

larkeith 7y ago
It seems you could make a law out of this - something like, "The amount a site values its community is inversely proportional to the community's size." Anywho, seems it's time to look at federating Q&A.
- luckylion 7y ago
  Or maybe rather "to the accumulated value the community has created"? I don't even think the community at SO is that large, or has grown that much recently. At some point, the users are committed having sunken so much time and effort into making the site great, and the company knows it and wants to squeeze more money out of the user contributions. I wouldn't be that surprised if they introduced a "pro user, only $7,99 per month" package in 2020 that gives some small perks ("your questions cannot be downvoted", "add a 100 points reward to three questions per month", "animated avatar", "special highlighting of your very important questions").
jordanpg 7y ago
As with most American enterprises, they must continue to grow -- indefinitely. They cannot be content to exist statically, even with whatever profit margins they currently have (if any). I'm no economist, but this precept is obvious nonsense in the sense that nothing can grow indefinitely. And so things are subsumed by other things which therefore grow, or they morph into things that can continue to grow indefinitely. SO is morphing into some other thing -- a quasi social/hiring/Q&A/team thing. Something, no doubt, that they can more easily monetize.
- 7y ago

nurettin 7y ago

Not sure where SO would have been without google obviously giving it a leg up for all these years. I literally cannot for the life of me find another search engine that brings me to the correct question no matter how vague my search terms are.

toddh 7y ago
Exploiting Google's SEO was the plan from the very beginning. They just did an excellent job of it.

eaurouge 7y ago

The response here is over the top. SO have been building Teams for some three years now. I know because I signed my company up for the beta, but we weren’t in a position to try it when it became available. The value prop should be obvious. It would archive and surface institutional knowledge. Many companies are currently using Slack for this, but then your search terms have to be precise to reveal what you’re looking for. And if you’re on the free plan, your data will eventually get deleted. Obviously this doesn’t affect the free product.

shagie 7y ago
How does that value proposition for an organization of 100 compare to Confluence? Comparing it to slack, I believe, is a apples to oranges. Slack isn't a knowledge management system and was never meant to be.
- eaurouge 7y ago
  I haven’t used Confluence but I imagine one advantage SO Teams would have is familiarity. Many developers/engineers already know about its benefits and how it works. Yes, apples and oranges with Slack. But if you’ve ever found yourself searching Slack for some piece of knowledge from a colleague then you’ve used it for that off label use case.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  All else being equal, I’d take Stack Overflow over Confluence for 2 reasons: speed and Markdown support.

losthobbies 7y ago

They need to do more with the World building section. It’s fun and educational

Havoc 7y ago

Sounds like quora implosion v2

malinens 7y ago

Lately I have seen many SO clones on google which show crawled SO content or translated copies. Maybe google does not care ir actively try to sink SO?