7 ms·

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 t

by 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
    I would love to have something like this for a research group. But that is too steep a pricing!
    - nitrogen 7y ago
      At that scale it's likely you can negotiate a custom contract.
      - msaharia 7y ago
        At my scale (<10 people), I can't. Are there any alternatives, open or closed source?
        johannes1234321 7y ago
        Even at that scale you probably could ask - typically those companies value direct contact over "anonymous" online sales as they hope for longer term upselling opportunities once they have a name and phone number and give discount.
        KabaKun 7y ago
        For 10 people you probably don't need the middle level, only the low one, which is $5/seat/month. There's also non-profit and educational pricing if you're associated with one of those. It's 50 cents/seat/month for the low level or $1.10/user/month for the middle one. They mentioned it on MSO. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/367590 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/367590
  - shagie 7y ago
    This is where other solutions such as the Q&A plugin for Confluance have their place. The Q&A plugin for 1k users is $1000/year (on top of the $24k/year for the 1k users)... but that's a small fraction of the price for the enterprise cost. ... And lacking the integration with other systems, the enterprise version of SO (and for that matter, teams) really lacks a good price / integration / use pitch.
marktangotango 7y ago
They could probably increase pricing on their jobs product, whatever they’re charging. I think it’s the best out there. I found the way they list remote positions and sometimes salary range to be highly effective in finding a job.
Vinnl 7y ago
Having worked at a large company before that had their own instance of Confluence Questions (i.e. Atlassian's SO clone): it was incredibly useful. As a new employee, it allowed me to relatively quickly find the relevant people, or even to come across answers by them to questions people kept running into over and over again. As I became responsible for an internal library used company-wide, I pushed for the Q&A site to be our primary means of communication, and would always refer to it after answering questions from people contacting me directly. I saw the same pattern repeat itself for many new hires. Otherwise I think your observations are spot on.
- caf 7y ago
  Yeah my experience is that large places that use things like Yammer it ends up getting used as basically a Q&A site.
  - smitty1e 7y ago
    Yammer is more like a private Facebook. StackOverflow is a technical trove. Distinctly different goals.
    - caf 7y ago
      Right, I understand that, but my point is that how it actually gets used is in largely a private-stackoverflow-substitute capacity, even though that's not really its intended use case. That's where the 'desire lines' go.
- benbristow 7y ago
  Perhaps for a large company with multiple offices etc, sure. For a smaller company though, other than as a search tool (previously asked questions) I don't see what advantage it has over just using Slack/Teams etc. in a relevant channel to your question.
  - edanm 7y ago
    I mean, I assume that they don't actually care about small companies, they don't have much money anyways. In these scenarios, they tend to act as a "loss-leader" for marketing purposes, mostly.
klenwell 7y ago
> I'm guessing that revenue from job postings (Careers section) and banner ads did not bring enough money. I've used their jobs platform on both sides (as a developer looking for work and as a hiring manager) and, regarding job postings at least, I suspect you're right. I've had very limited success with it. And yet it's my favorite platform for hiring or job-searching as a developer. I like it much more than Indeed which, to my chagrin, has proven more effective. It's free for people looking for jobs and IIRC around $500 - $1500/mo for companies looking to post a listing or two. It still baffles me that it does not have more uptake. I spoke with a room full of about 80 new developers at a code academy recently and asked how many of them used it. There weren't more than 2 or 3 hands. I suggested to our Sales rep that the hostile reception a lot of first-time question-askers encounter probably isn't doing them any favors. (SO has introduced new features to address this problem.) Their Marketing team also footgunned themselves, at least as far as our company was concerned. When it came time to extend our first contract, our Sales rep asked if I'd like some t-shirts for our team. I said sure. He said send me your sizes. So I polled my team of 12 and sent him the sizes. He came back and told me that a Marketing Director or someone said there was a new limit of 4. I said, "Hey, you asked me and I got a team full of devs looking forward to a t-shirt. Can you send me one for each?" He said he'd check but came back and said the person calling the shots was firm. They sent the 4 t-shirts. I delayed renewing our subscription 3 or 4 months as a result. We gave them another shot in the future at one of the lower levels. But those shirts would have paid for themselves the moment they sent them. I still don't know what the Marketing side was thinking. It ended up making me more attentive about paying for the platform. If they had sent the t-shirts, I probably would have just let the subscription ride and continued paying it even if we didn't have an active listing up. Instead, I only renewed when we needed to fill a new position. I'd say it taught me a valuable Sales or Marketing lesson, but isn't this common sense? Alas, the platform itself continued to perform so weakly in supplying candidates to our postings that I have discontinued using it all together, even though I still recommend young developers sign up and use when looking for jobs. I think SO deserves to succeed so hopefully the private Q&A will boost revenues.
- asark 7y ago
  > I spoke with a room full of about 80 new developers at a code academy recently and asked how many of them used it. There weren't more than 2 or 3 hands. I've been a developer for 10+ years and won't use it. I tried it on a whim a couple years ago and my GitHub wasn't cool enough for them so they told me "thanks but no thanks" so I've never looked again, and probably never will (my Github remains uncool, with no sign of that ever changing). I bounced off SO itself for similar reasons, and my lack of participation there probably contributed to their rejecting me. Sign up, find question, have useful comment to make (no good for a full answer, but great clarifying comment on another) get told "sorry you can only post questions and full answers and nothing else until you've spent tons of time giving us free content" and was like "LOL OK [logout]".
trickstra 7y ago
> revenue from job postings (Careers section) and banner ads did not bring enough money Actually, as per 2018 We Are Developers conference, Joel mentioned the Careers section (Talent) was making them the most money: https://invidio.us/watch?v=oUzUo8Jre8s https://invidio.us/watch?v=oUzUo8Jre8s @ 4m40s
- vidarh 7y ago
  But isn't that the point? 'The most' doesn't mean 'enough'.
KabaKun 7y ago
I think it's possible that they feel like Teams and Enterprise are really great (I use Teams at work and really like it) but that it's not really well-known. When I talk to other people, they're not aware of them but like the idea. If you have a product people really like but it doesn't seem like people are aware of it and want to encourage more adoption, you go looking for places to advertise... but the people most likely to want a internal version of SO are the people using SO. That means the obvious place to advertise is on Stack Overflow. I think it's a bit overboard to make it the focus of the home page rather than a secondary focus. But the homepage can change. It's already changed once. Lots of companies make the centerpiece of their homepage their big new product. When Teams is better-known, it probably won't need to be so obviously marketed. I think what makes this so jarring is that the first use of the homepage is for a specific reason rather than to talk about SO's primary purpose. If the page talked about how to ask/answer (something like a short version of the tour page) before it mentioned the other things (Teams, Jobs, etc) would that have been okay? I don't generally find the homepage to be a stellar introduction to SO.
- bigfailwhale 7y ago
  Agreed, the website change is dumb. They could make users aware of the products without the obnoxious front page advertising takeover.
  - KabaKun 7y ago
    I actually mean the questions list (the pre-change view). As-is, the list of active questions is full of... well, junk. It'd be better to have the home page include some curated questions not luck-of-the draw stuff to show off the value of the site.
avip 7y ago
What's the point in downvoting the answer that outlines the reasoning (with which no one is forced to agree) behind the changes? It seems utterly childish. Does the SO "community" cannot grasp the fact the site needs to sustain itself somehow?
- jstarfish 7y ago
  This is the case on every single site that enables content placement by user sentiment. Downvotes are the digital tantrum.
- _kst_ 7y ago
  By convention on Stack Overflow and other Stack Exchange sites, voting works differently on the meta.* sites. On the main sites, downvoting means "this is a bad question or answer" or "this answer is incorrect". On the meta sites, downvoting means "I disagree with this". https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/270/167210 https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/270/167210
manigandham 7y ago
The company doesn't need to be that big. They claimed before that they were leaving money on the table with ads and recently just had another big discussion thread after running network ads. They can easily run at half the size and just be a nice business, but I guess that's not acceptable anymore.
- noname120 7y ago
  When the company has early stage investors (and Stack Overflow does[1]), just being a nice business isn't enough. Investors want money back from their risky investment. [1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/stack-overflow#section-overview https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/stack-overflow#secti...
  - manigandham 7y ago
    Yea I didn't realize they raised $68M. That's a lot to recover and puts them in a bad position.
    - shagie 7y ago
      Articles on the $40M series D: https://techcrunch.com/2015/01/20/stack-exchange-raises-40m-led-by-a16z-to-boost-its-programmer-forums/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/01/20/stack-exchange-raises-40m-... and http://fortune.com/2015/01/20/stack-exchange-40-million/ http://fortune.com/2015/01/20/stack-exchange-40-million/ From the Fortune article: > Today, the company announces a new $40 million Series D round of funding. Andreessen Horowitz led the round and existing investors Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital, Bezos Expeditions, and Index Ventures participated. Stack Overflow, founded in 2008, has raised a total of $70 million in venture funding. The company did not disclose its valuation or revenue, but said it is not profitable. > Currently, Stack Exchange earns a third of its revenue from an advertising product that allows companies like Microsoft market its products to developers. With this new funding, Stack Exchange will invest more heavily in its Careers products, which include job listings and a candidate search database. Clients pay anywhere from $495 for a 30-day job posting to thousands of dollars for annual job postings. > ... > The 200-person company will also use the capital to release its site in Japanese, Russian, and Spanish and invest in expanding its Q&A community. Currently, the majority of its users are located in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France.

by jasode 7y ago

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
  I would love to have something like this for a research group. But that is too steep a pricing!
  - nitrogen 7y ago
    At that scale it's likely you can negotiate a custom contract.
    - msaharia 7y ago
      At my scale (<10 people), I can't. Are there any alternatives, open or closed source?
      - johannes1234321 7y ago
        Even at that scale you probably could ask - typically those companies value direct contact over "anonymous" online sales as they hope for longer term upselling opportunities once they have a name and phone number and give discount.
      - KabaKun 7y ago
        For 10 people you probably don't need the middle level, only the low one, which is $5/seat/month. There's also non-profit and educational pricing if you're associated with one of those. It's 50 cents/seat/month for the low level or $1.10/user/month for the middle one. They mentioned it on MSO. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/367590 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/367590
- shagie 7y ago
  This is where other solutions such as the Q&A plugin for Confluance have their place. The Q&A plugin for 1k users is $1000/year (on top of the $24k/year for the 1k users)... but that's a small fraction of the price for the enterprise cost. ... And lacking the integration with other systems, the enterprise version of SO (and for that matter, teams) really lacks a good price / integration / use pitch.

marktangotango 7y ago

They could probably increase pricing on their jobs product, whatever they’re charging. I think it’s the best out there. I found the way they list remote positions and sometimes salary range to be highly effective in finding a job.

Vinnl 7y ago

Having worked at a large company before that had their own instance of Confluence Questions (i.e. Atlassian's SO clone): it was incredibly useful. As a new employee, it allowed me to relatively quickly find the relevant people, or even to come across answers by them to questions people kept running into over and over again. As I became responsible for an internal library used company-wide, I pushed for the Q&A site to be our primary means of communication, and would always refer to it after answering questions from people contacting me directly. I saw the same pattern repeat itself for many new hires. Otherwise I think your observations are spot on.

caf 7y ago
Yeah my experience is that large places that use things like Yammer it ends up getting used as basically a Q&A site.
- smitty1e 7y ago
  Yammer is more like a private Facebook. StackOverflow is a technical trove. Distinctly different goals.
  - caf 7y ago
    Right, I understand that, but my point is that how it actually gets used is in largely a private-stackoverflow-substitute capacity, even though that's not really its intended use case. That's where the 'desire lines' go.
benbristow 7y ago
Perhaps for a large company with multiple offices etc, sure. For a smaller company though, other than as a search tool (previously asked questions) I don't see what advantage it has over just using Slack/Teams etc. in a relevant channel to your question.
- edanm 7y ago
  I mean, I assume that they don't actually care about small companies, they don't have much money anyways. In these scenarios, they tend to act as a "loss-leader" for marketing purposes, mostly.

klenwell 7y ago

> I'm guessing that revenue from job postings (Careers section) and banner ads did not bring enough money. I've used their jobs platform on both sides (as a developer looking for work and as a hiring manager) and, regarding job postings at least, I suspect you're right. I've had very limited success with it. And yet it's my favorite platform for hiring or job-searching as a developer. I like it much more than Indeed which, to my chagrin, has proven more effective. It's free for people looking for jobs and IIRC around $500 - $1500/mo for companies looking to post a listing or two. It still baffles me that it does not have more uptake. I spoke with a room full of about 80 new developers at a code academy recently and asked how many of them used it. There weren't more than 2 or 3 hands. I suggested to our Sales rep that the hostile reception a lot of first-time question-askers encounter probably isn't doing them any favors. (SO has introduced new features to address this problem.) Their Marketing team also footgunned themselves, at least as far as our company was concerned. When it came time to extend our first contract, our Sales rep asked if I'd like some t-shirts for our team. I said sure. He said send me your sizes. So I polled my team of 12 and sent him the sizes. He came back and told me that a Marketing Director or someone said there was a new limit of 4. I said, "Hey, you asked me and I got a team full of devs looking forward to a t-shirt. Can you send me one for each?" He said he'd check but came back and said the person calling the shots was firm. They sent the 4 t-shirts. I delayed renewing our subscription 3 or 4 months as a result. We gave them another shot in the future at one of the lower levels. But those shirts would have paid for themselves the moment they sent them. I still don't know what the Marketing side was thinking. It ended up making me more attentive about paying for the platform. If they had sent the t-shirts, I probably would have just let the subscription ride and continued paying it even if we didn't have an active listing up. Instead, I only renewed when we needed to fill a new position. I'd say it taught me a valuable Sales or Marketing lesson, but isn't this common sense? Alas, the platform itself continued to perform so weakly in supplying candidates to our postings that I have discontinued using it all together, even though I still recommend young developers sign up and use when looking for jobs. I think SO deserves to succeed so hopefully the private Q&A will boost revenues.

asark 7y ago
> I spoke with a room full of about 80 new developers at a code academy recently and asked how many of them used it. There weren't more than 2 or 3 hands. I've been a developer for 10+ years and won't use it. I tried it on a whim a couple years ago and my GitHub wasn't cool enough for them so they told me "thanks but no thanks" so I've never looked again, and probably never will (my Github remains uncool, with no sign of that ever changing). I bounced off SO itself for similar reasons, and my lack of participation there probably contributed to their rejecting me. Sign up, find question, have useful comment to make (no good for a full answer, but great clarifying comment on another) get told "sorry you can only post questions and full answers and nothing else until you've spent tons of time giving us free content" and was like "LOL OK [logout]".

trickstra 7y ago

> revenue from job postings (Careers section) and banner ads did not bring enough money Actually, as per 2018 We Are Developers conference, Joel mentioned the Careers section (Talent) was making them the most money: https://invidio.us/watch?v=oUzUo8Jre8s https://invidio.us/watch?v=oUzUo8Jre8s @ 4m40s

vidarh 7y ago
But isn't that the point? 'The most' doesn't mean 'enough'.

KabaKun 7y ago

I think it's possible that they feel like Teams and Enterprise are really great (I use Teams at work and really like it) but that it's not really well-known. When I talk to other people, they're not aware of them but like the idea. If you have a product people really like but it doesn't seem like people are aware of it and want to encourage more adoption, you go looking for places to advertise... but the people most likely to want a internal version of SO are the people using SO. That means the obvious place to advertise is on Stack Overflow. I think it's a bit overboard to make it the focus of the home page rather than a secondary focus. But the homepage can change. It's already changed once. Lots of companies make the centerpiece of their homepage their big new product. When Teams is better-known, it probably won't need to be so obviously marketed. I think what makes this so jarring is that the first use of the homepage is for a specific reason rather than to talk about SO's primary purpose. If the page talked about how to ask/answer (something like a short version of the tour page) before it mentioned the other things (Teams, Jobs, etc) would that have been okay? I don't generally find the homepage to be a stellar introduction to SO.

bigfailwhale 7y ago
Agreed, the website change is dumb. They could make users aware of the products without the obnoxious front page advertising takeover.
- KabaKun 7y ago
  I actually mean the questions list (the pre-change view). As-is, the list of active questions is full of... well, junk. It'd be better to have the home page include some curated questions not luck-of-the draw stuff to show off the value of the site.

avip 7y ago

What's the point in downvoting the answer that outlines the reasoning (with which no one is forced to agree) behind the changes? It seems utterly childish. Does the SO "community" cannot grasp the fact the site needs to sustain itself somehow?

jstarfish 7y ago
This is the case on every single site that enables content placement by user sentiment. Downvotes are the digital tantrum.
_kst_ 7y ago
By convention on Stack Overflow and other Stack Exchange sites, voting works differently on the meta.* sites. On the main sites, downvoting means "this is a bad question or answer" or "this answer is incorrect". On the meta sites, downvoting means "I disagree with this". https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/270/167210 https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/270/167210

manigandham 7y ago

The company doesn't need to be that big. They claimed before that they were leaving money on the table with ads and recently just had another big discussion thread after running network ads. They can easily run at half the size and just be a nice business, but I guess that's not acceptable anymore.

noname120 7y ago
When the company has early stage investors (and Stack Overflow does[1]), just being a nice business isn't enough. Investors want money back from their risky investment. [1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/stack-overflow#section-overview https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/stack-overflow#secti...
- manigandham 7y ago
  Yea I didn't realize they raised $68M. That's a lot to recover and puts them in a bad position.
  - shagie 7y ago
    Articles on the $40M series D: https://techcrunch.com/2015/01/20/stack-exchange-raises-40m-led-by-a16z-to-boost-its-programmer-forums/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/01/20/stack-exchange-raises-40m-... and http://fortune.com/2015/01/20/stack-exchange-40-million/ http://fortune.com/2015/01/20/stack-exchange-40-million/ From the Fortune article: > Today, the company announces a new $40 million Series D round of funding. Andreessen Horowitz led the round and existing investors Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital, Bezos Expeditions, and Index Ventures participated. Stack Overflow, founded in 2008, has raised a total of $70 million in venture funding. The company did not disclose its valuation or revenue, but said it is not profitable. > Currently, Stack Exchange earns a third of its revenue from an advertising product that allows companies like Microsoft market its products to developers. With this new funding, Stack Exchange will invest more heavily in its Careers products, which include job listings and a candidate search database. Clients pay anywhere from $495 for a 30-day job posting to thousands of dollars for annual job postings. > ... > The 200-person company will also use the capital to release its site in Japanese, Russian, and Spanish and invest in expanding its Q&A community. Currently, the majority of its users are located in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France.