6 ms·

I find parallels between Stack Overflow and Mozilla. Both started with fairly focused products that were best in class. The user base grew and the network eff

by eric_b 5y ago

I find parallels between Stack Overflow and Mozilla. Both started with fairly focused products that were best in class. The user base grew and the network effect multiplied. Both were started and largely staffed by engineers. Then both companies started focusing on "bigger", more ambiguous goals. Their about pages are riddled with the latest marketing-speak: Authentically empowering dignity, community, and inclusivity etc etc. Now their products are withering. Dying a slow death. I see these things as correlated. Many on HN will disagree. The honeyed words of social justice are more important than great, well executed products, apparently. It was a good run Stack Overflow.

rossdavidh 5y ago
While I agree that it is annoying whenever one reads something put out by the actual SO people, I notice that (thus far) if I simply ignore that and go there to look up the answers to questions (and very occasionally ask or answer them), it still works fine. As long as the new owner doesn't make it "pay to see", I can probably ignore them. There is, of course, no guarantee in this. But, while I find what I hear about Mozilla's internal politics obnoxious, I am also able to just use Firefox and ignore all that, thus far. Plenty of examples of a purchase being the beginning of the end, but it's not inevitable. Microsoft owns Github. Google owns Youtube. So far, both are still functional, if compared to other real-world products rather than some theoretical ideal. Now, you could put hundreds of counterexamples on the other side of that, but at least it is possible for the buyer not to completely screw things up.
- eric_b 5y ago
  I will admit the Prosus people seem more forward-looking (based on some wiki reading) than your usual run-of-the-mill PE acquirer. So perhaps they can steer the ship competently.
- pavel_lishin 5y ago
  > As long as the new owner doesn't make it "pay to see", I can probably ignore them. There was a very similar site about a decade ago, that would absolutely dominate in the Google search results - but of course, the answers were behind a paywall. Today, I don't even remember what their domain was called.
  - pestaa 5y ago
    Experts Exchange
  - sundarurfriend 5y ago
    Unrelated, but does anyone know of a site specializing in procedures for changing one's sex, as done by an advanced professional (an expert, even)?
  - yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
    I believe they were called E̶x̶p̶e̶r̶t̶ ̶S̶e̶x̶c̶h̶a̶n̶g̶e̶ Experts Exchange.
  - lupire 5y ago
    Actually the answers were obfuscated by html/css. Dev tools could expose the answers.
  - bbarnett 5y ago
    The parallel is more striking than your post suggests. Experts Exchange had no paywall for years. Endless people built the site up, provided help, then suddenly? All their posts, content, and more were one day monetized, and locked away. Same thing happened with IMDB too, at the start. It was all, all of it, user contributed. Then one day, they locked it all up. Of course, IMDB has grown a lot since then, and allows you to download the database if you wish regardless... But point is, this sort of thing happens all the time...
- Macha 5y ago
  Was github worse, prior to the microsoft purchase? It's still relatively recent and only a small chapter in the history of the company. I'm not sure you can say at this stage that it's better than if Github had remained independent.
  - rossdavidh 5y ago
    Sure, no claim that it's better, just that it's not (yet?) screwed up so as to be markedly worse.
TchoBeer 5y ago
Since when is stack overflow dying?
- croes 5y ago
  Now?
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    How so? As far as I know, it's _the_ de-facto dumping ground for tech questions and answers. The only alternatives around are Quora and Reddit, the latter of which is full of nonsense.
    - TchoBeer 5y ago
      The former of which as well
- mitchdoogle 5y ago
  It's not. This person doesn't like someone's political beliefs, so they're trying to denigrate them on a seemingly "objective" basis, which doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
- wyldfire 5y ago
  Stack Overflow suffers from a mismatch in expectations. The community is seen from the outside as "a place to find answers" so many people go there to ask questions. But in order for your question to be eligible to be answered (and not closed/on hold) it must be: (1) objectively answerable (no opinions!), (2) completely specified (reproducible problems). #1: lots of people want answers to subjective issues. "Should I do it like this or like that?" "What's the best way to ..." #2: many of the people who ask the questions just don't know the right way to ask their questions in order to get answers. Also, taking all the steps to make something reproducible can often make the problem apparent, eliminating the need to post the question. SO has these rules so that they can be a canonical place for people to be pointed by people who go to search engines looking for answers. But I think it's a big turnoff that they close so many. They might have been better served if they had created roles to prune questions that they don't want indexed or shuffle them to a sister site. Pruning them without telling the user they're "closed" or "on hold" would be a much more friendly experience.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
wayoutthere 5y ago
It has nothing to do with social justice; Stack Overflow and Mozilla had a user base that scaled with network effects, but both in markets with low switching costs. They’re constantly vulnerable unless they can come up with products that are harder to dislodge. Thus the mission statements that are vague because they’re trying to find a way out of the corner they’ve painted themselves in.
jsterSC 5y ago
>The honeyed words of social justice are more important than great, well executed products, apparently. I like how all the other comments are pointing out that the forces behind an acquisition are never good for 'focused products' and then there's this comment that shows us the truth, it's those damn kids and their social justice that ruins the products.
- eric_b 5y ago
  Well, since you're being deliberately obtuse - I'll expound. My point is that these companies are moving focus away from the products that got them to where they are, to a set of vague handwavy concepts that are completely unquantifiable. And, in my experience anyways, this usually comes at a cost to the existing products.
  - phillipcarter 5y ago
    Corporate branding efforts to be more "woke" are cheap. It doesn't cost Raytheon much to paint their logo as a rainbow and do an "employee story" about how they have also have LGBTQ employees (building missiles). But don't get under the impression that Raytheon still isn't focused on building missiles. It's just an easy corporate branding win for most of them, so they just do it. I don't think social justice messages on a website or social media are necessarily a sign of losing focus. It's just some branding stuff. If the company is "losing focus" is likely due to many more factors.
    - vp8989 5y ago
      Hah, bingo. I suspect all the people who left Basecamp will soon realize this when they finish their paid sabbaticals and move on to other companies.
polynomial 5y ago
TBF, the notion of community at least started off as more than marketing speak or social justice trend chasing. Arguably, it is a substantive basis of our inter-networked connectedness, even if it was later assimilated by the same marketing machinery that also spits outs empty (but apparently effective) buzzwords.
- polynomial 5y ago
  will somebody smarter than me please explain why this was downvoted? tia
selfhoster11 5y ago
Since when is Stack Overflow dying, or focused on social justice? That's not my experience at all. The purpose of the site (as well as the many, many sister sites) is to succinctly ask and succinctly answer questions. It does so admirably. Occasional drama is just what happens when you become the effective Wikipedia of everything that is possible to ask about any technical topic. The actual Wikipedia is also not free of drama or political struggles in the background. But, much like Stack Overflow, it's also far from dead and continues to be a priceless resource to all of humanity.
coliveira 5y ago
One annoying reality of the business world is that to prevail there you need to drink the full BS cool aid. You have to start talking business lingo (growth, empowering, success) to even get access to the financial support to grow the business and hire others. If you're down to earth and don't stand the whole BS, your chances in that area are very slim.
zoomablemind 5y ago
> Now their products are withering. Dying a slow death. What is SO business model? Is it ads-based? Just hope it won't devolve into news-sites free-article quota with account points mixed in for some throttling. IMO, the most attractive part of SO is that low friction to contribute an answer, oftentimes seeing a relevant topic to suggest an answer in passing or when looking for answers myself. Also SO's value is tied to the intensive community moderation effort, hope this would not be discounted in any future roadmap (wonder if there's anysuch).
- lupire 5y ago
  SO sells ads to recruiters.
mixmastamyk 5y ago
Sounds like it is merely a dialect of "suit-speak" for the 2020s, aka "lip-service." While suit-speak often marks the decline of a business, it is not clear lefty-politics makes that much difference in regards to the decline.

by eric_b 5y ago

rossdavidh 5y ago

While I agree that it is annoying whenever one reads something put out by the actual SO people, I notice that (thus far) if I simply ignore that and go there to look up the answers to questions (and very occasionally ask or answer them), it still works fine. As long as the new owner doesn't make it "pay to see", I can probably ignore them. There is, of course, no guarantee in this. But, while I find what I hear about Mozilla's internal politics obnoxious, I am also able to just use Firefox and ignore all that, thus far. Plenty of examples of a purchase being the beginning of the end, but it's not inevitable. Microsoft owns Github. Google owns Youtube. So far, both are still functional, if compared to other real-world products rather than some theoretical ideal. Now, you could put hundreds of counterexamples on the other side of that, but at least it is possible for the buyer not to completely screw things up.

eric_b 5y ago
I will admit the Prosus people seem more forward-looking (based on some wiki reading) than your usual run-of-the-mill PE acquirer. So perhaps they can steer the ship competently.
pavel_lishin 5y ago
> As long as the new owner doesn't make it "pay to see", I can probably ignore them. There was a very similar site about a decade ago, that would absolutely dominate in the Google search results - but of course, the answers were behind a paywall. Today, I don't even remember what their domain was called.
- pestaa 5y ago
  Experts Exchange
- sundarurfriend 5y ago
  Unrelated, but does anyone know of a site specializing in procedures for changing one's sex, as done by an advanced professional (an expert, even)?
- yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
  I believe they were called E̶x̶p̶e̶r̶t̶ ̶S̶e̶x̶c̶h̶a̶n̶g̶e̶ Experts Exchange.
- lupire 5y ago
  Actually the answers were obfuscated by html/css. Dev tools could expose the answers.
- bbarnett 5y ago
  The parallel is more striking than your post suggests. Experts Exchange had no paywall for years. Endless people built the site up, provided help, then suddenly? All their posts, content, and more were one day monetized, and locked away. Same thing happened with IMDB too, at the start. It was all, all of it, user contributed. Then one day, they locked it all up. Of course, IMDB has grown a lot since then, and allows you to download the database if you wish regardless... But point is, this sort of thing happens all the time...
Macha 5y ago
Was github worse, prior to the microsoft purchase? It's still relatively recent and only a small chapter in the history of the company. I'm not sure you can say at this stage that it's better than if Github had remained independent.
- rossdavidh 5y ago
  Sure, no claim that it's better, just that it's not (yet?) screwed up so as to be markedly worse.

TchoBeer 5y ago

Since when is stack overflow dying?

croes 5y ago
Now?
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  How so? As far as I know, it's _the_ de-facto dumping ground for tech questions and answers. The only alternatives around are Quora and Reddit, the latter of which is full of nonsense.
  - TchoBeer 5y ago
    The former of which as well
mitchdoogle 5y ago
It's not. This person doesn't like someone's political beliefs, so they're trying to denigrate them on a seemingly "objective" basis, which doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
wyldfire 5y ago
Stack Overflow suffers from a mismatch in expectations. The community is seen from the outside as "a place to find answers" so many people go there to ask questions. But in order for your question to be eligible to be answered (and not closed/on hold) it must be: (1) objectively answerable (no opinions!), (2) completely specified (reproducible problems). #1: lots of people want answers to subjective issues. "Should I do it like this or like that?" "What's the best way to ..." #2: many of the people who ask the questions just don't know the right way to ask their questions in order to get answers. Also, taking all the steps to make something reproducible can often make the problem apparent, eliminating the need to post the question. SO has these rules so that they can be a canonical place for people to be pointed by people who go to search engines looking for answers. But I think it's a big turnoff that they close so many. They might have been better served if they had created roles to prune questions that they don't want indexed or shuffle them to a sister site. Pruning them without telling the user they're "closed" or "on hold" would be a much more friendly experience.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

wayoutthere 5y ago

It has nothing to do with social justice; Stack Overflow and Mozilla had a user base that scaled with network effects, but both in markets with low switching costs. They’re constantly vulnerable unless they can come up with products that are harder to dislodge. Thus the mission statements that are vague because they’re trying to find a way out of the corner they’ve painted themselves in.

jsterSC 5y ago

>The honeyed words of social justice are more important than great, well executed products, apparently. I like how all the other comments are pointing out that the forces behind an acquisition are never good for 'focused products' and then there's this comment that shows us the truth, it's those damn kids and their social justice that ruins the products.

eric_b 5y ago
Well, since you're being deliberately obtuse - I'll expound. My point is that these companies are moving focus away from the products that got them to where they are, to a set of vague handwavy concepts that are completely unquantifiable. And, in my experience anyways, this usually comes at a cost to the existing products.
- phillipcarter 5y ago
  Corporate branding efforts to be more "woke" are cheap. It doesn't cost Raytheon much to paint their logo as a rainbow and do an "employee story" about how they have also have LGBTQ employees (building missiles). But don't get under the impression that Raytheon still isn't focused on building missiles. It's just an easy corporate branding win for most of them, so they just do it. I don't think social justice messages on a website or social media are necessarily a sign of losing focus. It's just some branding stuff. If the company is "losing focus" is likely due to many more factors.
  - vp8989 5y ago
    Hah, bingo. I suspect all the people who left Basecamp will soon realize this when they finish their paid sabbaticals and move on to other companies.

polynomial 5y ago

TBF, the notion of community at least started off as more than marketing speak or social justice trend chasing. Arguably, it is a substantive basis of our inter-networked connectedness, even if it was later assimilated by the same marketing machinery that also spits outs empty (but apparently effective) buzzwords.

polynomial 5y ago
will somebody smarter than me please explain why this was downvoted? tia

selfhoster11 5y ago

Since when is Stack Overflow dying, or focused on social justice? That's not my experience at all. The purpose of the site (as well as the many, many sister sites) is to succinctly ask and succinctly answer questions. It does so admirably. Occasional drama is just what happens when you become the effective Wikipedia of everything that is possible to ask about any technical topic. The actual Wikipedia is also not free of drama or political struggles in the background. But, much like Stack Overflow, it's also far from dead and continues to be a priceless resource to all of humanity.

coliveira 5y ago

One annoying reality of the business world is that to prevail there you need to drink the full BS cool aid. You have to start talking business lingo (growth, empowering, success) to even get access to the financial support to grow the business and hire others. If you're down to earth and don't stand the whole BS, your chances in that area are very slim.

zoomablemind 5y ago

> Now their products are withering. Dying a slow death. What is SO business model? Is it ads-based? Just hope it won't devolve into news-sites free-article quota with account points mixed in for some throttling. IMO, the most attractive part of SO is that low friction to contribute an answer, oftentimes seeing a relevant topic to suggest an answer in passing or when looking for answers myself. Also SO's value is tied to the intensive community moderation effort, hope this would not be discounted in any future roadmap (wonder if there's anysuch).

lupire 5y ago
SO sells ads to recruiters.

mixmastamyk 5y ago

Sounds like it is merely a dialect of "suit-speak" for the 2020s, aka "lip-service." While suit-speak often marks the decline of a business, it is not clear lefty-politics makes that much difference in regards to the decline.