7 ms·

How's business at Stack Overflow?

54 points by jlericson 3y ago

AndrewKemendo 3y ago
This is a perfect case study showing how it literally doesn't matter what your business is or what kind of community you've built, or operating practices you've developed; if the company has sold itself to investors, and investors decide "we want our exit" the company will turn into whatever it has to in order to "give investors their exit" and "return capital." Lets look at an article that talks about how they got into this situation (https://jlericson.com/2021/04/27/reading_tealeaves.html https://jlericson.com/2021/04/27/reading_tealeaves.html) Relevant quotes: "We can never go back to the golden years of Stack Exchange and we probably don't want that anyway." "This might seem odd until you understand the intended audience: investors. It's been over a decade since the first round of financing. At this point, private equity has invested more than $150 million. It's about time to find an exit strategy." "Instead, Stack Overflow will position advertising as a way for companies to promote both their products and their perks for potential employees." "Stack Overflow's investors want to get back their investments plus a healthy return. Let's say each investor wants at least 20% return on their investment per year." "The VCs want a bit more than Microsoft is willing pay. So the company needs to start making it's case for a public offering. The only story that will sell is growth—ideally "hyper growth". "I’m writing today to share that I’ve made the very difficult decision to reduce our workforce by about 10%, or 58 employees." Lets sum up shall we: We created this great product that people love. We then decided that we needed to grow really quickly and so we sold the future of the company to people who only care about money. We then sold the whole company outright to new investors (Prosus which is a "tech investment" firm) because the original investors are demanding a payout because "it's been long enough" apparently that they have not gotten their payout. The new company then demanded growth, which led to over-hiring on the false bet that they would increase revenue via propaganda. That didn't work so we're breaking our agreement with 58 people that we were betting on (most likely without telling them specifically that their employment was conditional based on a hypothesis) in order to make sure investors do not get upset. Sounds great, lets keep doing this.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
  Lol they also sold to Naspers. A company which started with slave trade as far away from programming and tech as one can hope for. If you sell to random companies who have blood money, shocked Pikachu face won't help you after.
can16358p 3y ago
I'm a long time StackOverflow user. A few days ago I had some confusion about how to use a React Native library and docs were also not super-clear for me. Asked StackOverflow. Then I said "let's see what happens if I copy paste the exact same question into GPT-4", and did it. Had my answer in 30 seconds, which explained the issue very well and worked. A few hours later I got an answer on SO too telling almost exactly the same, which was right. Anectodal for sure, but ChatGPT and similar tools will keep evolving faster and will become only better. Not surprising to see decline in SO. But I believe there will be an equilibrium as LLMs will need that training data too.
- new2this 3y ago
  I've been learning to code for the past year. StackOverflow was hugely important in the beginning. I haven't used it in probably 2 months because ChatGPT does an excellent job of not only answering my questions, but also allowing me to ask follow up questions like "what does that specific line of code do?"
- david422 3y ago
  Ok, but where is ChatGPT getting that answer?
  - CameronNemo 3y ago
    I think this is a major problem with LLMs. You often want to know where the answer came from not just so that you can verify the correctness, but also so you can do your own research, learn adjacent topics, and solidify your knowledge.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  Had my answer in 30 seconds, which explained the issue very well and worked. A few hours later I got an answer on SO too telling almost exactly the same, which was right. Wow, how strange...
  - can16358p 3y ago
    If you imply the person copy pasted it from ChatGPT, it's probably not as the answer was from a very reputable user especially on that framework, and even if the essence was the same as the GPT answer, it wasn't in the same style.
fabian2k 3y ago
The integration of Teams on Stack Overflow was a really weird thing. I do buy the argument from Jon Ericson in this post that integrating the internal Q&A into the Stack Overflow page is a large benefit for developers. I don't think this works for everyone, but having too many places where information might be that are not connected is a big problem. They way they did that was really weird and in my opinion a big mistake. The account system used to be directly tied to Stack Overflow accounts. This had all kinds of problematic consequences, e.g. how to handle SO moderation for users that had a Teams account. I don't think this kind of integration can work. I do think they went too far in the other direction, and some optional integration would be useful for people that use Stack Overflow anyway.
throwme_123 3y ago
I don't use StackOverflow anymore since ChatGPT launched. It's kind of not fair because a large part of ChatGPT being able to answer code questions correctly comes from the SO corpus... but... well life's unjust.
- dgfitz 3y ago
  I still like looking at SO, not for the answer per se, but to see all the other possible solutions. Even if they're wrong, I usually learn something. Either what not to do, or a neat trick I had not seen before.
- Doctor_Fegg 3y ago
  User content on StackOverflow is licensed openly (CC-BY-SA), as it should be. So it's absolutely fair game for reuse. I have a lot of sympathy with people whose all-rights-reserved content has been repackaged by LLMs and similar, but that's not StackOverflow. SO got free contributions from its users; the company didn't write them itself.
  - CameronNemo 3y ago
    The problem isn't one of legality, but practicality. If SO becomes a ghost town, all LLMs suffer, including OpenAI's.
brianmcc 3y ago
>> Layoffs are what happens when a business unit is spending money like it's going out of style and needs to reign it in a bit. Not necessarily. There are a number of other reasons e.g. revenues and profits are great but CEO wants even more $$$, or more charitably: strategies change and business units become genuinely obsolete. I'm honestly not even trying to be snarky, btw. But one can't infer any more that layoffs means dwindling funds.
- fjeifisjf 3y ago
  [dead]
- adrianmsmith 3y ago
  Agreed - my understanding of the recent layoffs at Google etc. is that the companies were making lots of money, but did layoffs anyway. (And the stock price increased, as now they'll have fewer costs and, at least in the short term, therefore make even more profit.)
monkeynotes 3y ago
We are going to see a lot of this sort of thing. It's like the internet all over again, stuff you used all the time starts to feel old and naive in comparison to new paradigm tools. What is surprising is quite how quickly this has happened, even 2 years ago SO would have been a solid go to, only game in town.
- jonatron 3y ago
  Quoting https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/ (2008). Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. Maybe a new new site for programming questions will come along.
ffjffsfr 3y ago
biggest danger for advertising revenue is ChatGPT. I visit it much less often since GPT. ChatGPT is just so much better at answering questions. I feel like I'm 10 times more productive with GPT. No more searching 1000 duplicate stack oveflow questions to find this one answer that accidentally refers to your specific use case. Long time ago I also used to contribute to site, but this was really emotionally challenging because of so many noob questions and general toxic community. I guess SO has really bleak future both because of competition from GPT and contributor burnout.
- Mistletoe 3y ago
  Is there a future where people stop using Stack Overflow, so ChatGPT doesn't have answers to new programming issues and questions to train on, and so it is suddenly blind to generating new useful answers?
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    Absolutely. But there's no obvious mechanism to counter this.
  - CameronNemo 3y ago
    It won't be such a night and day difference. LLMs can still train on official and unofficial docs (someone also mentioned that LLMs can read source code?). But the results will be worse in the absence of the additional Q&A style content, I would think.
naiv 3y ago
"By September 2022, Stack Overflow had 1 262 paying teams generating annual recurring revenue of US$50m" so an average revenue of $40,000 per team. I did not expect this.
- jlericson 3y ago
  The key word is "average". I'm assuming the former Enterprise customers (large companies like banks who pay for many, many users) are folded into the Teams product now. In any case, a few big customers will skew the average. I'd be interested in median, but that would be a lot less impressive in the annual report.
kleinsch 3y ago
> Business isn't great if you are cutting 10% of your workforce just 2 years after being acquired > But across-the-board layoffs force managers to cut people who probably ought to be retained. There are plenty of companies that aren't in trouble doing layoffs to shed dead-weight with the excuse that everyone is doing layoffs. Similarly, profitable companies are skipping raises this year bc everyone else is skipping raises.
- rob74 3y ago
  Skipping raises, or giving raises significantly below the inflation rate, which is the same as a pay cut...
- sciurus 3y ago
  If the information in https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-scoop-48 https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-scoop-48 is correct, it wasn't an across the board layoff. > About 30% of product development was let go and these techies were the largest affected group. Of the 58 people, about 40-50 of those let go were in the formerly 150-strong product development organization, I have confirmed with current software engineers at Stack Overflow... I have to wonder if StackOverflow has given up on innovation, and is looking to maximize profits while it still can.
  - jlericson 3y ago
    I only saw this detail after I wrote the post. Here's a primary source: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dalecook_opentowork-activity-7063927414552199168-c-SI/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dalecook_opentowork-activity-...
nologic01 3y ago
If for-profit LLM's can be trained on the public content of for-profit Q&A sites without paying anything, then there won't be any public content of for-profit Q&A sites. For-profit Q&A sites will have to either: * try to restrict access (some sort of technical and/or legal barrier) * shrink and become non-profit (Wikipedia style) * fold There are echoes in this conflict from the open source database vs cloud providers and licenses. It is the type of conflict we'll probably see more and more as different business models compete in the same global digital space.
deng 3y ago
I will never understand why SO canceled 'Talent', their job board. We got by far the most good people in our team through it. If it was unprofitable, why not raise prices? I was actually surprised at how cheap 'Talent' was compared to other options. I can say without a doubt that we'd have gladly payed more (well, not "gladly", but it wouldn't have been a big issue). The UI/UX was really good, you could very efficiently track communication to hundreds of candidates and it had lots of good ideas integrated, clearly made by people who cared about this and knew a lot about how hiring software developers works. A lot of hours must have gone into this, it's a shame this is just gone now. While 'Talent' technically still exists, just having a company page there does absolutely nothing and we canceled that one immediately.
- CuriouslyC 3y ago
  Seriously. SO jobs was great as a job seeker too, great interface, high quality companies and less ghosting/bs than other boards. I'm not looking forward to my next job search now that it's gone.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  It was good. SO seems to have very bad internal decision-making capability, at least since the founders left.
- snovv_crash 3y ago
  Yeah same, for some specialized roles we looked for months and managed to snag an excellent person in just 2 weeks from SO's Talent ads. Literally the best eyeballs to put job ads in front of are the ones looking at the relevant problems. It's even nicely tagged by category, tech stack etc.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  >I will never understand why SO canceled 'Talent', their job board. From a related article: https://jlericson.com/2021/04/27/reading_tealeaves.html https://jlericson.com/2021/04/27/reading_tealeaves.html "But since it was finally canceled well after the acquisition, I suspect it was no longer growing and, perhaps, unprofitable. I don't get the feeling that the new CEO was interested in this line of business and it could be that Talent was starved of resources until it was easy to eliminate." Simple: It wasn't making money fast enough for the parent company's investors
twelve40 3y ago
I don't know if this SO CEO person is actually good at his job, but every time i try to read his blog posts, he comes across as a completely lobotomized corporate drone who speaks in nonsensical non-statements and is completely disconnected from the actual community of people who contribute to his platform. I have a suspicion that he might be interested in just pushing the Teams product and doesn't give a rat's ass about the public SO website. But, maybe I'm wrong and he just sucks at blogging.
insane_dreamer 3y ago
ChatGPT is replacing SO for me. Just had an experience yesterday where the first few answers were not quite what I needed (they weren't incorrect, just didn't meet my requirements), so the ability to ask follow-up questions to narrow down the answer resulted in a solution in minutes which could have taken hours of searching and testing. (Still had to test, of course, and one advantage of SO that ChatGPT doesn't have, is that you can be pretty sure a reply with lots of upvotes will work out of the box.)
KaoruAoiShiho 3y ago
SO is completely dead. GPT-4 is far superior in 95% of what I used to use SO for. I have over 50k karma on SO and my visit to that site has basically went from very regular to almost none while my productivity has ballooned from using AI. If I can short that company I would.
- palla89 3y ago
  but if everyone stops using stackoverflow for questioning and answering, isn't a matter of time before also gpt won't have the answers? Of course this concept is applied to SO and every other website
taylodl 3y ago
Stack Overflow? Haven't used it in years. It was awesome when it first came out and for a little while afterward, but soon the karma whores swooped in, the answers became poor, and questions that were actually pertinent and had good answers were marked 'dead.' I just stopped going. Haven't even heard anyone talk about Stack Overflow in some time.
mnahkies 3y ago
Somewhat off-topic, but the article mentions Google docs not having a way to embed/format code nicely. This is no longer true - you can insert a code "building block" that functions much as you'd expect, though it wasn't obvious until a coworker pointed it out
- jlericson 3y ago
  Ooooooh. You gotta install an add-in to make it work. Example: https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/code_blocks/100740430168 https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/code_blocks/100...

54 points by jlericson 3y ago

This is a perfect case study showing how it literally doesn't matter what your business is or what kind of community you've built, or operating practices you've developed; if the company has sold itself to investors, and investors decide "we want our exit" the company will turn into whatever it has to in order to "give investors their exit" and "return capital." Lets look at an article that talks about how they got into this situation (https://jlericson.com/2021/04/27/reading_tealeaves.html https://jlericson.com/2021/04/27/reading_tealeaves.html) Relevant quotes: "We can never go back to the golden years of Stack Exchange and we probably don't want that anyway." "This might seem odd until you understand the intended audience: investors. It's been over a decade since the first round of financing. At this point, private equity has invested more than $150 million. It's about time to find an exit strategy." "Instead, Stack Overflow will position advertising as a way for companies to promote both their products and their perks for potential employees." "Stack Overflow's investors want to get back their investments plus a healthy return. Let's say each investor wants at least 20% return on their investment per year." "The VCs want a bit more than Microsoft is willing pay. So the company needs to start making it's case for a public offering. The only story that will sell is growth—ideally "hyper growth". "I’m writing today to share that I’ve made the very difficult decision to reduce our workforce by about 10%, or 58 employees." Lets sum up shall we: We created this great product that people love. We then decided that we needed to grow really quickly and so we sold the future of the company to people who only care about money. We then sold the whole company outright to new investors (Prosus which is a "tech investment" firm) because the original investors are demanding a payout because "it's been long enough" apparently that they have not gotten their payout. The new company then demanded growth, which led to over-hiring on the false bet that they would increase revenue via propaganda. That didn't work so we're breaking our agreement with 58 people that we were betting on (most likely without telling them specifically that their employment was conditional based on a hypothesis) in order to make sure investors do not get upset. Sounds great, lets keep doing this.

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
Lol they also sold to Naspers. A company which started with slave trade as far away from programming and tech as one can hope for. If you sell to random companies who have blood money, shocked Pikachu face won't help you after.

can16358p 3y ago

I'm a long time StackOverflow user. A few days ago I had some confusion about how to use a React Native library and docs were also not super-clear for me. Asked StackOverflow. Then I said "let's see what happens if I copy paste the exact same question into GPT-4", and did it. Had my answer in 30 seconds, which explained the issue very well and worked. A few hours later I got an answer on SO too telling almost exactly the same, which was right. Anectodal for sure, but ChatGPT and similar tools will keep evolving faster and will become only better. Not surprising to see decline in SO. But I believe there will be an equilibrium as LLMs will need that training data too.

new2this 3y ago
I've been learning to code for the past year. StackOverflow was hugely important in the beginning. I haven't used it in probably 2 months because ChatGPT does an excellent job of not only answering my questions, but also allowing me to ask follow up questions like "what does that specific line of code do?"
david422 3y ago
Ok, but where is ChatGPT getting that answer?
- CameronNemo 3y ago
  I think this is a major problem with LLMs. You often want to know where the answer came from not just so that you can verify the correctness, but also so you can do your own research, learn adjacent topics, and solidify your knowledge.
ChatGTP 3y ago
Had my answer in 30 seconds, which explained the issue very well and worked. A few hours later I got an answer on SO too telling almost exactly the same, which was right. Wow, how strange...
- can16358p 3y ago
  If you imply the person copy pasted it from ChatGPT, it's probably not as the answer was from a very reputable user especially on that framework, and even if the essence was the same as the GPT answer, it wasn't in the same style.

fabian2k 3y ago

The integration of Teams on Stack Overflow was a really weird thing. I do buy the argument from Jon Ericson in this post that integrating the internal Q&A into the Stack Overflow page is a large benefit for developers. I don't think this works for everyone, but having too many places where information might be that are not connected is a big problem. They way they did that was really weird and in my opinion a big mistake. The account system used to be directly tied to Stack Overflow accounts. This had all kinds of problematic consequences, e.g. how to handle SO moderation for users that had a Teams account. I don't think this kind of integration can work. I do think they went too far in the other direction, and some optional integration would be useful for people that use Stack Overflow anyway.

throwme_123 3y ago

I don't use StackOverflow anymore since ChatGPT launched. It's kind of not fair because a large part of ChatGPT being able to answer code questions correctly comes from the SO corpus... but... well life's unjust.

dgfitz 3y ago
I still like looking at SO, not for the answer per se, but to see all the other possible solutions. Even if they're wrong, I usually learn something. Either what not to do, or a neat trick I had not seen before.
Doctor_Fegg 3y ago
User content on StackOverflow is licensed openly (CC-BY-SA), as it should be. So it's absolutely fair game for reuse. I have a lot of sympathy with people whose all-rights-reserved content has been repackaged by LLMs and similar, but that's not StackOverflow. SO got free contributions from its users; the company didn't write them itself.
- CameronNemo 3y ago
  The problem isn't one of legality, but practicality. If SO becomes a ghost town, all LLMs suffer, including OpenAI's.

brianmcc 3y ago

>> Layoffs are what happens when a business unit is spending money like it's going out of style and needs to reign it in a bit. Not necessarily. There are a number of other reasons e.g. revenues and profits are great but CEO wants even more $$$, or more charitably: strategies change and business units become genuinely obsolete. I'm honestly not even trying to be snarky, btw. But one can't infer any more that layoffs means dwindling funds.

fjeifisjf 3y ago
[dead]
adrianmsmith 3y ago
Agreed - my understanding of the recent layoffs at Google etc. is that the companies were making lots of money, but did layoffs anyway. (And the stock price increased, as now they'll have fewer costs and, at least in the short term, therefore make even more profit.)

monkeynotes 3y ago

We are going to see a lot of this sort of thing. It's like the internet all over again, stuff you used all the time starts to feel old and naive in comparison to new paradigm tools. What is surprising is quite how quickly this has happened, even 2 years ago SO would have been a solid go to, only game in town.

jonatron 3y ago
Quoting https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/ (2008). Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. Maybe a new new site for programming questions will come along.

ffjffsfr 3y ago

biggest danger for advertising revenue is ChatGPT. I visit it much less often since GPT. ChatGPT is just so much better at answering questions. I feel like I'm 10 times more productive with GPT. No more searching 1000 duplicate stack oveflow questions to find this one answer that accidentally refers to your specific use case. Long time ago I also used to contribute to site, but this was really emotionally challenging because of so many noob questions and general toxic community. I guess SO has really bleak future both because of competition from GPT and contributor burnout.

Mistletoe 3y ago
Is there a future where people stop using Stack Overflow, so ChatGPT doesn't have answers to new programming issues and questions to train on, and so it is suddenly blind to generating new useful answers?
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  Absolutely. But there's no obvious mechanism to counter this.
- CameronNemo 3y ago
  It won't be such a night and day difference. LLMs can still train on official and unofficial docs (someone also mentioned that LLMs can read source code?). But the results will be worse in the absence of the additional Q&A style content, I would think.

naiv 3y ago

"By September 2022, Stack Overflow had 1 262 paying teams generating annual recurring revenue of US$50m" so an average revenue of $40,000 per team. I did not expect this.

jlericson 3y ago
The key word is "average". I'm assuming the former Enterprise customers (large companies like banks who pay for many, many users) are folded into the Teams product now. In any case, a few big customers will skew the average. I'd be interested in median, but that would be a lot less impressive in the annual report.

kleinsch 3y ago

> Business isn't great if you are cutting 10% of your workforce just 2 years after being acquired > But across-the-board layoffs force managers to cut people who probably ought to be retained. There are plenty of companies that aren't in trouble doing layoffs to shed dead-weight with the excuse that everyone is doing layoffs. Similarly, profitable companies are skipping raises this year bc everyone else is skipping raises.

rob74 3y ago
Skipping raises, or giving raises significantly below the inflation rate, which is the same as a pay cut...
sciurus 3y ago
If the information in https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-scoop-48 https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-scoop-48 is correct, it wasn't an across the board layoff. > About 30% of product development was let go and these techies were the largest affected group. Of the 58 people, about 40-50 of those let go were in the formerly 150-strong product development organization, I have confirmed with current software engineers at Stack Overflow... I have to wonder if StackOverflow has given up on innovation, and is looking to maximize profits while it still can.
- jlericson 3y ago
  I only saw this detail after I wrote the post. Here's a primary source: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dalecook_opentowork-activity-7063927414552199168-c-SI/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dalecook_opentowork-activity-...

nologic01 3y ago

If for-profit LLM's can be trained on the public content of for-profit Q&A sites without paying anything, then there won't be any public content of for-profit Q&A sites. For-profit Q&A sites will have to either: * try to restrict access (some sort of technical and/or legal barrier) * shrink and become non-profit (Wikipedia style) * fold There are echoes in this conflict from the open source database vs cloud providers and licenses. It is the type of conflict we'll probably see more and more as different business models compete in the same global digital space.

deng 3y ago

I will never understand why SO canceled 'Talent', their job board. We got by far the most good people in our team through it. If it was unprofitable, why not raise prices? I was actually surprised at how cheap 'Talent' was compared to other options. I can say without a doubt that we'd have gladly payed more (well, not "gladly", but it wouldn't have been a big issue). The UI/UX was really good, you could very efficiently track communication to hundreds of candidates and it had lots of good ideas integrated, clearly made by people who cared about this and knew a lot about how hiring software developers works. A lot of hours must have gone into this, it's a shame this is just gone now. While 'Talent' technically still exists, just having a company page there does absolutely nothing and we canceled that one immediately.

CuriouslyC 3y ago
Seriously. SO jobs was great as a job seeker too, great interface, high quality companies and less ghosting/bs than other boards. I'm not looking forward to my next job search now that it's gone.
robertlagrant 3y ago
It was good. SO seems to have very bad internal decision-making capability, at least since the founders left.
snovv_crash 3y ago
Yeah same, for some specialized roles we looked for months and managed to snag an excellent person in just 2 weeks from SO's Talent ads. Literally the best eyeballs to put job ads in front of are the ones looking at the relevant problems. It's even nicely tagged by category, tech stack etc.
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
>I will never understand why SO canceled 'Talent', their job board. From a related article: https://jlericson.com/2021/04/27/reading_tealeaves.html https://jlericson.com/2021/04/27/reading_tealeaves.html "But since it was finally canceled well after the acquisition, I suspect it was no longer growing and, perhaps, unprofitable. I don't get the feeling that the new CEO was interested in this line of business and it could be that Talent was starved of resources until it was easy to eliminate." Simple: It wasn't making money fast enough for the parent company's investors

twelve40 3y ago

I don't know if this SO CEO person is actually good at his job, but every time i try to read his blog posts, he comes across as a completely lobotomized corporate drone who speaks in nonsensical non-statements and is completely disconnected from the actual community of people who contribute to his platform. I have a suspicion that he might be interested in just pushing the Teams product and doesn't give a rat's ass about the public SO website. But, maybe I'm wrong and he just sucks at blogging.

insane_dreamer 3y ago

ChatGPT is replacing SO for me. Just had an experience yesterday where the first few answers were not quite what I needed (they weren't incorrect, just didn't meet my requirements), so the ability to ask follow-up questions to narrow down the answer resulted in a solution in minutes which could have taken hours of searching and testing. (Still had to test, of course, and one advantage of SO that ChatGPT doesn't have, is that you can be pretty sure a reply with lots of upvotes will work out of the box.)

KaoruAoiShiho 3y ago

SO is completely dead. GPT-4 is far superior in 95% of what I used to use SO for. I have over 50k karma on SO and my visit to that site has basically went from very regular to almost none while my productivity has ballooned from using AI. If I can short that company I would.

palla89 3y ago
but if everyone stops using stackoverflow for questioning and answering, isn't a matter of time before also gpt won't have the answers? Of course this concept is applied to SO and every other website

taylodl 3y ago

Stack Overflow? Haven't used it in years. It was awesome when it first came out and for a little while afterward, but soon the karma whores swooped in, the answers became poor, and questions that were actually pertinent and had good answers were marked 'dead.' I just stopped going. Haven't even heard anyone talk about Stack Overflow in some time.

mnahkies 3y ago

Somewhat off-topic, but the article mentions Google docs not having a way to embed/format code nicely. This is no longer true - you can insert a code "building block" that functions much as you'd expect, though it wasn't obvious until a coworker pointed it out

jlericson 3y ago
Ooooooh. You gotta install an add-in to make it work. Example: https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/code_blocks/100740430168 https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/code_blocks/100...