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> In May I wrote about Stack Overflow's business, which lost $42 million over 6 months and had just laid off 10% of its employees. Since then, the company's fis

> In May I wrote about Stack Overflow's business, which lost $42 million over 6 months and had just laid off 10% of its employees. Since then, the company's fiscal year-end results came out. Despite growing revenue, it lost $84 million over the year ending on March 31, 2023. Thank god Wikipedia isn’t run like Stack Overflow. As an end user, they have pretty much the same value proposition: user generated answers to my questions. Wikipedia is still doing well, meanwhile it seems SO is constantly being driven off a cliff by bimbos in management. Not everything needs to be a damn unicorn. SO is an information repository. They need to accept that stop trying to “enhance” it with more crap because they don’t realize their median user is a junior dev who really just needs to serialize a Java object and isn’t going to pay or put up with any LLM-generated nonsense. SO doesn’t need large language models. What they really need is a better model of what answers are good, what answers are outdated, and what answers should be expanded to include more info (and sometimes, what answers should be slimmed down a bit). Turn the top answer to popular questions into a wiki so that everyone can update it. And then add backlinks for questions which were closed for being “duplicates”. It solves so many problems SO has. Another thing. This “comments aren’t for extended discussion” nonsense needs to go too. Any question could easily include a Reddit-style discussion tab to facilitate discussion. I’m sure much of it would be at least as valuable as the answers themselves.

mrweasel 3y ago
> Not everything needs to be a damn unicorn. More people needs to understand this. It's fine being a small(ish) business that turns a profit and provides a service that's beneficial to society. You don't need to be a billion dollar company to be important or do great work. DHH talked about this 15 years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY
- dmvdoug 3y ago
  I’ll preach it again: people need to learn that satisficing is a good and valuable end-state!
  - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
    It is a startup wisdom that stagnation (i.e. no growth) means death. The often stated reason why C-level executives are paid so well is that they have to be able to solve the insanely hard problem of finding new growth opportunities for the company over a long(er) period of time; something few people are capable of. Well: by this criterion, many CxOs fail to deserve this huge pay (more precisely: they build Potemkin villages to pretend growth where in reality they burn the company's substance).
    - dmvdoug 3y ago
      They should bring me to Startup Bootcamp or whatever it is, so I can preach the satisficing gospel.
- palata 3y ago
  > You don't need to be a billion dollar company to be important or do great work. And importantly: because you are a billion dollar company doesn't mean you bring good to the world. At all.
  - lvncelot 3y ago
    I'd even argue that the burden of proof is reversed. There might be billion dollar companies which bring good, but I'll be skeptical of that fact at first.
    - Ekaros 3y ago
      I would argue that there is plenty of large(above billion dollars) companies that bring net good to world. Manufacturing is good field. Producing things like machinery improves quality of live and productivity. Not that these often doesn't have negative aspects when they strive for even higher value extraction, looking at something like John Deere. Still it does allow massive efficiency gains in farming.
    - BoxOfRain 3y ago
      I wonder if there's a general rule that the larger an organisation the more pronounced the diffusion of responsibility and the higher the likelihood of shady behaviour? It would be interesting to see some studies into this either way.
  - rpastuszak 3y ago
    I would imagine this gets progressively harder the bigger you get.
    - layer8 3y ago
      Thus why one should rather prefer slow growth. Fast growth only means you’ll be more likely to reach the shitty state faster.
      - palata 3y ago
- pydry 3y ago
  "People" understand this just fine the problem is that the economy is structurally geared towards creating unicorn monstrosities that extract value rather than SMEs that create value. If there were legal and regulatory pressure that crushed and broke down these behemoths (e.g. a FTC and judges that believed that predatory pricing was real and prosecuted accordingly) the VC model would break and this stuff would stop happening.
- mrtksn 3y ago
  But the whole "Tech" economy is based on the premise that everything must grow indefinitely and indefinitely means that at some point will be a unicorn. Europe is considered economical failure because there are not enough unicorns, there are lists on Twitter with list of unicorns per country that are supposed to show the decline of Europe. No matter if Europe has some of the best living condition for large group of people. IMHO this thing is ideological, I even feel uneasy mentioning this because it is something we are not supposed to talk since it can start a flamewar and flamewars are how you get your account restricted.
  - janalsncm 3y ago
    Between 2009 and today, the US doubled GDP while life expectancies fell. In the EU, GDP is stagnant but life expectancy went up. Those who say Europe’s economy is a failure should at least consider what the purpose of an economy should even be.
    - dustedcodes 3y ago
      wow that is super interesting (although not very surprising). Do you have any sources for this?
      - mrtksn 3y ago
        Europe: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/eur/europe/life-expectancy https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/eur/europe/life-expect... USA: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/life-expectancy https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/life... I'm sure there are nuances but according to this particular source European life expectancy went from 75 to 79, US life expectancy went from 78 to 79 with a period of a decline between 2013 and 2018.
        imglorp 3y ago
        What's the biggest impact on life expectancy in the first world that shows up at this level? Healthcare, walking culture, food options, other?
- sgarland 3y ago
  God, I wish more companies realized this. Doing one thing, and doing it well, is admirable.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    But how can I build a company to send rich people to space for dick measuring contests with only $1m a year in salary?!
- mschuster91 3y ago
  The problem is ambitious management on all levels. When you're running a billion dollar business, you can extract far better compensation (base, bonus, stock options) than if you're running a hundred million dollar business. The obvious solution is a compensation cap, not just because CEO comp has exploded while lower rung compensation has virtually stagnated, but also because it might put an end to the constant drive of companies to just gobble up competitors. [1] https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2020/ https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2020/
- bunga-bunga 3y ago
  > > Not everything needs to be a damn unicorn. > More people needs to understand this. I sounds more like neither one of you has had that choice. Most people, given the chance, would rather add a zero to their savings rather than “doing the right thing for society”
  - geysersam 3y ago
    Then we should not depend on people making the right choice. We should limit the opportunities people have to choose between "more for me" and "do something useful for society". One idea here is more progressive taxation.
    - chasd00 3y ago
      > We should limit the opportunities people have Riiight. See you at the voting booth.
      - geysersam 3y ago
        Opposite. We should empower people by having a system where you don't become homeless because of random medical expenses.
    - gottorf 3y ago
      > Then we should not depend on people making the right choice. Broadly speaking, any system that depends on an unbroken chain of good people who do the right things out of the goodness of their hearts is bound to fail much sooner rather than later. So I agree. The system should be designed so that people taking action out of their own interests nevertheless advances society as a whole. As Adam Smith put it: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." The system that was designed this way is capitalism, warts and all. > One idea here is more progressive taxation. I'm not sure how that conclusion follows from your premise. If you want to set up incentive structures such that people chasing their own interests also ends up being useful for society, then you want to make sure that people voluntarily pay money for goods and services that they value. The supplier of that value makes money, the consumer of that value is better off, and society as a whole is enriched as a result. This also means that the state takes action to break trusts and monopolies, and (more difficultly) guards against regulatory capture, all of which end up making it so that people involuntarily pay for goods and services that they don't necessarily value. Rent-seeking behavior such as this is one of the highest economic ills. "More progressive taxation" does many things, but it is also exceptionally good at enriching the politically well-connected, often in the form of rent-seeking behavior I described above. Look at world government spending as a fraction of GDP[0] as a good proxy for "more progressive taxation", and tell me between France (58.5%), the US (38.5%) and Singapore (15.4%), which you consider a well-run country where people do more useful things for society. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_government_spending_as_percentage_of_GDP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...
- cornholio 3y ago
  > It's fine being a small(ish) business that turns a profit and provides a service that's beneficial to society. It's fine, but it's no unicorn. And having such a business might be the closest and only chance the people involved have at real wealth and impact - they are 90% there, and only need a little scale, or so they think. If you were in their shoes, you would do the same.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- dreen 3y ago
  You can't talk people into not being greedy. Definietely not while living in an economic system that is built on it.
- pmontra 3y ago
  But each CEO of those businesses would like to be the next billionaire. Furthermore if the business doesn't turn out to be as good as they hope they can leave and try to get lucky at another company. They care about the company only up to a (small?) point.
- SkyPuncher 3y ago
  More people do understand this, but aren't in a situation to follow it. Many tech companies are only plausible with VC funding. In order to get VC funding, you generally have to have a path towards being a unicorn.
- refurb 3y ago
  You shouldn’t take VC money if you’re not going to try and be a unicorn. VC’s aren’t interested in your “smallish business that turns a profit” and neither are the LPs that invest in the fund.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  Once you take VC money, you don’t really have a choice but to grow large. That’s their entire business model. I can’t find it now. But Spolsky himself wrote about how Fogs Creek Software could be what we now call a “lifestyle company” that could grow slowly. But he felt he needed outside investment so Stack Exchange could grow fast since it was only useful if it had network effects.
- wnc3141 3y ago
  On the contrary, it's difficult to sustain the lifestyle of a unicorn founder unless you have a unicorn valuation. In less sarcastic terms, the ecosystem (VCs, founders etc) often is drawn to or selected for those who whish to get rich and get out. A hundred and fifty years ago people risked incredible suffering in order to strike gold. All when slow and steady profit could be made by owning a farm.
- ahartman00 3y ago
  > Despite growing revenue, it lost $84 million over the year ending on March 31, 2023 Its not possible to run a business that loses $84 million. You will run out of money.
ygra 3y ago
> Any question could easily include a Reddit-style discussion tab to facilitate discussion. This exists in the form of chat, and extended comment discussions migrate there. That being said, any question that requires extensive discussion is likely not a very good fit for SO because it's probably ambiguous, unclear or otherwise hard to answer exactly.
- nolok 3y ago
  Chat is instant. Blink and you will miss it. It isn't suited at all for thread discussion where they might be months between additional answers and comments. Or move it to zulip or zulip like so it's at least threaded in a way that works over months. But as is it's just two different purpose tool and cramming one's use case in the other just doesn't fit.
  - pasc1878 3y ago
    But SO is not meant for discussions. It is to provide answers (preferably one) to a question.
- nottorp 3y ago
  > That being said, any question that requires extensive discussion is likely not a very good fit for SO because it's probably ambiguous, unclear or otherwise hard to answer exactly. So basically SO isn't a tool to improve your skills but one to turn you into a copy/paste monkey?
  - dijksterhuis 3y ago
    I mean, if you can copy/paste my answer here into your codebase, I would be very surprised. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52206576/write-spark-dataframe-to-single-parquet-file/52217178#52217178 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52206576/write-spark-dat...
    - nottorp 3y ago
      I'm surprised you didn't get a mod complaining there's nothing to copy/paste in there :)
nottheengineer 3y ago
Agreed, stack overflow is the place where we stop to find an answer to a question. They should stay focused on that instead of adding useless features. But I don't entirely agree on LLMs being useless. An LLM could help with avoiding duplicate questions. It could analyze the content of the question and point out stuff like missing logs before the question is submitted to guide beginners through the basics. If someone manages to turn an LLM into a good context-aware search engine, that would also make sense for SO. But somehow no one seems to actually use LLMs given how much bullshit they talk about them.
- janalsncm 3y ago
  I just hope they understand the core value proposition of SO is that answers come from people. That is their product. If you want answers from a computer, you can get them from chat GPT. The best SO is going to do with that is spend a lot of money to repackage it into a feature people probably weren’t looking for on SO to begin with. I agree there are other indirect applications of ML models than just generating answers. And I hope ML can help to soften some of the “edges” in UX. A lot of that can be done with BERT or even more primitive statistical methods though.
  - hathchip 3y ago
    It's doubtful that ChatGPT would be able to answer so many tech questions, if it wasn't for the existence of SO.
    - a_c 3y ago
      I don't remember which podcast was it coming from, several years ago there was motion to shut down the US National Weather Service, or is it the NOAA I don't remember, because AccuWeather is all people need. No one seems to question where AccuWeather get the meteorological data. It is from the government service
      - a_c 3y ago
        Found it. Turns out it is an audio book by Michael Lewis, The Coming Storm https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Coming-Storm-Audiobook/B07F43574T https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Coming-Storm-Audiobook/B07F43...
nolok 3y ago
While I mostly agree with your point, I want to point out that on a financial level Wikipedia is really not that well handled. They keep increasing expenses into project that are not core to the experience, or that will never see the light of day (like when they had two different teams working on two different new text editor for the site). I have a belief that they're caught in a very bureaucratic "we need to use your budget otherwise it would be put into question", but it also means when I give 1 euro to them it goes less and less to their core mission I want to sustain.
- kramerger 3y ago
  Wikipedia is not particularly well run. Just look at their infrastructure expenses. On the other hand, they bring in tons of money from companies and user donations. Maybe its time for a leaner alternative?
- hathchip 3y ago
  You're giving them money, for your own reasons, when it's well established that they don't need your donations for their core mission. They spend it on things other than their core mission. Isn't this just a problem which you have created yourself? Just stop giving them money, give it to some other project which is also doing something valuable but which needs it more. If it ever turns out the Wikipedia needs your money urgently to keep the servers running, start giving to them again.
  - mcv 3y ago
    Wikimedia is swimming in money. Give to the Internet Archive instead. They really need it.
    - dwaltrip 3y ago
      Your post just got me to finally donate to internet archive!
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    > If it ever turns out the Wikipedia needs your money urgently to keep the servers running, start giving to them again. If they run out of money to run the servers, I'd consider that a good thing. Someone can start a new "wiki-2" project, starting out with a wikipedia dump as a base, and continuing to be a free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit, but without the $150 million dollars of expenses - I think you could host wikipedia with 2 members of staff and 5 servers, plus cloudflare for the 99% of read-only requests - similar to how they ran it at the start of the project.
ben_w 3y ago
> their median user is a junior dev who really just needs to serialize a Java object and isn’t going to pay or put up with any LLM-generated nonsense. (Un?)Ironically, one of my main uses of ChatGPT is to replace StackOverflow (it's great at turning vague guesses about what I want into fast ideas, and when it's wrong it's still less wrong than the combination of SO content and the search engines connected to it); and also for turning undocumented and badly documented examples of JSON into a collection of (swift) `Codable` structs.
- raincole 3y ago
  > one of my main uses of ChatGPT is to replace StackOverflow I'm pretty sure it's the main usage of almost all the programmers who use ChatGPT.
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    That and translating short messages into neurotypical-appropriate management-impressing emails, lol. Example, the message "tl;dr": Dear [Recipient's Name], I trust this email finds you well. I am writing to express my appreciation for the time and effort you invested in composing the recent email you sent my way. Your commitment to clear communication is commendable, and I value the insights you often bring to our exchanges. However, I must admit that due to the current demands on my schedule, I have not had the opportunity to read through the entire content of your email in its entirety. Recognizing the importance of your message, I feel it necessary to be transparent about my current time constraints and commitments. With a view to ensuring that I can fully grasp the essential points you wish to convey, I would be grateful if you could kindly provide a condensed version or a summary of the key takeaways from your original message. Rest assured that your efforts in doing so will be highly appreciated and will enable me to offer the attention and consideration your thoughts deserve. Please understand that my intention is not to diminish the significance of your communication but rather to ensure that I can respond meaningfully and efficiently to your input. I truly value our professional collaboration and the valuable contributions you consistently make to our discussions. Thank you for your understanding, and I look forward to receiving your condensed version of the email at your earliest convenience. Should you have any questions or require further clarification on this matter, please do not hesitate to reach out. With warm regards, [Your Name] [Your Title/Position] [Company Name] [Contact Information]
chmod775 3y ago
Yeah, I'm surprised that a company whose core product could be run by three people for less than a million USD per year with room to spare for lavish company cars, somehow manages to lose $84 million USD.
- bunga-bunga 3y ago
  This is a “Dropbox is just a pretty rsync”-level comment
  - chmod775 3y ago
    Plenty of sites of similar scale were run on less or are to this day. SO also is technologically as basic as it gets. They don't even serve big files.
    - b112 3y ago
      Some can't stand the fact that they have a perfect product.
    - tmpz22 3y ago
      I think OP may be referencing SO has multiple products outside the core QA site that may be more headcount-intensive or at least have more costs outside a few .NET servers and a well tuned database. Not to mention an international presence benefiting from 24-hour on-call rotations that would benefit from international offices and other fixtures that are very expensive to maintain.
  - toyg 3y ago
    Atwood and Spolsky themselves boasted repeatedly that SO, for a long time, was just a Windows server and a SQL Server with some C#. The key element in the success of SO was not technical: it was Spolsky and Atwood leveraging already-established (Microsoft) audiences they had, to create a virtuous circle of sharing that snowballed for years.
- Pigalowda 3y ago
  Musk can buy it and run it like that. Maybe drop the O and make it SX?
tgv 3y ago
> SO doesn’t need large language models. It could use it to improve its search. However, it should be trained on SO, because the language is quite specialized.
boredumb 3y ago
In a rosy red version of stack overflow yes, in reality it is a place for javascript developers to copy paste answers from. There core value proposition is being destroyed by GPT generating more contextualized copy paste snippets for them.
pasc1878 3y ago
Anyone can edit any answer (unless it is specifically locked which is uncommon) For new users the edit does have to get approved by 3 other users to give some check on vandalisim. Thus answers are wikis.
ZephyrOhm 3y ago
Really hope SO internalizes these suggestions
Qem 3y ago
> Thank god Wikimedia isn’t run like Stack Overflow. I wonder why didn't Wikimedia have a stackoverflow-like site before stackoverflow.
- throwawaymobule 3y ago
  There's a lot of nuance to how SO and other sites they run work. Turning programmer focused FAQs into a collaborative site was the route it kind of had to take. Reading through the joelonsoftware blog was kind of eyeopening, since I didn't know he was one of its creators.
  - Qem 3y ago
    Yet, now that stackoverflow is becoming increasingly hostile to their contributors, I think it would be a good moment to the Wikimedia folks to venture in this area.
    - tracker1 3y ago
      I take it you haven't had to deal with many mods on Wikipedia.
      - 3LazTjBv-f 3y ago
        Depends on who's fiefdom you encroach upon (and language version). I think SO "culture" is more equalized, even among multiple tags.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
    > I didn't know he was one of its creators This comment just made me feel old :-)
thaumasiotes 3y ago
> meanwhile it seems SO is constantly being driven off a cliff by bimbos in management A bimbo is a woman who makes up for a lack of intelligence or competence by having sex appeal. Don't take my word for it: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bimbo https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bimbo Did you mean to use a different word?
- cfiggers 3y ago
  It's 2023! There's no reason we can't assume gender-neutrality of previously-gendered terms. Maybe the parent commenter finds Prashanth Chandrasekar absolutely smoking hot (despite his seeming incompetence).
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    If you assume gender neutrality, you're still left with the near-explicit implication that management at Stack Overflow is chosen for their sexuality. It's not at all rare to accuse management (wherever) of being chosen for something other than competence, but usually you'd be saying they are where they are for political reasons, not because they slept with someone. This claim is unusual enough that I wanted to know if it's what my parent commenter meant.
hyperbovine 3y ago
The ChatGPT answer for "how do I serialize a Java object" is spot on, better than the one I found on SO in a comparable amount of time. I encourage you to try it.
throwaway290 3y ago
> Another thing. This “comments aren’t for extended discussion” nonsense needs to go too. Any question could easily include a Reddit-style discussion tab to facilitate discussion. I’m sure much of it would be at least as valuable as the answers themselves. Please god no. Why this tendency to grow something you like until it includes everything? There are other places to discuss including the actual Reddit. SO is about question-answers, that's why it got popular. You try to turn it into Reddit, you will add Reddit-scale moderation overhead across 100000 simultaneously running threads to already existing moderation overhead for actual answers. If you didn't notice Reddit can't even manage their own overhead so they freeze discussions after a while. This is the opposite of what SO should do, which is focus on discovering and improving existing information instead of adding more and more ways to contribute low-effort junk
throwaway2990 3y ago
> SO is constantly being driven off a cliff by bimbos in management. Mods are the worst. Community moderators are ruining SO faster than the CEO.
- paulmd 3y ago
  Yeah, the CEO nailed the problem 5 years ago and tried to fix it. The community was having absolutely none of it - meta overflow more or less had a collective “are we so wrong? no, it’s the questionmakers who are wrong…” and then went right back to it. https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-very-welcoming-its-time-for-that-to-change/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-ve... What do you do with the fact that your core contributors are toxic manchildren who love the ability to push buttons at people for daring to ask a question? Build something new where they’re not the core contributors.
  - throwaway2990 3y ago
    I guess all the people downvoting are moderators on SO who are upset they killed a community.
StackOverlord 3y ago
> needs to serialize a Java object and isn’t going to pay or put up with any LLM-generated nonsense. I use GPT to implement classes with many interfaces. Even though I often have to make corrections, it's still way faster than looking up the documentation for each of these interfaces. Saves a lot of time in these cases, all the more so I don't have to ponder on which interface in the class hierarchy tree I need to implement.
endofreach 3y ago
Now that you write about the median user being a junior with trivial needs, i realize, i barely visit SO anymore. Not sure when that happened. I used to be a power-consumer on SO. I don‘t think i have even visited SO this year at all. I did use GPT4 for a lot of the minor things that i am too lazy to remember and would have „relearned“ on SO every time… maybe others have a similar experience and management just sees visits dropping? Maybe they just focus on developing a target audience for a tailored product.
- paulmd 3y ago
  > Now that you write about the median user being a junior with trivial needs, i realize, i barely visit SO anymore. Not sure when that happened. I used to be a power-consumer on SO. I don‘t think i have even visited SO this year at all. Google algorithm changes have absolutely curbstomped SO visibility, probably due to third-party sites mirroring their content and making it appear to be a linkfarm to google. It's funny how even as tech users, google is "the internet" and if something disappears off google, it's gone. Even just pushing a site down a ways in results will massively reduce the amount of traffic, even for us technical users. There have been a lot of "monkeypatches" from users working around it, like adding "reddit" or site:reddit.com or other hints, but fundamentally google result quality has been significantly declining for 10+ years now and it's getting to the point where it no longer surfaces desirable content anymore.
  - endofreach 3y ago
    > It's funny how even as tech users, google is "the internet" and if something disappears off google, it's gone Good point! Your response just made me remember why Copilot & later ChatGPT came in so handy. It was a weirdly perfect timing . It was after i have been so annoyed with all these trashy low quality code snippet sites just copying SO content appearing multiple times on the first page for almost any code related query. After months I even made a Ask HN because i wondered, if only I was so incredibly annoyed by these sites popping up. I just stopped googling for much programming related questions because of this. OT: A silly thought crossing my mind: I never really understood the value of these sites. In hindsight now, does it seem plausible that microsoft or openAI were behind these or had something to do with these sites?
throw_m239339 3y ago
> Thank god Wikipedia isn’t run like Stack Overflow. Wikipedia isn't run like a business, but relies on charity. Wikipedia doesn't have to be profitable to exist so of course it isn't run like Stack Overflow, Wikipedia is backed by a foundation that gets plenty of donations. Maybe SO should adopt that model, but that's an entire different question. If Wikipedia had to be profitable it would be a very different platform. Both are crowdsourced (so are reddit, facebook and youtube), and the similarities stop there.
cyanydeez 3y ago
They probably could use the LLM to do a lot of things: Imagine sanity checking old answers for new versions of language or Library. Adding probabilistic merit to new user answers. Asking the question asker to review machine generated answers in troubleshooting questions with little traction. Obviously, enshittiffication is at work in how these social0-esque sites try to use tech.

mrweasel 3y ago

> Not everything needs to be a damn unicorn. More people needs to understand this. It's fine being a small(ish) business that turns a profit and provides a service that's beneficial to society. You don't need to be a billion dollar company to be important or do great work. DHH talked about this 15 years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY

dmvdoug 3y ago
I’ll preach it again: people need to learn that satisficing is a good and valuable end-state!
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  It is a startup wisdom that stagnation (i.e. no growth) means death. The often stated reason why C-level executives are paid so well is that they have to be able to solve the insanely hard problem of finding new growth opportunities for the company over a long(er) period of time; something few people are capable of. Well: by this criterion, many CxOs fail to deserve this huge pay (more precisely: they build Potemkin villages to pretend growth where in reality they burn the company's substance).
  - dmvdoug 3y ago
    They should bring me to Startup Bootcamp or whatever it is, so I can preach the satisficing gospel.
palata 3y ago
> You don't need to be a billion dollar company to be important or do great work. And importantly: because you are a billion dollar company doesn't mean you bring good to the world. At all.
- lvncelot 3y ago
  I'd even argue that the burden of proof is reversed. There might be billion dollar companies which bring good, but I'll be skeptical of that fact at first.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    I would argue that there is plenty of large(above billion dollars) companies that bring net good to world. Manufacturing is good field. Producing things like machinery improves quality of live and productivity. Not that these often doesn't have negative aspects when they strive for even higher value extraction, looking at something like John Deere. Still it does allow massive efficiency gains in farming.
  - BoxOfRain 3y ago
    I wonder if there's a general rule that the larger an organisation the more pronounced the diffusion of responsibility and the higher the likelihood of shady behaviour? It would be interesting to see some studies into this either way.
- rpastuszak 3y ago
  I would imagine this gets progressively harder the bigger you get.
  - layer8 3y ago
    Thus why one should rather prefer slow growth. Fast growth only means you’ll be more likely to reach the shitty state faster.
    - palata 3y ago
pydry 3y ago
"People" understand this just fine the problem is that the economy is structurally geared towards creating unicorn monstrosities that extract value rather than SMEs that create value. If there were legal and regulatory pressure that crushed and broke down these behemoths (e.g. a FTC and judges that believed that predatory pricing was real and prosecuted accordingly) the VC model would break and this stuff would stop happening.
mrtksn 3y ago
But the whole "Tech" economy is based on the premise that everything must grow indefinitely and indefinitely means that at some point will be a unicorn. Europe is considered economical failure because there are not enough unicorns, there are lists on Twitter with list of unicorns per country that are supposed to show the decline of Europe. No matter if Europe has some of the best living condition for large group of people. IMHO this thing is ideological, I even feel uneasy mentioning this because it is something we are not supposed to talk since it can start a flamewar and flamewars are how you get your account restricted.
- janalsncm 3y ago
  Between 2009 and today, the US doubled GDP while life expectancies fell. In the EU, GDP is stagnant but life expectancy went up. Those who say Europe’s economy is a failure should at least consider what the purpose of an economy should even be.
  - dustedcodes 3y ago
    wow that is super interesting (although not very surprising). Do you have any sources for this?
    - mrtksn 3y ago
      Europe: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/eur/europe/life-expectancy https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/eur/europe/life-expect... USA: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/life-expectancy https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/life... I'm sure there are nuances but according to this particular source European life expectancy went from 75 to 79, US life expectancy went from 78 to 79 with a period of a decline between 2013 and 2018.
      - imglorp 3y ago
        What's the biggest impact on life expectancy in the first world that shows up at this level? Healthcare, walking culture, food options, other?
sgarland 3y ago
God, I wish more companies realized this. Doing one thing, and doing it well, is admirable.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  But how can I build a company to send rich people to space for dick measuring contests with only $1m a year in salary?!
mschuster91 3y ago
The problem is ambitious management on all levels. When you're running a billion dollar business, you can extract far better compensation (base, bonus, stock options) than if you're running a hundred million dollar business. The obvious solution is a compensation cap, not just because CEO comp has exploded while lower rung compensation has virtually stagnated, but also because it might put an end to the constant drive of companies to just gobble up competitors. [1] https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2020/ https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2020/
bunga-bunga 3y ago
> > Not everything needs to be a damn unicorn. > More people needs to understand this. I sounds more like neither one of you has had that choice. Most people, given the chance, would rather add a zero to their savings rather than “doing the right thing for society”
- geysersam 3y ago
  Then we should not depend on people making the right choice. We should limit the opportunities people have to choose between "more for me" and "do something useful for society". One idea here is more progressive taxation.
  - chasd00 3y ago
    > We should limit the opportunities people have Riiight. See you at the voting booth.
    - geysersam 3y ago
      Opposite. We should empower people by having a system where you don't become homeless because of random medical expenses.
  - gottorf 3y ago
    > Then we should not depend on people making the right choice. Broadly speaking, any system that depends on an unbroken chain of good people who do the right things out of the goodness of their hearts is bound to fail much sooner rather than later. So I agree. The system should be designed so that people taking action out of their own interests nevertheless advances society as a whole. As Adam Smith put it: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." The system that was designed this way is capitalism, warts and all. > One idea here is more progressive taxation. I'm not sure how that conclusion follows from your premise. If you want to set up incentive structures such that people chasing their own interests also ends up being useful for society, then you want to make sure that people voluntarily pay money for goods and services that they value. The supplier of that value makes money, the consumer of that value is better off, and society as a whole is enriched as a result. This also means that the state takes action to break trusts and monopolies, and (more difficultly) guards against regulatory capture, all of which end up making it so that people involuntarily pay for goods and services that they don't necessarily value. Rent-seeking behavior such as this is one of the highest economic ills. "More progressive taxation" does many things, but it is also exceptionally good at enriching the politically well-connected, often in the form of rent-seeking behavior I described above. Look at world government spending as a fraction of GDP[0] as a good proxy for "more progressive taxation", and tell me between France (58.5%), the US (38.5%) and Singapore (15.4%), which you consider a well-run country where people do more useful things for society. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_government_spending_as_percentage_of_GDP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...
cornholio 3y ago
> It's fine being a small(ish) business that turns a profit and provides a service that's beneficial to society. It's fine, but it's no unicorn. And having such a business might be the closest and only chance the people involved have at real wealth and impact - they are 90% there, and only need a little scale, or so they think. If you were in their shoes, you would do the same.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
dreen 3y ago
You can't talk people into not being greedy. Definietely not while living in an economic system that is built on it.
pmontra 3y ago
But each CEO of those businesses would like to be the next billionaire. Furthermore if the business doesn't turn out to be as good as they hope they can leave and try to get lucky at another company. They care about the company only up to a (small?) point.
SkyPuncher 3y ago
More people do understand this, but aren't in a situation to follow it. Many tech companies are only plausible with VC funding. In order to get VC funding, you generally have to have a path towards being a unicorn.
refurb 3y ago
You shouldn’t take VC money if you’re not going to try and be a unicorn. VC’s aren’t interested in your “smallish business that turns a profit” and neither are the LPs that invest in the fund.
scarface_74 3y ago
Once you take VC money, you don’t really have a choice but to grow large. That’s their entire business model. I can’t find it now. But Spolsky himself wrote about how Fogs Creek Software could be what we now call a “lifestyle company” that could grow slowly. But he felt he needed outside investment so Stack Exchange could grow fast since it was only useful if it had network effects.
wnc3141 3y ago
On the contrary, it's difficult to sustain the lifestyle of a unicorn founder unless you have a unicorn valuation. In less sarcastic terms, the ecosystem (VCs, founders etc) often is drawn to or selected for those who whish to get rich and get out. A hundred and fifty years ago people risked incredible suffering in order to strike gold. All when slow and steady profit could be made by owning a farm.
ahartman00 3y ago
> Despite growing revenue, it lost $84 million over the year ending on March 31, 2023 Its not possible to run a business that loses $84 million. You will run out of money.

ygra 3y ago

> Any question could easily include a Reddit-style discussion tab to facilitate discussion. This exists in the form of chat, and extended comment discussions migrate there. That being said, any question that requires extensive discussion is likely not a very good fit for SO because it's probably ambiguous, unclear or otherwise hard to answer exactly.

nolok 3y ago
Chat is instant. Blink and you will miss it. It isn't suited at all for thread discussion where they might be months between additional answers and comments. Or move it to zulip or zulip like so it's at least threaded in a way that works over months. But as is it's just two different purpose tool and cramming one's use case in the other just doesn't fit.
- pasc1878 3y ago
  But SO is not meant for discussions. It is to provide answers (preferably one) to a question.
nottorp 3y ago
> That being said, any question that requires extensive discussion is likely not a very good fit for SO because it's probably ambiguous, unclear or otherwise hard to answer exactly. So basically SO isn't a tool to improve your skills but one to turn you into a copy/paste monkey?
- dijksterhuis 3y ago
  I mean, if you can copy/paste my answer here into your codebase, I would be very surprised. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52206576/write-spark-dataframe-to-single-parquet-file/52217178#52217178 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52206576/write-spark-dat...
  - nottorp 3y ago
    I'm surprised you didn't get a mod complaining there's nothing to copy/paste in there :)

nottheengineer 3y ago

Agreed, stack overflow is the place where we stop to find an answer to a question. They should stay focused on that instead of adding useless features. But I don't entirely agree on LLMs being useless. An LLM could help with avoiding duplicate questions. It could analyze the content of the question and point out stuff like missing logs before the question is submitted to guide beginners through the basics. If someone manages to turn an LLM into a good context-aware search engine, that would also make sense for SO. But somehow no one seems to actually use LLMs given how much bullshit they talk about them.

janalsncm 3y ago
I just hope they understand the core value proposition of SO is that answers come from people. That is their product. If you want answers from a computer, you can get them from chat GPT. The best SO is going to do with that is spend a lot of money to repackage it into a feature people probably weren’t looking for on SO to begin with. I agree there are other indirect applications of ML models than just generating answers. And I hope ML can help to soften some of the “edges” in UX. A lot of that can be done with BERT or even more primitive statistical methods though.
- hathchip 3y ago
  It's doubtful that ChatGPT would be able to answer so many tech questions, if it wasn't for the existence of SO.
  - a_c 3y ago
    I don't remember which podcast was it coming from, several years ago there was motion to shut down the US National Weather Service, or is it the NOAA I don't remember, because AccuWeather is all people need. No one seems to question where AccuWeather get the meteorological data. It is from the government service
    - a_c 3y ago
      Found it. Turns out it is an audio book by Michael Lewis, The Coming Storm https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Coming-Storm-Audiobook/B07F43574T https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Coming-Storm-Audiobook/B07F43...

nolok 3y ago

While I mostly agree with your point, I want to point out that on a financial level Wikipedia is really not that well handled. They keep increasing expenses into project that are not core to the experience, or that will never see the light of day (like when they had two different teams working on two different new text editor for the site). I have a belief that they're caught in a very bureaucratic "we need to use your budget otherwise it would be put into question", but it also means when I give 1 euro to them it goes less and less to their core mission I want to sustain.

kramerger 3y ago
Wikipedia is not particularly well run. Just look at their infrastructure expenses. On the other hand, they bring in tons of money from companies and user donations. Maybe its time for a leaner alternative?
hathchip 3y ago
You're giving them money, for your own reasons, when it's well established that they don't need your donations for their core mission. They spend it on things other than their core mission. Isn't this just a problem which you have created yourself? Just stop giving them money, give it to some other project which is also doing something valuable but which needs it more. If it ever turns out the Wikipedia needs your money urgently to keep the servers running, start giving to them again.
- mcv 3y ago
  Wikimedia is swimming in money. Give to the Internet Archive instead. They really need it.
  - dwaltrip 3y ago
    Your post just got me to finally donate to internet archive!
- londons_explore 3y ago
  > If it ever turns out the Wikipedia needs your money urgently to keep the servers running, start giving to them again. If they run out of money to run the servers, I'd consider that a good thing. Someone can start a new "wiki-2" project, starting out with a wikipedia dump as a base, and continuing to be a free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit, but without the $150 million dollars of expenses - I think you could host wikipedia with 2 members of staff and 5 servers, plus cloudflare for the 99% of read-only requests - similar to how they ran it at the start of the project.

ben_w 3y ago

> their median user is a junior dev who really just needs to serialize a Java object and isn’t going to pay or put up with any LLM-generated nonsense. (Un?)Ironically, one of my main uses of ChatGPT is to replace StackOverflow (it's great at turning vague guesses about what I want into fast ideas, and when it's wrong it's still less wrong than the combination of SO content and the search engines connected to it); and also for turning undocumented and badly documented examples of JSON into a collection of (swift) `Codable` structs.

raincole 3y ago
> one of my main uses of ChatGPT is to replace StackOverflow I'm pretty sure it's the main usage of almost all the programmers who use ChatGPT.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  That and translating short messages into neurotypical-appropriate management-impressing emails, lol. Example, the message "tl;dr": Dear [Recipient's Name], I trust this email finds you well. I am writing to express my appreciation for the time and effort you invested in composing the recent email you sent my way. Your commitment to clear communication is commendable, and I value the insights you often bring to our exchanges. However, I must admit that due to the current demands on my schedule, I have not had the opportunity to read through the entire content of your email in its entirety. Recognizing the importance of your message, I feel it necessary to be transparent about my current time constraints and commitments. With a view to ensuring that I can fully grasp the essential points you wish to convey, I would be grateful if you could kindly provide a condensed version or a summary of the key takeaways from your original message. Rest assured that your efforts in doing so will be highly appreciated and will enable me to offer the attention and consideration your thoughts deserve. Please understand that my intention is not to diminish the significance of your communication but rather to ensure that I can respond meaningfully and efficiently to your input. I truly value our professional collaboration and the valuable contributions you consistently make to our discussions. Thank you for your understanding, and I look forward to receiving your condensed version of the email at your earliest convenience. Should you have any questions or require further clarification on this matter, please do not hesitate to reach out. With warm regards, [Your Name] [Your Title/Position] [Company Name] [Contact Information]

chmod775 3y ago

Yeah, I'm surprised that a company whose core product could be run by three people for less than a million USD per year with room to spare for lavish company cars, somehow manages to lose $84 million USD.

bunga-bunga 3y ago
This is a “Dropbox is just a pretty rsync”-level comment
- chmod775 3y ago
  Plenty of sites of similar scale were run on less or are to this day. SO also is technologically as basic as it gets. They don't even serve big files.
  - b112 3y ago
    Some can't stand the fact that they have a perfect product.
  - tmpz22 3y ago
    I think OP may be referencing SO has multiple products outside the core QA site that may be more headcount-intensive or at least have more costs outside a few .NET servers and a well tuned database. Not to mention an international presence benefiting from 24-hour on-call rotations that would benefit from international offices and other fixtures that are very expensive to maintain.
- toyg 3y ago
  Atwood and Spolsky themselves boasted repeatedly that SO, for a long time, was just a Windows server and a SQL Server with some C#. The key element in the success of SO was not technical: it was Spolsky and Atwood leveraging already-established (Microsoft) audiences they had, to create a virtuous circle of sharing that snowballed for years.
Pigalowda 3y ago
Musk can buy it and run it like that. Maybe drop the O and make it SX?

tgv 3y ago

> SO doesn’t need large language models. It could use it to improve its search. However, it should be trained on SO, because the language is quite specialized.

boredumb 3y ago

In a rosy red version of stack overflow yes, in reality it is a place for javascript developers to copy paste answers from. There core value proposition is being destroyed by GPT generating more contextualized copy paste snippets for them.

pasc1878 3y ago

Anyone can edit any answer (unless it is specifically locked which is uncommon) For new users the edit does have to get approved by 3 other users to give some check on vandalisim. Thus answers are wikis.

ZephyrOhm 3y ago

Really hope SO internalizes these suggestions

Qem 3y ago

> Thank god Wikimedia isn’t run like Stack Overflow. I wonder why didn't Wikimedia have a stackoverflow-like site before stackoverflow.

throwawaymobule 3y ago
There's a lot of nuance to how SO and other sites they run work. Turning programmer focused FAQs into a collaborative site was the route it kind of had to take. Reading through the joelonsoftware blog was kind of eyeopening, since I didn't know he was one of its creators.
- Qem 3y ago
  Yet, now that stackoverflow is becoming increasingly hostile to their contributors, I think it would be a good moment to the Wikimedia folks to venture in this area.
  - tracker1 3y ago
    I take it you haven't had to deal with many mods on Wikipedia.
    - 3LazTjBv-f 3y ago
      Depends on who's fiefdom you encroach upon (and language version). I think SO "culture" is more equalized, even among multiple tags.
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
  > I didn't know he was one of its creators This comment just made me feel old :-)

thaumasiotes 3y ago

> meanwhile it seems SO is constantly being driven off a cliff by bimbos in management A bimbo is a woman who makes up for a lack of intelligence or competence by having sex appeal. Don't take my word for it: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bimbo https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bimbo Did you mean to use a different word?

cfiggers 3y ago
It's 2023! There's no reason we can't assume gender-neutrality of previously-gendered terms. Maybe the parent commenter finds Prashanth Chandrasekar absolutely smoking hot (despite his seeming incompetence).
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  If you assume gender neutrality, you're still left with the near-explicit implication that management at Stack Overflow is chosen for their sexuality. It's not at all rare to accuse management (wherever) of being chosen for something other than competence, but usually you'd be saying they are where they are for political reasons, not because they slept with someone. This claim is unusual enough that I wanted to know if it's what my parent commenter meant.

hyperbovine 3y ago

The ChatGPT answer for "how do I serialize a Java object" is spot on, better than the one I found on SO in a comparable amount of time. I encourage you to try it.

throwaway290 3y ago

> Another thing. This “comments aren’t for extended discussion” nonsense needs to go too. Any question could easily include a Reddit-style discussion tab to facilitate discussion. I’m sure much of it would be at least as valuable as the answers themselves. Please god no. Why this tendency to grow something you like until it includes everything? There are other places to discuss including the actual Reddit. SO is about question-answers, that's why it got popular. You try to turn it into Reddit, you will add Reddit-scale moderation overhead across 100000 simultaneously running threads to already existing moderation overhead for actual answers. If you didn't notice Reddit can't even manage their own overhead so they freeze discussions after a while. This is the opposite of what SO should do, which is focus on discovering and improving existing information instead of adding more and more ways to contribute low-effort junk

throwaway2990 3y ago

> SO is constantly being driven off a cliff by bimbos in management. Mods are the worst. Community moderators are ruining SO faster than the CEO.

paulmd 3y ago
Yeah, the CEO nailed the problem 5 years ago and tried to fix it. The community was having absolutely none of it - meta overflow more or less had a collective “are we so wrong? no, it’s the questionmakers who are wrong…” and then went right back to it. https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-very-welcoming-its-time-for-that-to-change/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-ve... What do you do with the fact that your core contributors are toxic manchildren who love the ability to push buttons at people for daring to ask a question? Build something new where they’re not the core contributors.
- throwaway2990 3y ago
  I guess all the people downvoting are moderators on SO who are upset they killed a community.

StackOverlord 3y ago

> needs to serialize a Java object and isn’t going to pay or put up with any LLM-generated nonsense. I use GPT to implement classes with many interfaces. Even though I often have to make corrections, it's still way faster than looking up the documentation for each of these interfaces. Saves a lot of time in these cases, all the more so I don't have to ponder on which interface in the class hierarchy tree I need to implement.

endofreach 3y ago

Now that you write about the median user being a junior with trivial needs, i realize, i barely visit SO anymore. Not sure when that happened. I used to be a power-consumer on SO. I don‘t think i have even visited SO this year at all. I did use GPT4 for a lot of the minor things that i am too lazy to remember and would have „relearned“ on SO every time… maybe others have a similar experience and management just sees visits dropping? Maybe they just focus on developing a target audience for a tailored product.

paulmd 3y ago
> Now that you write about the median user being a junior with trivial needs, i realize, i barely visit SO anymore. Not sure when that happened. I used to be a power-consumer on SO. I don‘t think i have even visited SO this year at all. Google algorithm changes have absolutely curbstomped SO visibility, probably due to third-party sites mirroring their content and making it appear to be a linkfarm to google. It's funny how even as tech users, google is "the internet" and if something disappears off google, it's gone. Even just pushing a site down a ways in results will massively reduce the amount of traffic, even for us technical users. There have been a lot of "monkeypatches" from users working around it, like adding "reddit" or site:reddit.com or other hints, but fundamentally google result quality has been significantly declining for 10+ years now and it's getting to the point where it no longer surfaces desirable content anymore.
- endofreach 3y ago
  > It's funny how even as tech users, google is "the internet" and if something disappears off google, it's gone Good point! Your response just made me remember why Copilot & later ChatGPT came in so handy. It was a weirdly perfect timing . It was after i have been so annoyed with all these trashy low quality code snippet sites just copying SO content appearing multiple times on the first page for almost any code related query. After months I even made a Ask HN because i wondered, if only I was so incredibly annoyed by these sites popping up. I just stopped googling for much programming related questions because of this. OT: A silly thought crossing my mind: I never really understood the value of these sites. In hindsight now, does it seem plausible that microsoft or openAI were behind these or had something to do with these sites?

throw_m239339 3y ago

> Thank god Wikipedia isn’t run like Stack Overflow. Wikipedia isn't run like a business, but relies on charity. Wikipedia doesn't have to be profitable to exist so of course it isn't run like Stack Overflow, Wikipedia is backed by a foundation that gets plenty of donations. Maybe SO should adopt that model, but that's an entire different question. If Wikipedia had to be profitable it would be a very different platform. Both are crowdsourced (so are reddit, facebook and youtube), and the similarities stop there.

cyanydeez 3y ago

They probably could use the LLM to do a lot of things: Imagine sanity checking old answers for new versions of language or Library. Adding probabilistic merit to new user answers. Asking the question asker to review machine generated answers in troubleshooting questions with little traction. Obviously, enshittiffication is at work in how these social0-esque sites try to use tech.