Crazy how much I used SO for so long and yet how happily i switched to Reddit and LLMs 100% and haven’t once look back. Over the years it became a place to fear posting since their no matter how much you researched before posting you’d be met by an army of people noting it’s posted in the wrong place and off topic and closed and then years later you see it incredibly voted up for being so helpful. Changing the brand seems like rearranging chairs on the titanic or worse, on the bottom of the ocean.
linker3000 · 6h ago
Yep, I was learning C++ and could not understand an example in one of Stroustrup's books, so I posted a query asking for help, giving my thoughts and confusion.
I was roundly berated for not reading carefully enough, until one lonely soul piped up and said that actually there was a typo in the book's example code.
I'm only a hobby programmer and the experience wasn't encouraging.
The question was answered in 1 hour. There are a few useless comments but it's not too bad.
mbwgh · 5h ago
> I'm only a hobby programmer and the experience wasn't encouraging.
I have come across elitist communities like on SO, also regarding C++. I was downvoted and told to intentionally be spreading misinformation by using the word 'struct', because as you should know, in C++ there are only classes...
I haven't encountered that kind of vitriol when I asked beginner questions about how loops work, on 4chan out of all places.
But there were also times where I spent hours with people chatting on IRC while learning, where people were forgiving and encouraging.
In both places however, it seemed to be unfathomable for people that someone was trying to learn to program, not because they had to because of school or uni.
moomin · 5h ago
I’ve had people complain that, and I kid you not, my answer was obviously answered by combining the content of two specific pages in different reference books. Which, honest to God, made me wonder what _was_ a valid question.
znpy · 2h ago
I had a similar bad experience not with posting but with answering questions.
Some overly-zealous mod came and edited (!!!) what i wrote because they didn’t like the wording. No swear or any kind of trouble involved, they just didn’t like the words i used.
Picking the specific words, besides merely answering questions, is quite literally what makes me me and what makes someone else someone else, in a text-only community.
I never replied any other thread since then and never posted again. Whatever I write can be edited according to what random person somewhere thinks is better.
Going to extreme: if some mod decides to edit my comments to include racial slurs, that’s entirely within the realm of possibility.
I do not play that game.
No wonder they’re getting crushed by ChatGPT and other LLMs.
terminalbraid · 7h ago
> What started as a simple Q&A site is now also a thriving SaaS company, a unique advertising proposition, and a proud community platform.
How they prioritized that list is exactly how they have prioritized their operations.
dismalpedigree · 5h ago
Clearly. Hence the “they feel like ads but we need them”
deng · 6h ago
I will never, ever understand why they closed their jobs portal, and I wonder if they are regretting this now, since their core business is eaten up by LLMs. The job portal was pretty great and back then we got by far the best hires through StackOverflow. I think it was one of the success stories of SO and there were definitely opportunities for growth.
kyleee · 1h ago
Such an awful decision. I had good interactions via SO jobs too; what a shame, it could have been so much more.
nottorp · 7h ago
> most decisions are developer-focused, often alienating the wider Network.
Actually you've been alienating the developers for years and no rebranding will fix that.
bgwalter · 6h ago
So they are "renewing the brand", appointed a committee but the post does not mention anything concrete at all apart from AI FOMO.
Stackoverflow's problem is that they did not push back on AI right from the start. Instead, they launched hundreds of surveys where they tried to extract from developers that they want AI.
Well, they don't. People don't like their free work under the Creative Commons License to be sold to "Open"AI under a partnership.
Is the recent lockdown with captchas designed to grant "Open"AI a monopoly over the stolen Creative Commons contributions? Is that the goal of the rebranding?
notpushkin · 5h ago
Do they still upload data dumps?
chillfox · 6h ago
I stopped going to StackOverflow years ago as it was always a case of the question I needed answered was always closed with the reason of being a duplicate of something subtly different in a very important way that made the answer completely useless to me.
joelthelion · 6h ago
Exactly, what they need is not a rebranding but a hard look at theit practices.
tsurba · 6h ago
I guess SO was quite useful for providing a lot of training material for technical question answering for LLMs? I don’t think they got compensated for it so that is a bit sad.
In terms of my use, most questions and answers either were low quality, the question was a bit off of what you really wanted to know, or if it was a problem that required discussion or opinions, a ”real” hobbyist forum was better.
While at some point I felt like I (tried to) look up everything from SO, I now basically never use it anymore, but thanks for all the fish!
michaelt · 6h ago
> I don’t think they got compensated for it so that is a bit sad.
I'm pretty sure the people who posted answers weren't doing it in the expectation of getting paid.
ludicrousdispla · 5h ago
I stopped checking StackOverflow around 2014-15 because a lot of the answers/solutions were just wrong, as if they were copied and pasted in by the submitter without being tested. makes sense that it would be pulled into an llm
ChrisMarshallNY · 7h ago
I wish them luck.
For myself, I no longer find utility in the site. I now use LLMs to do what I used to use SO for, and find them to be far more useful.
I am aware that a lot of that usefulness, is because the LLMs trained on SO content.
walterbell · 6h ago
> LLMs trained on SO content
Ongoing via OpenAI licensing of SO API live feed.
dumbmrblah · 3h ago
That post has very little substance. ‘We’re rebranding to… something, stay tuned!!”
It should be locked due to lack of detail.
mywacaday · 6h ago
I wish them the best, it was a great resource when I first started working when my options were trawling through the folder of msdn CDs and later a paid subscription to expertsexchange.com.
Joel and Jeff were also the first blogs I would check weekly for updates. Whatever way it ended up it was a great resource for a long time and helped a lot of us.
pjmlp · 7h ago
What I really liked was the job board, as it had interesting opportunities for engineers that actually care.
Never been a fan of the way questions/answers were managed.
walterbell · 7h ago
> [job] opportunities for engineers that actually care
Were those job listings from SO contributors, rather than HR departments?
yallpendantools · 5h ago
I have an amusing anecdote to share. It's definitely related to your question but, anecdotes being what they are, I'm not presenting it as any form of final word on the matter.
I got my current job through the SO job board. When I applied, the first person to reply to my application was the technical lead of the role. He was also deeply involved in my hiring process, present at even the HR interview.
He was also very hands-on (in a good way) during my onboarding. In one of the first actual technical tasks he set me on, I was doing the usual SO research when I happened upon an important caveat with an orange amount of upvotes in one of the answers' comments. It was posted by my technical lead.
Our hiring practices have changed since. We now have the usual indirection layers of "Talent Acquisition Consultants". From what I know of the company now, posting on SO Jobs was very likely the initiative of my first TL.
----
I've always had the impression that most of the non-$BIGCORP posters on SO Jobs were there because they had a certain affinity for engineering. I've been to other interviews from companies posting there and while I didn't always end up talking to a technical committee, even the "usual headhunters" were surprisingly[1] technically-literate. Maybe I just got lucky. Maybe it was the zeitgeist of the 2010s. Most likely a combination of both.
Though I'm still pretty satisfied with my current job, I was genuinely disappointed when they shutdown SO Jobs.
[1] "surprisingly" is carrying a lot of YMMV-weight in this statement.
pjmlp · 7h ago
I am not aware how the job board submissions worked.
healsdata · 6h ago
Nope. It worked like other sites where you pay a fee and they host your job listing. The one difference was that the "Joel Test" was part of each post.
Early on, the job posts were low volume, high quality. I assume this was because it was only SO users who thought to advertise there. But over time, they built a sales team and ended up with the same posts as everyone else.
kmarc · 4h ago
Hard situation to be in this post-LLM era, but a rebrand would probably not help at this point. The comments here tell a lot, the negative sentiment is quite strong in general.
Maybe this was it for them, but I would still want to appreciate what SO did for the global programming community (especially for people who have less means to access high quality information / education). Thanks!
Now on-prem Stackoverflow, (SO for teams?) now THAT is a cancer that should be killed.
While I don't know how well it generalizes, pages like this can't be replaced by LLMs, and still contain instructive technical content. There are certainly other little islands like this.
LLMs have probably forever replaced the "how do I center a button" type questions, but there are still lots of things they can't do that needs a human asking and answering.
suby · 6h ago
I have a mild level of hostility towards their brand due to the level of pedanticness on Stack Overflow. I think they've fostered an unwelcoming, hostile and elitist community that acts brashly to shut down legitimate questions, with a high rate of erroneous closings. I think the harm of letting these questions play out would be close to 0, I do not buy the argument that they're making it easier for folks to find the one canonical answer to each question.
I think there's only so much oxygen on the 'net for a help site centered around programming. I think to some extent it's a zero sum game and we've been stuck with the local maxima of Stack Overflow, where the nature of social media network momentum has prevented a competitor from forming and overtaking them. I don't necessarily want them to fail or anyone to lose their jobs, but I am happy that LLM's have arrived and replaced my usage of their site. I'm sure a lot of folks love StackOverflow, and it does provide real value, but I'd bet a disproportionately high number of people feel similar to me because of the way they operate that site.
nkrisc · 5h ago
> I have a mild level of hostility towards their brand due to the level of pedanticness on Stack Overflow.
Pedantry
notpushkin · 5h ago
Love the ironicality of this.
K0balt · 4h ago
Ironicness
CottonMcKnight · 55m ago
Ironicry
dismalpedigree · 5h ago
I see what you did there. :)
ramijames · 7h ago
Ya, because a new brand is what they need.
K0balt · 4h ago
A million years ago, stack overflow was something special. It’s still useful for figuring out things you really should have known but don’t, though LLMs are much better, since you can actually ask them questions rather than just try to search for someone else who asked a question like yours.
But for anything nontrivial, the site sucks because a nontrivial question can almost always be framed as being “a lot like” some other, more trivial question, but the question you need answered is in what way is it different from the obvious.
Somehow, LLMs are better at understanding your question and delivering a relevant topic than SO mods.
sethops1 · 5h ago
My latest interaction with Stack Overflow?
A perfectly reasonable question with 34 upvotes locked by a power tripping moderator.
That is not an example of a power tripping moderator, it is a moderator doing their job. The question is bad.
The message is telling you something is going to happen. You already figured out what that something is. You already figured out you are not in the 1% on which it is being tested. You are asking whether something that doesn't affect you somehow affects you anyway. The included screenshot tells you how to test what it otherwise would have done.
MattPalmer1086 · 1h ago
Given someone felt the need to ask, clearly they didn't know what appears to be obvious to you.
000ooo000 · 3h ago
This is the exact attitude that has killed SO.
danw1979 · 5h ago
> What else? We would love to know any pain points with our brand you have felt over the years.
Agree. Feels like grasping at straws. I imagine the company viability is at risk and they are panicking about what to do.
Looks at what your users actually care about, not at how much garbage you can get away with before alienating all the users. You tried that and the answer is that you alienated almost all the original users.
I understand the need to be paid. Do something creative. The ads for paid stuff seems lazy. I imagine the incentives are aligned with “clicks” and not actually delivering value to users in terms of the ads.
jmye · 4h ago
Yeah, I don’t understand these long posts about brand. Does anyone care why they’re changing their brand? Does anyone care what they (SO) think their brand even is?
constrictpastel · 5h ago
First thing they need to do is get rid of the 'accept all cookies' pop up that sits in the lower left corner and consumes a quarter of the page. I'm still learning Linux and many of my search results end up there...and I can't tell you how annoying that is.
damnitbuilds · 7h ago
I saw "Meta" at the top and thought they'd bought them :-o
4ad · 7h ago
Deleted my account many years ago when it became clear that I was the product.
linker3000 · 6h ago
I used to be a major contributor on Superuser then one day the SO team had a competition to ship a reasonably decent spare graphics card to the most worthy requestor, based on a community vote.
I won in behalf of my young son, whose graphics card had just expired, but when the SO folks noticed I was in the UK, they decided shipping the card to me was too much effort and didn't send it.
That's when I decided my knowledge and free input would be better appreciated elsewhere and I quit. That was perhaps 12-ish years ago and I think I've been back a handful of times just out of curiosity.
kyleee · 14m ago
Were they actually prohibited for some reason from shipping to UK? I’d like to hear their side but how they handled it does seem dumb
7bit · 5h ago
Wow.
ThrowawayTestr · 7h ago
I'm assuming every SO question and answer has been scraped or sold. What value does it have anymore?
I don't understand the post, to be honest. It seems they wrote a book to announce that they will install a new logo and an updated design.
They are asking the community to get involved in the process, but don't exactly tell them how. Possibly because they aren't interested in their opinion, but just want to keep them busy to keep up the appearance that they truly care. I guess so that the backlash is smaller when they actually roll it out.
My personal opinion of stack overflow is, that they're past their summit. The community is toxic. Questions get closed or down voted for subjective reasons. I've been a big fan of especially the serverfault community. It was small enough to feel familiar, friendly, and questions were not met with a harsh tone. It felt like building a reputation there was worthwhile.
I don't feel like that anymore, and for a long time. The community also changed. When before, my correct answers would get accepted or at least upvoted, more and more often Questioners don't care anymore. That is not StackOverflows fault, but it still keeps me from investing the time to answer questions if I don't even get a thank you in return.
Now the community takes a friendly tone with this post, but it just feels like a layer of pretense, from an enterprise that doesn't care about anything than the money. It's fair enough, but not enough to really impact me.
I just don't care any more.
cookiengineer · 6h ago
Take my upvote, I couldn't have said it better myself.
No matter how much research and debugging you did in advance, no question can be formulated correctly. That is also partially SO's fault for making it impossible to link other things on the web, and the text length limit, and the trigger happy mods closing new threads etc.
It's a wrongly designed game at this point that benefits monopolization of abuse of power instead of being a welcoming community.
crawsome · 5h ago
The brand is still pretty dead. The antisocial strict community there deterred more conversations than they helped, and they are not asking those people to change.
> Stack Overflow is used offline in locations like The Ice Cube Lab, a remote research station at the South Pole and the world’s largest neutrino detector. “We constantly work on scripts, a lot of Python code.There’s always something that doesn’t work. That’s when Stack Overflow comes in handy,” says Ralf Auer, the Ice Cube Data Center Manager.
mvdtnz · 7h ago
Thanks for the announcement that at some indeterminate point in the future you will announce a rebranding. I'll take that under advisement, this is very worthwhile information.
mediumsmart · 5h ago
A King has his reign and then he dies. It's inevitable
I was roundly berated for not reading carefully enough, until one lonely soul piped up and said that actually there was a typo in the book's example code.
I'm only a hobby programmer and the experience wasn't encouraging.
I have come across elitist communities like on SO, also regarding C++. I was downvoted and told to intentionally be spreading misinformation by using the word 'struct', because as you should know, in C++ there are only classes... I haven't encountered that kind of vitriol when I asked beginner questions about how loops work, on 4chan out of all places.
But there were also times where I spent hours with people chatting on IRC while learning, where people were forgiving and encouraging.
In both places however, it seemed to be unfathomable for people that someone was trying to learn to program, not because they had to because of school or uni.
Some overly-zealous mod came and edited (!!!) what i wrote because they didn’t like the wording. No swear or any kind of trouble involved, they just didn’t like the words i used.
Picking the specific words, besides merely answering questions, is quite literally what makes me me and what makes someone else someone else, in a text-only community.
I never replied any other thread since then and never posted again. Whatever I write can be edited according to what random person somewhere thinks is better.
Going to extreme: if some mod decides to edit my comments to include racial slurs, that’s entirely within the realm of possibility.
I do not play that game.
No wonder they’re getting crushed by ChatGPT and other LLMs.
How they prioritized that list is exactly how they have prioritized their operations.
Actually you've been alienating the developers for years and no rebranding will fix that.
Stackoverflow's problem is that they did not push back on AI right from the start. Instead, they launched hundreds of surveys where they tried to extract from developers that they want AI.
Well, they don't. People don't like their free work under the Creative Commons License to be sold to "Open"AI under a partnership.
Is the recent lockdown with captchas designed to grant "Open"AI a monopoly over the stolen Creative Commons contributions? Is that the goal of the rebranding?
In terms of my use, most questions and answers either were low quality, the question was a bit off of what you really wanted to know, or if it was a problem that required discussion or opinions, a ”real” hobbyist forum was better.
While at some point I felt like I (tried to) look up everything from SO, I now basically never use it anymore, but thanks for all the fish!
I'm pretty sure the people who posted answers weren't doing it in the expectation of getting paid.
For myself, I no longer find utility in the site. I now use LLMs to do what I used to use SO for, and find them to be far more useful.
I am aware that a lot of that usefulness, is because the LLMs trained on SO content.
Ongoing via OpenAI licensing of SO API live feed.
It should be locked due to lack of detail.
Never been a fan of the way questions/answers were managed.
Were those job listings from SO contributors, rather than HR departments?
I got my current job through the SO job board. When I applied, the first person to reply to my application was the technical lead of the role. He was also deeply involved in my hiring process, present at even the HR interview.
He was also very hands-on (in a good way) during my onboarding. In one of the first actual technical tasks he set me on, I was doing the usual SO research when I happened upon an important caveat with an orange amount of upvotes in one of the answers' comments. It was posted by my technical lead.
Our hiring practices have changed since. We now have the usual indirection layers of "Talent Acquisition Consultants". From what I know of the company now, posting on SO Jobs was very likely the initiative of my first TL.
----
I've always had the impression that most of the non-$BIGCORP posters on SO Jobs were there because they had a certain affinity for engineering. I've been to other interviews from companies posting there and while I didn't always end up talking to a technical committee, even the "usual headhunters" were surprisingly[1] technically-literate. Maybe I just got lucky. Maybe it was the zeitgeist of the 2010s. Most likely a combination of both.
Though I'm still pretty satisfied with my current job, I was genuinely disappointed when they shutdown SO Jobs.
[1] "surprisingly" is carrying a lot of YMMV-weight in this statement.
Early on, the job posts were low volume, high quality. I assume this was because it was only SO users who thought to advertise there. But over time, they built a sales team and ended up with the same posts as everyone else.
Maybe this was it for them, but I would still want to appreciate what SO did for the global programming community (especially for people who have less means to access high quality information / education). Thanks!
Now on-prem Stackoverflow, (SO for teams?) now THAT is a cancer that should be killed.
While I don't know how well it generalizes, pages like this can't be replaced by LLMs, and still contain instructive technical content. There are certainly other little islands like this.
LLMs have probably forever replaced the "how do I center a button" type questions, but there are still lots of things they can't do that needs a human asking and answering.
I think there's only so much oxygen on the 'net for a help site centered around programming. I think to some extent it's a zero sum game and we've been stuck with the local maxima of Stack Overflow, where the nature of social media network momentum has prevented a competitor from forming and overtaking them. I don't necessarily want them to fail or anyone to lose their jobs, but I am happy that LLM's have arrived and replaced my usage of their site. I'm sure a lot of folks love StackOverflow, and it does provide real value, but I'd bet a disproportionately high number of people feel similar to me because of the way they operate that site.
Pedantry
But for anything nontrivial, the site sucks because a nontrivial question can almost always be framed as being “a lot like” some other, more trivial question, but the question you need answered is in what way is it different from the obvious.
Somehow, LLMs are better at understanding your question and delivering a relevant topic than SO mods.
A perfectly reasonable question with 34 upvotes locked by a power tripping moderator.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79062092/how-does-chrome...
Still need an answer.
The message is telling you something is going to happen. You already figured out what that something is. You already figured out you are not in the 1% on which it is being tested. You are asking whether something that doesn't affect you somehow affects you anyway. The included screenshot tells you how to test what it otherwise would have done.
“please -anyone- validate our Marketing team’s existence.”
I won in behalf of my young son, whose graphics card had just expired, but when the SO folks noticed I was in the UK, they decided shipping the card to me was too much effort and didn't send it.
That's when I decided my knowledge and free input would be better appreciated elsewhere and I quit. That was perhaps 12-ish years ago and I think I've been back a handful of times just out of curiosity.
They are asking the community to get involved in the process, but don't exactly tell them how. Possibly because they aren't interested in their opinion, but just want to keep them busy to keep up the appearance that they truly care. I guess so that the backlash is smaller when they actually roll it out.
My personal opinion of stack overflow is, that they're past their summit. The community is toxic. Questions get closed or down voted for subjective reasons. I've been a big fan of especially the serverfault community. It was small enough to feel familiar, friendly, and questions were not met with a harsh tone. It felt like building a reputation there was worthwhile.
I don't feel like that anymore, and for a long time. The community also changed. When before, my correct answers would get accepted or at least upvoted, more and more often Questioners don't care anymore. That is not StackOverflows fault, but it still keeps me from investing the time to answer questions if I don't even get a thank you in return.
Now the community takes a friendly tone with this post, but it just feels like a layer of pretense, from an enterprise that doesn't care about anything than the money. It's fair enough, but not enough to really impact me.
I just don't care any more.
No matter how much research and debugging you did in advance, no question can be formulated correctly. That is also partially SO's fault for making it impossible to link other things on the web, and the text length limit, and the trigger happy mods closing new threads etc.
It's a wrongly designed game at this point that benefits monopolization of abuse of power instead of being a welcoming community.
https://kiwix.org/en/look-at-us-we-took-stack-overflow-offli...
> Stack Overflow is used offline in locations like The Ice Cube Lab, a remote research station at the South Pole and the world’s largest neutrino detector. “We constantly work on scripts, a lot of Python code.There’s always something that doesn’t work. That’s when Stack Overflow comes in handy,” says Ralf Auer, the Ice Cube Data Center Manager.