{"id":40199,"date":"2023-07-28T15:39:22","date_gmt":"2023-07-28T19:39:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=40199"},"modified":"2023-08-09T15:38:09","modified_gmt":"2023-08-09T19:38:09","slug":"the-mess-at-stack-overflow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2023\/07\/28\/the-mess-at-stack-overflow\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mess at Stack Overflow"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ayhan Fuat Çelik<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Over the past one and a half years, Stack Overflow has lost around 50%<\/del> 35% of its traffic (Update: Around 15% of the observed loss seems to be related to the recategorization of the Google Analytics Cookie<\/a> around May 2022.[…]). This decline is similarly reflected in site usage, with approximately a 50% decrease in the number of questions and answers, as well as the number of votes these posts receive.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Via David Mimno<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

This is not sad, this is a warning. A company did everything (mostly) right: created a vitally useful free service, worked hard to keep it healthy, shared data for research. Then another company swooped the data and made it compete against itself.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

To be clear, this is really bad for LLM cos as well. You can only pull the “snarf an existing web community” trick once, folks like Reddit have already wised up. Free data is as dead as zero interest rates.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

I’m not sure how much of this has to do with AI. What is the evidence for that? It doesn’t seem like a good substitute, at least for the way I use Stack Overflow. Sure, some people are probably asking ChatGPT or Copilot instead, but so many so quickly?<\/p>\n

My impression is that Stack Overflow had been kind of losing its way for years. The founders got distracted by other projects, then left, and the new management seemed more interested in business deals than in improving the product. They lost sight of what was best for the user\/community.<\/p>\n\n

Jon Ericson<\/a> (via Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

I’ve been on vacation<\/a>, so I haven’t been\nfollowing the Stack Overflow moderator\nstrike<\/a>. Not that there has\nbeen much progress. Negotiations stalled for a variety of\nreasons<\/a>. Meanwhile\nStack Overflow’s CEO, Prashanth Chandrasekar, dug the company’s hole a\nbit deeper during an interview with\nVentureBeat<\/a>.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

By contrast Prashanth regularly talks about combining community and AI\nwithout going into detail about how that solves the problem at\nhand. Neither does he go into much detail about the problems the\ncompany intends to solve. I suspect one reason is that Prashanth, who\nhas spent most of his career in\nmanagement<\/a>,\nhas become something of an architecture\nastronaut<\/a>. As\nJoel puts it, “architecture people are solving problems that they\nthink they can solve, not problems which are useful<\/em> to solve.” Since\nthere is overlap between a Q&A site and generative artificial\nintelligence, there must be a way of jamming them together.<\/p>

But there’s another factor. In May I wrote about Stack Overflow’s\nbusiness<\/a>, which lost $42 million over 6\nmonths and had just laid off 10% of its employees. Since then, the\ncompany’s fiscal year-end results came\nout<\/a>. Despite\ngrowing revenue, it lost $84 million over the year ending on March\n31, 2023. In fact Prosus’ entire education technology segment<\/em> lost\nmoney despite growing income[…]<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

While this might be the company’s public position, Prashanth\nprivately wanted to limit who can access the\ndata<\/a>. On\nMarch 28, 2023, he ordered the data dump not be uploaded to\nArchive.org. The DBA who turned it off warned that the community would\nnotice and it did. Rather than having an answer prepared, the company\npublicly struggled for an answer. Internal\ncommunication<\/a> shows most of the company\nwas as surprised as the rest of us.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

It seems like they could have been profitable at a smaller size, but they grew way too much and got rid of unique features people liked, such as the jobs board.<\/p>\n\n

Danny Thompson<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

STACK OVERFLOW JUST ANNOUNCED THEIR OWN AI!!!<\/p>\n

OverflowAI is a tool, that will also have a VS Code plugin. The way this works, if you are on the site and ask a question, it will produce the answer for you while also citing the sources it used to produce the answer.<\/p>\n

You can then ask more in the conversational area, even including code, and through Generative AI it can continue building off of the answer.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n