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Stack Overflow's CEO doesn't understand Stack Overflow (jlericson.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/technology@beehaw.org
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[–] 99 points 3 years ago (24 children)

Stack Overflow has a CEO? WTF for? It's a repository of information. All the LLMs have already ripped a copy of the site, so where were they planning to generate revenue?

I hope someone starts a version and integrates it with activitypub and then users can donate towards the hosting costs.

Stack Overflow is supposed to be the wiki of developers, not a fucking business. I hate these greedy fucks. "let's make money from other people's time and effort" 🤮🤮🤮

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  • [–] 56 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    It seems you're unclear on what a CEO is. Even non profit organizations have CEOs (though stackoverflow is very much a for-profit company). A CEO is just the head decision maker in an organization.

    At the end of the day, SO has server hosting costs, and they have to cover those costs somehow. That makes them a business.

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  • [–] 43 points 3 years ago (9 children)

    Stack Overflow is supposed to be the wiki of developers, not a fucking business.

    Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood founded it, and it was sold to Prosus, a Netherlands-based consumer internet conglomerate, on 2 June 2021 for $1.8 billion.

    I guess someone would like some of that money back.

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  • [–] 19 points 3 years ago (7 children)

    lol almost $2 billion for a website with almost no ads and that makes almost no revenue? Especially now that they closed the (paid) jobs section?

    ROI in 10000 years?

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (4 children)

    I'm unsure of many people know that StackOverflow also had enterprise offerings. Our company has their own StackOverflow instance with very specific content to our tech stacks.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (3 children)

    Yes but they stopped offering that years ago.

    So, no more job classifieds, no saas, only ads from views... I don't see where it can be profitable like that

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    No they didn't? My company just recently introduced it.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    Valuation is usually based on potential revenue, not actual revenue. A $2 billion valuation would have been about $50 per user. It seems reasonable Stack Exchange should be able to make that much money per user somehow over the entire future existence of the company... if it's run well. Which doesn't seem to be happening from where I'm sitting.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    Valuation is usually based on potential revenue, not actual revenue

    How similar this is to how capitalists look at natural "resources". "This website[wetland] sure is great. Lots of people[animals] are loving it. And it's a vital part of the development[water] cycle... But it's just not making me any money!"

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (5 children)

    That will become necessary soon, since their "business model" lost it's meaning after the LLM's

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  • [–] 19 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    Lol I doubt it. LLMs are useless for the kinds of questions stack overflow is useful for.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    And no SO means worse LLMs. Chatgpt relies on scrapes of SO, reddit, forums and GitHub discussion pages.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago

    It's not like ChatGPT is the only LLM. GPT is pretty broad and general. Remember that MS has Co-Pilot which is literally entirely built on GitHub's codebase knowledge. Different data sets will produce different kinds of useful predictors.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

    And the scrapping stage already happened. A new one will be useful only after enough human-made content is added, or it a major change in tech happen.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago

    I've had great success with LLMs troubleshooting my code independently without needing to consult a peer.

    It's easier than looking on StackOverflow because it already crawled the answers there and it's been programmed to drop the sass unless you ask it to be sassy specifically. All the knowledge without the elitism.

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