After 16 years, we're renewing the StackOverflow Brand

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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?

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.