Stack Overflow gets series E funding for $85M | Hacker News Reader

Stack Overflow gets series E funding for $85M

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112 pointsshagie133 comments

As a pretty avid answerer on SO (>5k rep, >100 answers), it's surprising how much money people are willing to throw at this. The staff's apparent inability to interact positively with the community is a huge red flag[0], especially as the primary value they have as a brand is the size and quality of the community. I would switch sites easily if there was a compelling alternative, but I haven't heard of one.

0: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-...

I'd say most people come to SO from Google searches and are not following any of those politics.

Most users, sure. I think most of the regular answerers are aware of this, and they are the main value of SO.

The thing is that you eventually get a good answer, and I don't know who, but someone does eventually go back around and delete all the bad answers. I checked all my previous questions. I remember being met with people cursing me out for not already knowing the answer (why would I be even asking in the first place?), and after a few months, when I go back for reference, it all looks peachy.

You're left with a golden nugget of interaction with most answers, and that builds up over time.

I would switch too, but they do provide value as of today, even while your first few interactions might be more unsavory, because at the end of the day, as far as I can see, the people giving terrible first answers are regular people, and if so, the value they're providing is finding the good answer in a sea of awful people.

A lot of investors have ingrained that "bundling/unbundling" phases happen across every industry and see Google Search as the ultimate unbundling opportunity in all likelihood. Therefore, I'm not surprised micro/niche search engines continue to see outsized funding relative to their business model potential.

“I would switch sites easily if there was a compelling alternative, but I haven't heard of one.”

That’s because it’s difficult to unseat an incumbent in a market where there are strong network effects, which is also the same reason that investors are willing to invest. The fact that they have lost brand trust without losing traffic is a positive, not a negative.

Part of the difficulty SO faces is that there's sort of two similar but distinct problems that it's meant to solve, and as such there is no one "community". It's simultaneously a place to ask programming questions and get answers to them, and it's a repository of commonly asked programming questions with curated answers. The heavily engaged section of the community represented by your linked thread tends to focus on the latter goal, and the things they do to benefit the site for it (e.g., the aggressive closed-as-duplicate patrol) tend to be the things that makes it a hostile feeling place for the "long tail" community of new question askers and occasional answerers.

A trivial solution to this dilemma seems to be to consider stack overflow a place for the former, and have a system in place where you can vote specifically to elevate a question to the latter category. (god knows they don't mind adding stuff, with comments, votes on comments, votes on questions, on answers, votes on closing questions, votes on reopening them... – surely yet another kind of vote wouldn't bother them!)

Such an elevation may require some small edits. This adds all sorts of benefits:

1. Given that it is now clear that the question is moving from 'this answers the question asked by the original poster' to 'this is now like a blog post, generally useful information that should score highly on google', it is completely fine to edit the question and turn it into something that no longer entirely matches the original asker. I'd even go so far as to clone the question, and leave the real question unmolested.

2. The question (or, better yet, an answer) can be marked as obsoleted or outdated. There are huge swaths of questions on SO that have a ton of votes and an answer that was fantastic in the past, but is now flat out misleading or wrong, but it seems both onerous to begin the path of finding a few thousand people to downvote it, as well as 'mean' to the poster of that answer, and tricky for the historic purposes of the internet (imagine a fix in some source code has a comment that links to this answer!) - and for similar reasons, editing the answer so that it is nothing like the original answer is also flat out bizarre. It'd be so much better if it was possible to vote an answer as 'obsolete' or 'outdated'. But that doesn't work if SO is at odds with itself and at once a repo of common questions AND a specific question->specific answer forum.

3. Given that an SO community now has a presumably much smaller set of questions-with-answers that have been elevated to 'commonly asked question with great curated answers', they can 'police' their fiefdom of curated general knowledge vastly better, with mods and random passersby invited to ocassionally inspect one of these curated answers and see if it still seems useful, applicable, and correct in the current day and age. It also becomes far more feasible to browse through the entirety of the curated questions list.

This already exists as "Community wiki" [0], which is almost exactly what you describe, at least in theory.

It seems like a useful feature that often has a positive effect. It's not clear to be that it's improved the general attitude of the community or of management.

[0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11740/what-are-comm...

The community wiki is strange to me because it completely removes the gamification aspect. If your post becomes a community wiki, you stop getting reputation. If you edit a community wiki, you get no reputation.

I was active from very early on but lost trust in SO when my best answer got turned into a community wiki. It’s an amazing resource but now I mostly consume.

I don't think community wiki's are what was described at all.

I'd describe as every question starting out as a forum post and only upvoted questions become Questions.

No one's question gets deleted. Question quality doesn't get diluted.

Ah, very interesting.

But does it matter? The SO I know still aggressively hints at the 'I dont know what we actually are' problem; if you answer very obvious questions, you get downvoted with notes to 'VTC and move on', for example. I also get no option to vote to promote an answer into the wiki.

The community wiki feature as implemented does not fulfill what I'm proposing, I'd say. Or at least, the current policies do not mesh with the existence of the wiki in a way to solve the dilemma.

Aside from the Monica Celio event, SO navigated the trouble waters of newspeak well enough to deserve respect.

IMO, they should not have created non-technical sites. This is where the danger lies, but they were confident they can handle it.

When SO took off they thought they could replicate the success with other sites. This lead to the original trilogy (SO, SuperUser, ServerFault) and the Area51 site to propose new sites, of which many betas were started. Turns out few beta sites reached the engagement criteria to graduate to a full site, and this creeping scale with hundreds of site led to substantial technical debt. Each site was more or less a fork of the codebase, and required a separate DB instance.

The mistake was to treat each site as a separate community and expect it to eventually grow to an SO-level success. In contrast, Reddit's subreddit approach is much more scaleable and can tolerate niche communities. Reddit is strong not because of any single community, but because of the combination of communities to grab inbound traffic and keep users engaged. SO partially missed out on this.

> Each site was more or less a fork of the codebase, and required a separate DB instance.

I don't believe this is true. At least as of 2016, the various sites were on a shared codebase [0], and there were two SQL Server clusters total [1], for all the various sites, chat, devops, other systems, etc.

[0]: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar...

[1]: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar...

Yes, what you say is more precise than what I said. They did a lot of fixing and by now nearly all sites use the same codebase (incl frontend), apparently with feature toggles for some sites (e.g. Stackapps or Meta have unique mechanics but run on the same software). The only surviving forks are probably Area51 and their Enterprise product. Previously, frontend/layout had diverged though, which prevented rapid rollout of new UI features[1]. One of the perks of a graduated site used to be a custom design (not always just CSS changes).

Sites don't need separate database servers but separate database schemas, which is also why migrations between sites are still quite broken. Many processes around launching a new site appear to be very manual.

[1]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/307862

Why, I greatly appreciate sites about foreign languages study, for instance.

Of course, something like politics.stackexchange.com would be a suicide.

So like... https://politics.stackexchange.com

Not to mention Interpersonal. :(

I'd rather avoid either asking or answering anything there like a plague. Maybe not as suicidal as tweeting something slightly unorthodox on a politically heated topic, but still not a place to be while the cancel culture exists.

Judaism is a heated topic. If they did not have judaism.stackexchange.com, they would not have the Monica Celio incident.

That sounds awfully close to antisemitism. Perhaps you'd like to expand upon your statement?

What makes Judaism as a topic more heated than Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, all of which also have their own Stack Exchange sites?

You just proved my point!

... no, definitely missed it. Do you think that there's something special about Judaism vs other religions that makes it contentious to talk about?

If so, what and why?

If not, what are you talking about?

I’m just hearing about this case for the first time, and it took me a while to understand what happened, the question is detailed but there’s no summary, so here’s mine in case you’re interested:

A moderator had questions about / issues with a new Code of Conduct policy change which would “apparently force” moderators to use preferred pronouns of users, while the moderator preferred to use “they” to avoid using the wrong pronoun. StackExchange abruptly demoted the moderator before the change was published, and have since failed to give a good, evidence supported reasoning why. StackExchange attempted to apologize, multiple times, escalating to its CTO. The moderator still feels hurt and has not been reinstated.

You’ve pretty much hit the nail on the head. A few missing pieces:

- The moderator in question is a professional writer and preferred to avoid using any pronouns at all. She emailed SE to ask if that was acceptable, or if the new policy was mandating that she go out of her way to use pronouns. SE did not respond to her emails at all, then several weeks later they revoked her moderator status on a Friday night without even telling her — she figured it out when logged into the site and saw that her moderator tools were gone.

- Stack Exchange then went to the press and called her a transophobe and a bigot. They did post several “apologies,” but they weren’t apologies at all — they simply restated the (false) accusations and said they weren’t going to do anything to fix it. (See https://web.archive.org/web/20191005000615/https://meta.stac...)

- SE didn’t retract any of the accusations until the moderator got a lawyer and prepared to sue for defamation (SE’s accusations were the top Google result for her name for months)

- Then when all of the outrage started to die down, part 2 began when SE fired two long-time community managers who were just about the only staff members left that the community still trusted: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/342039/258777

Jiminy! That's an unforced error if I ever saw one! Thanks for the summary and context.

It's worth noting also around this same time they changed the front page of the site from the list of current questions to a "welcome" page that attempts to direct you towards purchasing one of their enterprise products. This is of no use to the vast majority of users who go to the site.

Between that and their CEO retiring, it's clear that the site is moving to a new way of working, and it's one that isn't beneficial to their actual users. If they're having trouble making money the way they previously did, then I guess they have to try something new, but it sure is sad to see this happen.

I'm not keen on going back to the experts exchange days. The only thing that matters to me is that I can either find an answer immediately or eventually get an answer. Today, that still works meaning the community is still working. I'm not able to get my answers from standard docs because my questions tend to be for edge cases in tech or languages that I don't use as often.

As a pretty avid finder of answers on SO, it's not surprising how much money people are willing to throw at this. It's one of the most useful resources on the internet, from my experiences.

But not a resource that was able to become profitable.

It is the Uber hypothesis. With so many users and so much demand, there must be profit somewhere right? /s

it's more like there's no reason why it can't be profitable but it wants to expand into 100 other niches

Not sure that's the best example: Uber is profitable in mature markets, but has high fixed costs from legal battles and SDC adventures.

My question is, why can't SO make a profit? All the substantive content is given for free by the community, and it's a widely known, relied-upon site. How is it so hard to cover operating costs from ads and whatever related sources come from that?

Uber is only “profitable” if you ignore a lot of expenses.

I’m purposefully not choosing the latest quarter that looks worse. I don’t think it’s fair to judge whether a company has a sound business model based on the effects of Covid.

https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-det...

Adjusted EBITDA. We define Adjusted EBITDA as net income (loss), excluding (i) income (loss) from discontinued operations, net of income taxes, (ii) net income (loss) attributable to non-controlling interests, net of tax, (iii) provision for (benefit from) income taxes, (iv) income (loss) from equity method investment, net of tax, (v) interest expense, (vi) other income (expense), net, (vii) depreciation and amortization, (viii) stock-based compensation expense, (ix) certain legal, tax, and regulatory reserve changes and settlements, (x) asset impairment/loss on sale of assets, (xi) acquisition and financing related expenses, (xii) restructuring charges and (xiii) other items not indicative of our ongoing operating performance.

They're already making money from 200k paid user accounts, from their team/enterprise-facing products, which they're using the funding to expand on.

Also, Uber has raised 160x as much capital, which makes the comparison slightly hyperbolic.

This has been an issue since the very beginning. There was a "discussion" and you can guess which side won.

>I would switch sites easily if there was a compelling alternative, but I haven't heard of one.

I think you just answered your own question on why people are willing to throw money at them.

I can't pinpoint the exact moment but I noticed I've been finding more and more answers in the official documentation, GitHub issues and project source code. Maybe Google got better at indexing docs or people started writing higher quality documentation but where I used to land on SO multiple times a day I will now visit it a few times a week at most. Also when the mentioned sources hit a search result it's almost always better quality (SO has gems for sure, but I often encounter outdated, incorrect or half solution answers and the format is not structured so that you can share your process which makes it hard to examine how someone got to that point and where to take it from there - unlike say GitHub issue thread).

Documentation as a sales and SEO tactic has been undervalued for so long that it's surprising it's taken this long for projects to clock onto the fact.

It's definitely a great trend for questions to be answered by the right communities up front rather than endless SO questions asking slightly different variants of the same thing.

(And if you run a project and aren't thinking about your documentation in that way, do start!)

> people started writing higher quality documentation

I think that's certainly the case. We went from raw, technical-specs style documentations revolving around feature description towards a more usage-based documentation style, which is far more effective at answering the most common questions when approaching a new software: "How can I do X using this software? What if Y happen when trying to do X?"

Also, projects like Django and companies like Stripe provided great examples to follow when writing solid documentations for respectively frameworks and APIs and led the way to an overall higher quality of docs, by mimetism.

It also doesn't hurt that a well-documented product sells better and has easier adoption: maybe the popular software/frameworks/languages/APIs of today are not exactly the "best" of yesterday, but people naturally gravitated towards the better documented ones.

Ive experienced the same thing, but have attributed it to gaining more experience. I feel like the questions answered on stack overflow usually are ones that one can trivially solve by knowing where to find documentation, and the questions I end up wanting help with are too specific to bring up sensible search results. Maybe I'm just bad at using search engines though...

> attributed it to gaining more experience

This was my thought. When I google stuff and will still see stack overflow as a top result but click on the official documentation instead, which is usually the 3rd or 4th result. SO is still showing up, I just visit it less because I get more value from docs these days.

I think experience (learning where to search) is a part of it.

But a lot of the software I was working with 10 years ago was not open-source - these days I can look up the source all the way to OS level when doing Android stuff for eg.

And documentation is really just much much better - MSDN of old was considered gold standard but nowdays it would be considered bad documentation - like someone else said above docs moved from pure references to more use case focused which makes it much more searchable and eats in SO space.

Reading the API reference or source code of the libraries I interface with is my first instinct today. In the past I would Google for the answer and land on StackOverflow. I don’t feel there was a radical change across all libraries I just have more experience under my belt, and it is faster to navigate the docs.

I've noticed the same thing. If it's a public library I am trying to figure out, I search the GitHub issues before StackOverflow now.

As a PHP developer, even when I have a general language question, I find myself looking at the Laravel GitHub issues or Laracasts before SO now. I can generally find the answer quicker there. And that's assuming I don't find the answer in the PHP docs, which are generally pretty good.

One of the documentation sites that were decent since a long time but have _massively_ increased over the last years is MDN [0].

It's just incredibly well designed and their tutorials and documentation pages are friendly but thorough.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/MDN_at_ten/History_...

I'm not a fan of everything Mozilla does, but their MDN docs are an exceptional standard that other language docs should aspire to.

This - unfortunately Google rarely lands there - but I use it exclusively when I need to lookup JS stuff.

Tip for those who use DDG:

You can prefix your query with '!mdn' (plus a space). To search in MDN directly.

> An Inflection Point to Accelerate the Realization of our Mission

It makes me sad to think that someone wrote this headline and thought it really meant something.

Congrats to the SO team, I guess.

I guess eventually you get to some substance. They are going to focus on "stack overflow for teams"

"Slack Overflow"

This name illustrates the limitations of this strategy. I like the idea of SO for Teams, but we already have Github Wikis, Github issues, and our team's slack instance.

Which is, of course, to immanentize the eschaton.

Hail Eris!

you mean that they should have ipo'd earlyer or that we should have an exclusive stock market for devs ?

Someone took their MBA vocabulary too seriously.

Well, assume you have a graph of progress over time, with 0 being just the mission plan and 1 being a full implemention. Then if your graph had a positive but declining slope, due to depleted funds, and now you get a cash injection, you'll hopefully see an inflection point marking a switch from negative to positive acceleration, towards realizing the mission.

Congrats to the SO team. That said, I'm struggling to understand how/why a they could possibly need to raise now a total of $153MM.

All the content is community generated so there's no costs there.

The core Exchange product is extremely templatized and I would assume be quite scale-able to spin-up as they need additional ones.

I don't believe they have much in the form of paid outbound marketing initiatives.

I'm assuming that I'm completely missing something here. Educate me. ;)

They are certainly trying to move the company in other directions that will require a lot of funding and uncertain returns. Otherwise, investors wouldn't even look at it.

That said, I'm struggling to understand how/why a they could possibly need to raise now a total of $153MM.

Gotta make the work of those digital sharecroppers pay off somehow: https://blog.codinghorror.com/are-you-a-digital-sharecropper...

No, the fact that the blog post was written by a SO founder is not lost on me.

> This is a topic that I've spent a great deal of time thinking about, because we happen to run a site chock full of user generated questions and answers. The last thing I want to do is exploit Stack Overflow users for corporate gain, even accidentally. That's horrible.

Yikes. Right on the nose...

Yikes is right. Seems like they said the quiet part out loud.

Jeff Atwood had principles, which is why the current morally bankrupt leadership wants to erase him. Stack would have been in a much better place if he’d been left in charge.

Why is it congratulatory when a company needs another round of funding? Shouldn’t they be congratulated once they have profitable business model that doesn’t require outside funding?

It's just a shame that programmers like myself can't invest randomly in the tools we love. GitHub, StackOverflow, and DigitalOcean all would have had at least $10k from me years ago. I get the reasons why, it's just frustrating to see obviously good companies grow just like you expect them to and 100x their valuation over a decade.

How will the rich and powerful grow if programmers like you are allowed to invest like you describe?

If you believe this then write to your congressional representative and tell them to repeal accredited investor rules.

What if they are one of the people that lost? Not every person gets a representative, only the bigger (but potentially small) portion of voters gets.

Most engineers can clear the accredited investor rules in their 30's. A million isn't what it used to be in the 80's.

Imagine thinking this is even close to accurate

Sorry, but it is accurate with many engineers I know. Most have pretty fat 401Ks by mid to late 30's. 401K millionaires are not uncommon.

Also, many west coast folks or those in high cost of living areas can clear the accredited investor rule based on income alone. ($200K income for 2 years in a row.)

You are aware that most engineers don't live and work in SF or NYC, right?

And even of the ones that do, most are not working at FAANG?

It's laughable that you think that just because you and your friends have the highest paying jobs, this somehow extrapolates to "most engineers."

As for the income rule, it's $300k, not 2.

Yes, I am aware. I am wrong about most. I will say that many engineers should be able to clear the accredited investor rule by their mid to late 30's. The bar is not that high.

And you are wrong about the income rule. It's $300k with a spouse. $200k as an individual. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investor#United_Sta... : "a natural person with income exceeding $200,000 in each of the two most recent years or joint income with a spouse exceeding $300,000 for those years and a reasonable expectation of the same income level in the current year."

"Many" could mean anything, so it's impossible to argue for or against.

I mean, pretty much everyone in NYC, SF (maybe Seattle too?) makes $200k+. That's a decent number of people to be sure, but a fraction of all engineers in the United States. The average senior software engineer salary nationwide is just over $120k. (That average includes the high coastal salaries, obviously.) Ain't no one getting accredited on that, honey.

You're right about the income rule, thanks for the correction.

You might need to offer more than $10k (or not, maybe enough fellow HNers are interested!) but 'investment clubs' could let you.

I gather it's a bit out of fashion (retail investing got easier, basically) but perhaps it's due a revival with a focus on private equity.

(The difference from an investment trust being that the club's members, the fellow HNers, vote on where to put their pooled money, rather than each mutually anonymously trusting the manager to do a good job, based on reputation or whatever.)

The issue isn't so much one of knowing how to invest, it's more the friction involved in investing in small companies. Random terms on sheets, weird cross-country concerns (like Canadian startups that want to maintain CCPC status), not being able to liquidate on demand.

What I want is something closer to a stock market for startups. But I get why that can't happen: Too many scams with small companies. Even today on places like TSXV there are tons of scams and it would only get worse.

If the market existed the bad would probably outweigh the good. I'm just sad because the good would have been great for me.

Right, I didn't mean that you didn't know how, just that it's high effort and capital requirement for such early stage companies; which used to be more true for publicly traded companies (phone calls, letters, physical share certificates) and investment clubs were/are a way of pooling resources. Family offices, but a club rather than a family, I suppose.

But it sounds like you want something more like VC-backed ETFs, with a pretty granular or even single-company focus, such that you agree with the underlying's focus, but don't have to deal with the lawyers etc. side of it.

Actually it's been a theme of Matt Levine's that the trend is toward ETF everything, ETFs of ETFs, 'nobody' dealing directly in the underlying.

I know ETFs are more popular with most people, but I'm a reasonably good investor. Average about 18% a year on a 50-50 mix of stocks and bonds, and that's before counting cryptocurrencies.

I absolutely knew that DigitalOcean was going to win as soon as I saw their UI, API, and pricing. I was almost as sure with GitHub.

What I like about dealing with the underlying in stocks is I can evaluate the product. Certain companies are no brainers when it comes to product (bought Tesla at $30, early Shopify, Apple after the iPhone came out, etc) and once I check out that their fundamentals don't leave them out of cash in a year or two I don't mind making the call. I also don't mind selling early. Buying hundreds of shares of Apple and selling call options at 10 or 15% above the current price six months out is a reasonable way of making a good return without getting greedy. If it swings south again I buy again.

That said, I haven't bought much in a couple years. The easy wins aren't there and the market as a whole was overvalued before covid and now it's just bananas. So I wait like a bear and make some piddly 1% return in a money market fund. Tempted to short the market, but I don't like shorting and puts are too expensive right now because of volatility.

ETF doesn't have to mean basket of shares though, there are already bond, short, mortgage, and all manner of ETFs. In theory I don't think anything stops a VC from investing in Digital Ocean's series whatever, and then launching an ETF derivative. I mean, maybe the series' terms, but probably mostly the lack of incentive.

In the UK (at least) there are venture capital trusts (VCTs) which give exchange traded access to 'venture-stage' private companies, but that's still a (small) basket of someone else's choosing rather than your own ideas and DD.

Basically I agree, I'd like it too. (I'd have had Stripe and Cloudflare (now $NET) some time ago for sure.) I'm just trying to think through how it could work, what it might look like. Crowdfunding rounds are obviously closest, but it's rare, at the companies' discretion even more than the decision to raise, and even says something about the sort of company it is.

100% agree with everything you said. I knew about non-broad basked ETFs but I think you knew that I knew anyway.

Crowdfunding looks nice, but I just want protection for the public at the same time as I want high-skilled technologists to be able to invest in obviously undervalued startups.

I actually really like this idea. The model sort of reminds me of a cooperative. There is a cooperative for Outdoor Clothing in Canada and it had a reasonable amount of success.

These types of organizations tend to be _very_ resilient and stable [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative

REI is a multi billion dollar co-op that is still going strong

MEC is struggling hard right now, unfortunately. COVID + Amazon + investment in more physical stores == Money troubles.

This concerns me. I doubt the product will actually become better with more VC money thrown at it. We will probably see things like premium content now.

What’s the endgame with SO here? A series F investment? Going public? Selling to Microsoft?

I would assume selling to Microsoft would be the thing to do.

But whoever buys it has no revenue model so that’s tricky. Unless they’re doing it for altruistic purposes.

Don’t get it twisted I love SO.

At this valuation an acquisition is less likely. I would have rather expected an acquisition by Microsoft than a series E, but I guess it's too late now.

That would leave an eventual IPO as the only way out, but they'd need to break even first (or at least have a very compelling vision to break even soon). I don't see that happening with their current Teams product, which is an uncompelling entry in a crowded market.

Also, whether Teams eventually succeeds is largely unrelated to SO's unique value: the community. Teams is not valuable because of the community, it's just a spin-off from their public platform. They really need to find a better path to success, because wasting $85M on the status quo is not going to get them there. Their Careers product was more interesting in this respect, but it seems they failed to achieve sufficient scale there.

> has no revenue model

Half the smartest people in the world are working on the revenue model

Ads. Ads everywhere.

The internal SO offering (SO for teams or what it's called) works reasonably well for huge orgs.

They're secretly waiting for GPT-4 to be finished, which will be trained on the whole SO question/answer corpus and can then be sold to big corporations desperate to scale up their teams of monkeys copy-pasting code from SO...sorry, I meant to say "engineers writing enterprise grade software".

> This is an exciting inflection point in our company’s history as we accelerate the realization of our mission

If your first line of a financing announcement is this, then I do wonder if SO has lost touch with who their target audience is.

I also struggle to see where the value actually comes from, if tomorrow all of the top 1% of posters stopped then their leverage to promote other lineups is dead.

It's a shame to say it but its another case of VC overvaluation

Bit concerning they haven't been able to build a sustainable business off a website that has become more or less a canonical resource for software engineers by now.

Looking at the answer-rate-over-time[0] SO benefits from the Corona pandemic.

0: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/303570/an...

wow, it looks like the answer rate is going down significantly. It looks like it slipped a bit in 2014/2015 but there's a big decrease in 2019 around the time of the Monica Cellio incident.

remember that the database to SO is released under CC.

https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2015/10/how-to-download-th...

Oh boy, Series E.

If you raise Series E it means either you are doing extremely well or your business is drowning and you need a lifesaver. A business that is doing really well typically raises much more than 85M, so I'm going to go with the latter option. In which case, also, an 85M lifeline at this stage means you are not worth that much alive ...

IMO I can see in a very clear way the downfall of SO happened, they undermined the community that made them rise in the first place. Their most valuable asset IS the community, way more than the knowledge base they have accrued. People no longer feel comfortable going there. I wouldn't be surprised if their MAU is going down.

Too bad for Atwood which I think is responsible for the culture that SO initially had, and which lured many of us to contribute. Since he left, it's hard to put it in words but something changed. I don't think he's happy with how the site turned out to be down the road.

tl;dr; what this series E means is that SO will become the new experts-exchange sooner than later.

SO is over 10 years old now and hasn't changed much - I'm wondering what makes the investors think that profits will come and now is a good time to invest more money.

Stack Overflow is the greatest programming resource ever made and the people who answer questions in a manner that helps also teach the OP are the true heroes.

How difficult it would be to build a decentralised SO?

I know it's the valuable knowledge base and contributing users that will be missing in our new service but we gotta start somewhere.

I guess it would be easier to onboard Software developers on a decentralised service than general public.

Some ideas for this service:

1. Users can choose to keep knowledge base locally for topic of their interests

2. A terminal based interface for quick answers

I guess the difficult part is not the technology, it's not like SO is doing anything too fancy on that front. But the community, growing and getting people to answer questions, that's something we'd have expected FSF to grow, but somehow that community couldn't.

I agree that building a community is very hard, but at least there are success stories to look at. I can't name any successful, Google-accessible decentralized system.

> How difficult it would be to build a decentralised SO?

Q&A platforms are widely available, and they could easily support federated/decentralized use cases via ActivityPub. So building a decentralized platform is mostly about creating these communities and enabling them to federate with one another.

In reading another current HN post I was reminded that for a long time, this was known as USENET.

Every time I search for an answer to a technical question, and I end up on a mailing list post, I get the old great/damn response: Great, that's my question! Damn, will it actually be accompanied by an answer??

I wonder if they have received any buyout offers lately. Their business model doesn't seem to be as successful as it should be (given how much their site is used), but it seems like they'd be an ideal candidate for a company that wanted to make inroads with developers, like Microsoft. And the site does already run on IIS. Perhaps I should start a Bureau of the Atomic Scientists-esque doomsday clock[0] for the minutes until Microsoft buys Canonical and Stack Overflow and completes their trifecta of modern dev tooling companies with GitHub.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock

I want to say "with the direction that SO Teams took - no."

Its not that SO Teams is a bad thing, just that it isn't the thing that the other companies want to buy.

Look at Microsoft - its got a large work productivity suite (MS Teams, Office, Sharepoint) - all of which are more more mature than Stack Overflow in terms of developer experience. And then there's GitHub and its got GitHub Discussions ( https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/104 ) on its roadmap for the near future. SO would be conflicting with that... and then there's the rest of the SE network that has nothing that a hypothetical MS buyer would want. And SO Jobs competes with LinkedIn. At best it would be an accuhire... but a lot of the developer knowledge has either left or been fired.

Google is the other option. But then... Google is trying to do its own venture into worker productivity. SO (and the SE Network) would kind of help that and making it searchable... but its really not that interesting of a target beyond all that content (and Google doesn't really like managing content of their own). And elsewhere on HN today you can see what Google thinks of maintaining information... why would they want to buy it when they can get search clicks for free? Google has no need to buy SO as an accuhire... and again, most of what is there seems to be sales rather than engineering (look at job postings https://stackoverflow.com/company/work-here#positions )

The blog post seems to suggest that SO wants to go up head to head with Zoom, Atlassian, Slack and Microsoft for the team productivity area. That feels like a "too little, too late" for the direction that they're looking at.

As an aside - look at the benefits on https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/companies/stack-overflow - the free lunch from in house chef and proclaiming great chairs feels (at least to me) more of a startup that is spending money because it got it.

A dystopian science fiction story where Yahoo buys Stack Overflow, destroys it like all their other products, and in the doing so, no one knows how to program anymore and society collapses.

"The next generation of digital applications" buzzbingo!

SO is an amazing product. I learnt a lot from it. But in the last few years, I have been directed more towards Github, whenever I face issues with a particular library or tech stack. I see those questions already being asked/answered via github Issue.

I am not sure, what is the endgame for SO. But, Github could become a strong competitor in this space. Its become lot more easier to copy paste troublesome code/error and see resolution in github.

I prefer using forums. They feel more personal, inviting, and calm. My bookmarks include top forums for every language I use. I would rather wait a few hours for an answer than bother with SO when I have questions that don't seem to have been asked before. SO is hostile even after years, and years of use I still always feel as though I am walking on eggshells when I post questions to SO. That's not okay.

To me the problem with stackoverflow is the same. It's a useful place to find examples and simple answers to almost-documentation kind of thing, but all the hard questions without a clear possibile answer is not allowed. This made the website less and less useful over time.

Haven’t used SO at all for over five years now. Eventually I’ll look up some weird edge case answers, but the trust I had on the site and it’s content is long gone.

This smells like a corporate move to get more money on executive’s pockets, nothing more. A shame that SO was allowed to get to this state.

Congrats to them. Let's hope it doesn't destabilize the product too much.

one the bright side, if it's destabilized enough then someone would be incentivized to build a better one.

How do you make a better one? It's a human problem, a social interaction problem, not a tech one. Novices want to ask all the didn't-even-read-the-official-docs and don't-want-to-do-my-own-homework questions they want, and the more experienced users don't want to see those kinds of low-bar questions.

In my not so humble opinion, the mods on SO gets a lot of shit, but I think they're not strict enough. SO is absolutely brimming with low-bar questions and answers. Best case that is all noise, worst case, the wrong and misinformed answers (by people portraying expertise) ends up in production code.

much like how there is a feature for linking to duplicates, there should be an official feature to link to a section in the official docs.

It should even be in your face when answering a question. A culture of posting sources/references.

What about all the other stack exchange sites? Are they separate and not deserving of support because they are not about software? Is it because software makes money so a public support group for software is monetizable?

I miss usenet.

I've stopped contributing to SO.

SO is simply going the same route as Experts Exchange (if you're old enough to remember it). It has amassed a significant amount of knowledge (for free!) that they'll some day hide behind a paywall and sell to desperate seekers of that information.

Doubtful, in the case of Stack Overflow, I think "free" and ads provide a hell of a lot more users and revenue than paywall.

EE used to be the top search result for a long time... Hope SO don't go out in the same way.

Congrats. Despite all the complaints about the nastiness of their mods, they’ve generated billions of dollars of programmer productivity to the world.

Could also be:

"Despite all the nastiness of their mods, they’ve generated billions of dollars of programmer productivity to the world, but who knows how much it could have been if the moderation was done better?"

The original quote is "Despite all the complaints about the nastiness of their mods." The original was not granting as true the mods being nasty, just that the complaints were real.

>complaints about the nastiness of their mods,

I didn't downvote your comment but I think it would be better if we don't phrase it in a "us vs them" manner such as "their mods".

The mods are _us_. The mods are mostly unpaid fellow users that passed a points threshold[1] to do certain admin tasks. E.g. 3000 points to cast "close votes" isn't that high.

If we don't like what the "mods" are doing, maybe that old saying is relevant: "we've met the enemy and the enemy is us."

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges

its mildly more complex. As someone that never enjoyed the moderation angle that SO took (forgoing community for correctness and generally tending towards librarian stuffiness), to me the mods are most certainly not "us".

If the mods on SO were more lenient than they already are SO would be completely useless, as opposed to barely useful, as it stands today.

So many of the low-effort questions and answers belong in forums or IRC channels, or just ask your colleague, FFS. Or, you know, read official documentation? Get an understanding of the subject before you start making posts and just wait around for an answer. But I guess people could actually learn something, then.

Learning is not what many developers seem to use SO for, they just want a quick fix. Something to copy-paste. It leaves them with no understanding and increases the shittyness of code everywhere.

We need a higher bar for programming. If you can't get your work done without SO, you should be fired.

Way more people are on SO than venture into IRC or are now split up on discord. SO had the opportunity to be that community and to be that helping hand, the community were willing (people like me!) but due to the attitudes of some, like yourself (j'accuse!) we closed ourselves off to that because we thought being "correct" was more important than helping.

SO could have easily been both but people just overly fixated on the concept of building a perfect library of knowledge.

The mods are one of the reasons SO is my last resort for finding help these days (for years now). You can say it's "us" but its not, and never has been.

Fair enough. Strictness of the model is more accurate than nastiness of the mods.

I thought it was bought by Microsoft but I guess it's just Mandela effect playing trick with my mind.

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