Ask HN: What Would Make Stack Overflow Great Again?
Just a brain exercise - and maybe a source of non-obvious pivot ideas:
If you were a product manager, what should Stack Overflow do to become great again?
If you were a product manager, what should Stack Overflow do to become great again?
I wouldn't go anti-AI though. AI is great at answering "how do I sort an array in Python", let it have those. Where it falls apart is the messy real-world stuff. I've had AI confidently tell me the wrong way to handle background BLE on Android, which would've gotten my app killed by every Samsung and Xiaomi device out there.
SO could own that dividing line. Let AI handle the commodity questions, use the reputation data to route the hard ones to actual humans who've been there. Mentorship marketplace on top of that. That's not anti-AI, that's using AI to make the human expertise more valuable, not less.
Basically make it more like Reddit askprogramming subreddit but keeps a higher standard about efforts made before asking the question. Questions should only be closed if there is no effort put into it or a genuine, obvious duplicate.
It’s also a good idea to embed an AI to point users to similar questions when posting their own questions. The original one sometimes didn’t work very well.
What I would fix is the karma system.
1) Don't give mod powers and responsibilities to people with high karma; moderation skill is intangible and not related to technical competency.
2) Get rid of "bullying" habits. Punish downvoting by increasing the cost to -1. Or do what other social media has done and hide votes, especially to high karma users.
3) Reset karma to 0, but recognize their peak value. Send an email out on why. This should be enough to get rid of all the people who are in it for the karma, and pull back all the people who were in it to contribute to a knowledge base.
4) Fire all the current moderators. They've collectively done a terrible job. Add their salaries together and use it to poach dang from HN.
But now with the usage fallen, maybe they could train their own coding models to compete with OpenAI, Anthropic, sort of like a hybrid of their previous forum + AI. AI solutions that work will get locked as "Accepted" by stack overflow like before via user vote.
Paid expert support in natural extension to bounty based q/a. Also, an AI with human in the loop.
A world where the BEST Typescript skills are crowdsourced over hundreds of thousands of projects/agents/people.
Q&A is dead more or less. Skills would bring it back.
I would say City for EPL for the greater good.