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Stack Overflow Live Q&A YouTube Link: https://www.youtube.com/live/6-3J7G_XX0s

On February 26, 2025, from 3:00 to 4:30 PM EST (20:00 to 21:30 UTC), Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar will be holding an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session for members of the Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange communities. We would appreciate it if you would join for this session, which will be hosted on YouTube. Learn more about this event from Prashanth’s blog post here.

Why You Should Attend

Live Q&A Session: Prashanth and other leadership team members will answer your questions. A presentation on the future of Stack Overflow. An opportunity to ask questions, share feedback, and hear from members of the Stack Exchange leadership team.

Session Agenda (90 minutes total)

  • Presentation - approximately 30 mins
  • Questions submitted in advance - approximately 30 mins
  • Questions submitted during the session - approximately 30 mins

How to Participate & Attend

You can view and participate in the session on the Stack YouTube Channel. You can submit your questions ahead of time either as an answer on this post or via submission on this form. You may also submit questions during the Q&A portion of the AMA.

Submitting a question is not a guarantee that one or any of your questions will be answered. You don’t have to attend to submit a question. Feel free to submit questions even if you won’t be able to attend.

Save the Date:

  • Date: February 26, 2025
  • Time: 20:00 UTC, 3:00 PM EST, 12:00 PM PST, 11:00 PM GMT+3, 7:00 AM AEDT
  • Platform: YouTube
  • Question submission: Use this form

We are looking forward to hearing from you and answering as many questions as we have time for. If you have any additional concerns or feedback, please leave them on this post.

We will continue to monitor this post until the AMA has concluded, but the best way to make sure your questions are submitted for possible inclusion in the AMA, especially during the week of the event, is to fill out the question submission form.

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    dunno if yall have forgotten, but you've kinda got a Q&A network here, it could even be organized by the tag you just created. Commented Feb 6, 2025 at 15:28
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    It could even just go on forever, with the CEO and "few others" being able to answer whenever they want, wherever they want, with no real time crunch or necessary need to have an answer immediately or within the next month. Commented Feb 6, 2025 at 15:53
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    Wouldn't it be better to hold this in the morning US time? Given that largest parts of the SE user base is split between 3 time zones: Americas, Europe/Africa and India. Commented Feb 6, 2025 at 15:53
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    @TylerH unless the questions are closely related I'd be for separate answers, then it's easier to vote on them and later select the popular ones. Commented Feb 6, 2025 at 16:22
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    Since I don't think this will get answered anyway I'll just throw this out here instead of filling that form: Over the last 4 years the CEO basically has had zero activity on the network (Other than a comment replying to a joke). Over this period of time there have been many discussions have happened and the companies relation with the community has been at a low point. Why does the CEO not use their own platform and why doesn't he address the community here but rather chooses external platforms to do so? Commented Feb 6, 2025 at 16:44
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    @AbdulAzizBarkat A comment replying to a joke about an event with users that was then postponed and never happened. Commented Feb 6, 2025 at 19:26
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    In Indian Standard Time, the meeting will commence at 1:30 AM. Note that the date in India and Australia will be February 27, 2025. Commented Feb 6, 2025 at 19:29
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    If SO's leadership had any interest in answering questions from the community, they would simply log in to meta occasionally and join in the discussions. I don't exactly know why they're doing this "AMA" but it's not to answer actual questions. Any predictions about how many "questions", not submitted in advance, will get "answered"? I guess 5. Commented Feb 7, 2025 at 5:57
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    @SteveBennett And here I am not just predicting how many, I think I may also know whose questions will be answered. Commented Feb 7, 2025 at 8:22
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    @SteveBennett it's just a show. Might be fun to watch, but I really and honestly don't expect it to be anything more than just fun. (i.e. no hope something useful will come out of it.) Commented Feb 9, 2025 at 9:27
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    @NoDataDumpNoContribution I remember it. It ran for 45 minutes and it was announced as it started. I found out about it 40 minutes after the start. It was never re-scheduled or in any way repeated. Not even all things that were raised there were given staff response. Even though some of the points that were raised after the 45 minute window did get a response, others didn't. I vividly remember how it didn't serve at all as a boost of confidence for Collectives and I took it as a red flag at the time. In retrospect, I feel it was justified. Commented Feb 10, 2025 at 13:03
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    @Sinatr You can submit your questions ahead of time either as an answer on this post or via submission on this form. It is perfectly reasonable for someone to want to ask a question without the general public knowing they were the one that asked it; they may not want to deal with the comments. We all know the questions are going to be filtered so it matters not that some are asked privately. Commented Feb 10, 2025 at 18:13
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    @Sinatr an external form that doesn't require login allows access to people outside of MSE Commented Feb 10, 2025 at 19:22
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    "A presentation on the future of Stack Overflow" - Why do I get the icky feeling that this is the main reason for this "AMA", and the "Ask" and "Anything" parts are just tacked on to draw people in to the presentation? How much of said presentation will involve convincing us that AI isn't evil? Commented Feb 12, 2025 at 0:17
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    CEO says one of his biggest mistakes is not engaging with the community on Meta. I'm guessing this doesn't extend to him actually doing so, starting tomorrow morning Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 20:43

56 Answers 56

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AMA Question:

How would you rate/describe your performance in your role?

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    Now this would be an interesting question to get an answer to... Commented Feb 6, 2025 at 23:50
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    @V2Blast Most people have problems answering truthfully there. Better to ask indirectly, like what he sees as his biggest achievement here. Commented Feb 7, 2025 at 6:34
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    @NoDataDumpNoContribution - Thats what I'd be counting on, if they can't be truthful then I'd know how much credence to give to their other answers Commented Feb 7, 2025 at 9:15
  • @Sayse As I said, most people (me included) would not answer truthfully there. Of course my performance always was to the best of my knowledge. Now you know how much credence you can give to all my other answers. Commented Feb 7, 2025 at 9:57
  • It will be very interesting to hear how the CEO (I take it this is a question for him, specifically?) reflects on his role so far. Commented Feb 9, 2025 at 11:37
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AMA Question

What is the difference between an answer submitted by a person who has years of experience in their expert field and one generated by Artificial Intelligence?

Related: How close are we to AI's generated content even matching or surpassing that of a subject matter expert's?

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    Perhaps because you seem to ask a question that can be answered by anyone. Maybe it's better to ask "What, in your opinion, is the difference .."? Commented Feb 8, 2025 at 12:49
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    Or better yet - “Why do you think artificial intelligence can match the expertise of someone with years of experience in their field?” Commented Feb 8, 2025 at 13:18
  • @Anerdw The idea is, that noone will deny the fact that it can't. It's just a matter of, who is willing to train their AI for free? Commented Feb 8, 2025 at 15:49
  • I don't think the SE CEO is the person to ask that question, if it is at all a question to ask an individual rather than a philosophical one or a question for ongoing research. Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 15:51
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AMA Question:

What have you learnt about the company and the community since joining as CEO?

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    I fear this question is far too open-ended to get any sort of meaningful answer. Commented Feb 6, 2025 at 23:50
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    @V2Blast I fear if you expect ANY meaningful answers from that event you will be sorely disappointed... Commented Feb 7, 2025 at 9:17
  • @V2Blast I'm not expecting much, but I'm sure the community will make something of the answer. Commented Feb 7, 2025 at 12:34
  • [...If anything] Commented Feb 9, 2025 at 7:42
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AMA Question:

Are there any plans to make more community-wide AMAs sessions in the future? Could they happen occasionally, periodically (e.g., every 2-3 months), or will it only happen once or twice? I suppose that this is not completely decided yet, but I would like to at least know if they are plans to make it into a definite way for SO and SE users to ask questions to leadership team members (with or without the CEO).

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    One of these every 2-3 months?! With a CEO as active as ours, you'd be dreaming to get one every six months. Commented Feb 9, 2025 at 2:35
  • We don't need AMAs, this is a Q&A platform. Just let people address questions to SE management, and highly-upvoted ones can be queried and answered at one's leisure. Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 15:53
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A recent experiment appears to suggest that the introduction of AI generated answers, alongside expert answers, should increase the volume of users/visitors and in the long term increase user-satisfaction.

What evidence is there that supports this idea?

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  • suggested by who, where? Commented Feb 8, 2025 at 9:09
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    @starball Why do you think there's currently an experiment being performed on three Q&A sites? meta.stackexchange.com/questions/406307/…. What do you think is the motivation behind such an initiative? Commented Feb 8, 2025 at 9:22
  • so you mean implicitly suggested? Commented Feb 8, 2025 at 9:35
  • I suggest rewording this. The phrase "A recent experiment appears to suggest" makes it sound like you're talking about a conclusion that can be drawn from the result of the experiment, but I think that's not what you mean. Perhaps "A recent experiment appears to be based on the assumption that..." would fit your meaning better? Commented Feb 24, 2025 at 16:14
  • @N.Virgo makes it sound like you're talking about a conclusion that can be drawn from the result of the experiment, Yes, I suppose that interpretation is a possibility. It hadn't occurred to me that the meaning could be misconstrued. However, the link to the "experiment" and the words "suggest" and "should increase" insinuate that it has not concluded. I'll think about whether it's opportune to edit the post. Thank you for your suggestion. Commented Feb 25, 2025 at 10:11
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AMA question

Do you think that to keep the userbase activated & engaged, we need to pivot and synergize™ the effects of a dynamic, light hearted work q&a enviroment?

Actual question: A lot of events had been cancelled over the past years (e.g. ,,). Is there any plan to bring any back or create new ones? Personally I think there should be a bit of fun every now to help keep morale up.

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  • 100% about your real question. It's a shame so many fun events have been canceled/retired over the last few years. I think some of them (e.g. April Fool's, Winterbash) were probably unsustainable the way they were being run – a cross-functional team spending several weeks implementing things that'd only apply for a week or a day – but I think there are ways to have fun that aren't quite so resource-intensive. Commented Feb 21, 2025 at 19:59
  • @V2Blast agreed there are tons of small things, like this contest for meta rep and some more cheesy stuff. I think that sort of thing should still be feasible to do nowadays. Commented Feb 23, 2025 at 14:40
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AMA question:

A classic: If in 6-8 years it turned out that the StackExchanges went down, what will most likely have been the reason for it?

In other words, what is seen by management as the single biggest danger to continued success of the platform?

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    It's also not so hypothetical, judging by the decreased traffic over the last years I see a real probability for it. Commented Feb 8, 2025 at 12:39
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    While a trend in users or questions may be apparent, asking to speculate why the site may go down in an imagined future is completely hypothetical. You're basically asking them to make up a reason for why the site might fail in 6-8 years. They could say "a meteor hit the Earth and we all died" and it would be a valid, honest answer. Doesn't really tell us anything. Commented Feb 12, 2025 at 15:16
  • @TylerH This is a classic and every answer would tell us a lot. It's just a reformulation of "what is the biggest weakness of your business model in your opinion". If they said that it's actually so rock solid that only a meteor can derail them, they either wouldn't be honest or completely detached from reality, which would be good to know. You would have to compare your answer with their answer. But maybe analyzing weaknesses has gone out of fashion. I don't know. I anyway don't think much useful will come out of this AMA. Commented Feb 12, 2025 at 15:26
  • I agree there is some value to asking some form of this, and have upvoted similar posts that others have suggested here. I just think this form of the question is too vague to be of any value (and I think that's true for any AMA by any person/organization, not specific to SO). Commented Feb 12, 2025 at 15:34
  • @TylerH I thought that is one of the biggest questions here at all. There is a decline of the network and we cannot simply continue with the old recipes but we differ greatly on how to go forward. One possible analysis would look at what the essential mistake/wrong assumption is that is done here. Of course asking can result in dishonest, empty answers but that risk always exist and is no reason not to ask. It would be their chance to explain their view of what goes wrong. Commented Feb 12, 2025 at 20:40
  • I think in that case it's best to rephrase your question entirely, like "what do you think is the current greatest danger to its continued success" or something similar that they can reasonable expect to answer. Commented Feb 12, 2025 at 21:57
  • I think what you propose and what I wrote are synonyms and both are equal in my eyes but if it helps I will put both versions. Commented Feb 12, 2025 at 22:02
  • suggest s/single biggest danger/greatest dangers/ Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 15:54
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AMA question:

Are you going to be an old-school CEO that invest in his company to make grow what you manage? Or instead just another new-style short-term minded CEO that only tries to maximize shareholder value by destroying the business that have been placed on its hands?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/28/maximizing-shareholder-value-the-dumbest-idea-in-the-world/

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AMA Question

When do you stop the job-cooperation with Indeed and bring back the old jobs? Did you ever thought about?

Background

From my point of view: The old job-system brought a good cashflow, it gave a good reason to write good answers on SO and many people talked about SO.
And now, the cooperation produced a system with a lot bugs and seems to be "more or less" a link to Indeed.

Fun Fact: I found my current job with the old Jobs.

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    I agree as well that the new system is more of a link to indeed as well as not so engaging. Commented Feb 24, 2025 at 7:10
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    I doubt that they'll ever bring back the old Jobs platform, but I do agree that the new one doesn't serve much of a purpose. Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 18:53
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    The new system is literally worse than just using indeed directly. Fraud/spam can't be reported here, it is pre-filtered in a way that you can't control and is most certainly filtering out good opportunities, and it does a horrible job of filtering based on location. Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 18:58
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AMA Question:

  • With Stack Overflow demonstrably in decline...
  • With the community rejecting nearly every change forced in by "Stack Exchange, Inc."...
  • With the need for a human-driven place to share knowledge as strong as ever...

Will you facilitate the restructuring of Stack Exchange, moving to a non-for-profit with a community-lead board?

Answer by Prashanth Chandrasekar (CEO):

Oh that's a very specific question. I'm not sure we would need to do that, is sort of the answer to that question, given what I just described. Because that I think assumes that there's some sort of a disconnect between what we're trying to do. Ultimately it's all in service of the users. All the things, free products, which is the public community which all of you help create, and our paid products, the enterprise products. Some companies have chosen to be 100% nonprofits, and that's not us. We want to basically have a business model around a community and a knowledge base, ultimately again in service of you. We think that works for this particular company versus being sort of a nonprofit.

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    Suggest s/every change/many, and perhaps most, changes/ . No need for hyperbole. But this is a super-important question. I'd floated this idea as part of the discussions about the moderator strike: "If you say you don't have money, then spin out SE as a non-profit and the community will manage to fund it." or something along those lines. Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 15:59
  • @einpoklum I don't think it's hyperbole. I haven't seen a single notable change that the community liked in years. Taking into account the bias that highlights negative changes, and the fact that we engineers tend to nitpick everything, I hedged with the "nearly" part of "nearly every change". Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 17:21
  • I think meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432836/… qualifies as a well-received change. It was very simple change for something the company broke six years ago and refused to revert despite very clear community feedback, but still. Commented Feb 27, 2025 at 7:25
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AMA question:

Last one, I promise. What in your opinion is the best, i.e. most beneficial and maintainable, way to store human knowledge? There is Q&A, articles, graphs, coefficients of models, or maybe something else?

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  • Q&A surely seems like a good way to retrieve knowledge and maybe even to generate knowledge (not so sure) but the intermediate information storage I always rather imagined a book (basically just the answers with some relations between them). Commented Feb 12, 2025 at 7:49
  • Nobody seems to know or want to know. What a pity. Commented Jul 13, 2025 at 22:44
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AMA Question:

In a world increasingly shifting from democracy to plutocracy — simply because the technology is now there to shift the opinion of the voters — democratic pillars are one by one being replaced with autocratic pillars. Stack Exchange was one place that I hoped would be able to stand up to this trend. But when I see a proposal with 25 upvotes and almost 400 downvotes being nonetheless advanced, because it benefits an unnamed plutocrat — it makes me realize I was wrong. Stack Exchange has become a business, who is willing to lose a large portion of its quality, or even users, if in the end it means SE has made more money.

Are you willing to stand up to the plutocracy that's taking over this world? How much monetary value do you put on the opinion of the users? At which point will you say No to an offer regardless of how big of an payment you get? Where do you draw the line?

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    I'm not sure if autocracy has anything to do with it. It's just a business not a charity. The only purpose is to make money. If there is something good happening as a side product, it's fine but the owners decide what it will be. And that would be true and desirable in a democracy as well. It's not like SE is in the gun or drug business or promoting say Trump's or Putin's worldviews. We, the users have to stand up, so that the businesses simply adapt to us. If you don't like SE you can simply make your own competing service or join a competing initiative. Commented Feb 7, 2025 at 18:41
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    Thanks a lot for lifting up an incredibly important point that would otherwise be left out. I honestly don't see much reason to trying to actually engage with SE to get answers, but at least this points out the nasty reality behind the power concentration that lays in this. These LLMs are not democratic whatsoever; they are fully under the control of individuals we know do not take the society's needs and rights into account, and they themselves aren't being held accountable. It's important to point out how dystopian this path is. Commented Feb 7, 2025 at 18:46
  • Having said that once upon the time business leaders seemed to have a bit of morale but then they owned the business, which is a totally different case. Commented Feb 7, 2025 at 18:48
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    @NoDataDumpNoContribution You entirely miss the point. It's a massive power concentration in all the wrong hands; the hands of people that are not in a position to be held accountable, and even worse, the power that lays in this isn't even clear out of the gate to most people. Commented Feb 7, 2025 at 18:50
  • @NoDataDumpNoContribution But at the same time, you do have a point as well. When I first signed up, I don't remember being aware of this profit-focused orientation. I remember Jeff being very active, and I realized that he's profiting a lot less than the amount of time he's putting into it. I thought it was about people helping people -- a "charity effort" in your words -- and the advertisement was chiefly there in order to pay for the hosting... Commented Feb 7, 2025 at 20:05
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    @Alex Maybe that was the idea in the beginning but since 2019 the company belongs to an even larger company. It doesn't sound fair to hold it to a higher standard than what you would expect from any other private company in the world. SO took venture capital as far as I know to get started. The financial backers weren't in it for the charity effort. They were in it for the money. Seems like a misunderstanding from the side of the users then. Commented Feb 7, 2025 at 21:29
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    @NoDataDumpNoContribution Companies are not obliged to make money. I would expect a private company to not have "make money" as its focus if it is stewarding a community resource. We do not, under any circumstances, "gotta be fair to them" if they're destroying what we have for their own enrichment. Commented Feb 8, 2025 at 13:14
  • @wizzwizz4 Maybe, but we should not act too surprised now. At least not since the company belongs to Prosus, is my opinion. There isn't really a contract to that regard, just expectations and if they are reasonable or not... Commented Feb 8, 2025 at 13:29
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    Please leave politics out of this. I agree about SE being too much of a business, but even if the CEO or management or whoever sails the ship has certain political view and opinions, it's not relevant. Commented Feb 8, 2025 at 19:39
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    @ShadowWizard We are currently doing politics. I am doing politics in response to your politics in response to politics on DoingPolitics Stack Exchange. You'll have to be more specific than "please leave politics out of this". Commented Feb 8, 2025 at 22:15
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    On Jeff Atwood & charity: blog.codinghorror.com/stay-gold-america Commented Feb 9, 2025 at 2:39
  • This appears to simply repeat, just using much more political and ambiguous language, my question here: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/406399/… Commented Feb 12, 2025 at 15:20
  • @TylerH I read and voted on your question before posting mine -- the main difference was, that your question asks about the present -- "Why?" The Why is clear to me -- money; my question asks about the future -- Where will you draw the line? Because Money will remain a factor indefinitely, even until SE content loses its value; but there has to be a point at which they will say, enough is enough? Commented Feb 12, 2025 at 15:49
  • I wish the SE network had been more democratic, or at least more answerable to the community - but that's fundamentally not the case. So I believe your premise is flawed: SE Inc. was always a business and always a plutocracy. The CEO serves the people with ploutos, i.e. wealth, i.e. the company owners. If that were different, we would see some binding commitment to such service. Still, +1 for bringing the subject up. Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 15:58
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AMA Question:

How do you prioritize bug fixes for the bugs reported by the users?

For example, here on Meta, there are many bugs reported that are highly upvoted, which suggests that they affect many users, but that are still to be assigned a formal "status" tag. Many of these bugs are quite old.

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    Status tags are generally assigned by mods Commented Feb 6, 2025 at 18:41
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    @Starship yes, although that's a bit of a recent change. The status tags used to be assigned by staff. Then they added the ability for mods to assign the tags. So, old questions wouldn't have been overseen by mods at the time. A mod might add a status tag on an older question, if they so wish, but it requires the mod to trawl through the backlog, evaluate if that's still an issue, evaluate how critical it is, etc. Mods can also respond to a flag, if a user requests a status-review tag. But SE essentially passed the ball to the community to do triage. Doing it retroactively is hard. Commented Feb 6, 2025 at 19:20
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    This seems more like a question for the development team manager(s) than the CEO. Commented Feb 6, 2025 at 20:06
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    @Mithical I agree. Note that the OP mentioned that "Prashanth and other leadership team members will answer your questions." Hopefully, these "other members" will include the people who are able to answer this question. Commented Feb 6, 2025 at 20:31
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    the other members are mentioned in the blog Commented Feb 6, 2025 at 22:25
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    Good question. While status tags are assigned by mods, prioritization is completely opaque and only discernable after the fact by looking at what actually gets implemented (and it's often stuff that had no relevant bug reports or feature requests tagged in the first place). Commented Feb 12, 2025 at 15:15
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    I thought prioritization was by whether Elon Musk is tagged in your bug report directly to the CEO on Twitter (warning, this link will take you to Twitter aka x.com). Commented Feb 12, 2025 at 16:57
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My AMA Question:

Suppose the company would be facing rough times in the future, and must cut its losses and possibly make drastic changes in order to survive.

Would you, as the CEO, prefer to shrink the company back to Stack Overflow only and thus cut everything related to the rest of the sites (i.e. closing them down, making most Community Manager roles obsolete, as well as less need in support and developers, etc.) or perform a massive "flat" layoff of employees as happened several times before?

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  • Frankly, given the disparity in size between SO and any other site, I really doubt that removing all other sites and keeping SO would make any significant difference to how many CMs or other staff are needed, so this question seems moot. Commented Feb 8, 2025 at 21:34
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    I think it's pretty obvious, when it comes to making money: do more with less. So "cutting" sites would be a pretty desperate move, they would cut people (by far their biggest expense) before removing sites which generate even small amounts of income Commented Feb 11, 2025 at 21:52
  • Phillippe commented on this answer that personnel costs amount to ~80% of their budget, if that helps put it in perspective. Commented Feb 11, 2025 at 22:04
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AMA Question:

What are you doing to better retain your StackOverflow for Teams / Enterprise customers? As a long time user of one of your Enterprise accounts you just lost, I'd like to know how the company can pivot to provide better value to your paying customers. Specifically, what features can you add are of value to customers like us and can you commit staff to building corporate communities like ours? Expecting volunteer engagement might be one thing here in the greater internet, but it did not work well in building our corporate community...and we were paying StackOverflow for the service.

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    Would probably depend on why you left the paid product. Did you give them feedback? Have they asked for it? Is it something that could be fixed? Commented Feb 13, 2025 at 22:20
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    There are reasons for the departure that could be specifically talked about in a private conversation. But, in general terms for a public audience, and what I'm trying to talk about here, is that our attempt to build a StackOverflow community within our org had limited success. A lot of that has to do with us, but I definitely didn't feel supported by the StackOverflow company in our attempt despite us paying $$ for the service. It's like they expected the same things that work on the public internet to work in a paid corporate environment. Commented Feb 17, 2025 at 16:16
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About AMA question:

Will there be any written publication on the transcription of what will be done on YouTube?

Unfortunately I am working in an area that is difficult to access and the connectivity would only allow me to read text articles.

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    I just posed the same question on the YouTube live chat. I think they will. But worst case, we can still get access to the VOD of the stream and convert them manually Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 21:35
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    The audio echo was so horrible much of the time that it is torture to ask someone to produce a transcript manually. It's so sad that they couldn't fix it for so long. I gave up in pain and disgust Commented Feb 28, 2025 at 1:03
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    Transcript now available as a pdf on the wrap up post Commented Feb 28, 2025 at 23:46
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AMA Question:

What do you think is your (and your team's) biggest achievement since joining Stack Overflow? What was/is your (and your team's) biggest challenge since joining Stack Overflow?

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  • We already know. His biggest achievement is acquisition of SO by Prosus. Commented Feb 14, 2025 at 17:40
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    [...If anything...] Commented Feb 15, 2025 at 19:38
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AMA Question:

Are there any benefits planned to encourage users to participate more, especially the 20k+ rep community?

I've been a member of StackOverflow since beta, loved the mission, loved helping out, and the original podcast etc. etc. However in recent months/years I've been less interested in participating actively (insert meme of Peter Gibbons meeting with the Bobs in Office Space).

"The thing is Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, I just don't care... where's the motivation?"

I'd honestly like to contribute more, but it doesn't feel "as fun" as it did in the early years.

I have a bunch of rep and badges, but grinding out for a bit more rep/badges doesn't have the same pull it used to.

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  • Great question! I'm not sure if it got answered in the AMA, but I am curious. For you personally, what do you think has changed that's made participation feel less motivating? What would make contributing feel more worthwhile for you today? what would make contributing to Stack Overflow feel more worthwhile for you today? Commented Feb 27, 2025 at 2:50
  • After 20k rep, there are no milestones (in terms of permissions) to achieve - some additional "goals" (yes even of no financial value) would provide the "carrot on a stick" to work towards. When I do answer, I often find a question gets closed as a dupe, but what it points to is "kinda sorta" the same, but not quite, and I feel the end user is sent on a quest trying to get the answer they actually need (this is a problem)... if I ask AI, "how do I do X, with Y, when Z" I get a very direct on point answer - I think this is what SO is now competing against... 1/2 Commented Feb 27, 2025 at 16:46
  • 2/2 , enabling a higher signal to noise ratio for user's questions will be key to making the "question asker" happier, and the "answer provider" more engaged to provide answers. Commented Feb 27, 2025 at 16:47
  • Off yeah. I am sure questions getting closed can be frustrating, especially when you do take the time to answer. If that were addressed, it could definitely make answering feel more rewarding. But you also brought up wanting more goals to work toward... if you could imagine some new, creative goals or milestones that don’t exist right now, what would they be? What kind of achievements or rewards would make you feel more motivated to get involved? Commented Feb 27, 2025 at 18:07
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AMA Question

Some time ago we had a brilliant AI Search service which is now unavailable. It is a pity since it helped to find correct answers even if in "draft" condition. It was a great starting point.

Questions:

  1. Is there a plan to get it back?
  2. If not, can you share the recent version of the trained model and scripts so that it could be reworked to run locally?
  3. If not, is there any trained model based on SO/SE databases which could be used online or locally to get the collective experience together with power of LLM?

*Reservation. I know that the main opposing argument is that for now it is risky since it gives sometimes low quality answers, but consider the other usage. I just get hints and ideas from it and this is much faster than shape the question, especially when it is hard to word something unknown. AI with LLM helps a lot for first steps here.

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    This currently exists as a stack over flow for teams feature. Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 15:35
  • @KevinB, thank you, this helps. Seems, the question should be reworded to "does this mean that this won't be on the other parts of SO/SE, since it is a valuable part of paid section and a good reason for pay?". Not sure who could I ask about this. If this is the reasoning, there is no hope to get the trained LLM. Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 16:25
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    my understanding is... they don't have a trained LLM for this purpose, they're using off the shelf solutions, combining a search that finds relevant answers and an LLM doing summaries. Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 16:36
  • @KevinB, do you mean that they use real SO/SE textbase and real-time search on it without any preprocessing which results in a relatively small dataset (like trained 8Gb LLM)? Do you see like they just run search with my text and then compile results only with LLM? Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 18:39
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    My understanding, based on the feature announcement for when this feature was publicly tested on stackoverflow.com, was that it was simply a search + summarization. no training. They relied on existing public models. Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 18:41
  • @KevinB, I get it, thank you. (Just to be on the same page, in my last comment I just asked if I got you correctly, this wasn't a kind of argument or doubts in your vision for this case). Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 18:45
  • Honestly I wasn't sure i completely understood what you were stating, if maybe you were interpreting something from what i said that i didn't think i said or... what. :shrug:. but it was more or less just semantic search + summarization, and a fairly standard chatbot mode. From what i've seen of demos for what it in teams... it seems like it's exactly the same thing. Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 18:46
  • @KevinB, as a second thought, even this could be used locally. If they share LLM which is doing summaries and allow to use it with prompting, it could work. Like I have command prompt tool where I post my question, it sends it to SO/SE, gets the results and builds the answer. Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 18:47
  • I mean... if the LLM they're using to do summaries is just sending stuff off to gemini... i'm not sure what you're expecting to retrieve. Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 18:48
  • @KevinB, now I finally got the point. Thank you. Then, only scripts could be of use in case they have some tuning. Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 19:43
-1

AMA Question:

Will you please direct your engineering/development teams to implement hierarchical (parent) tags on relevant Stack sites? This has been requested over a hundred times, for at least 15 years, and would greatly improve the usefulness of the tagging system for finding relevant content or implementing new features that scale well. It was rather myopically resisted by one of the original founders, but he was wrong, and he's also been gone from the company for over a decade, so now'd be a great time to implement such a sorely-needed feature.

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    Honestly, this isn't a community asks sprint. Promoting a feature request really doesn't seem like the point of this Commented Feb 6, 2025 at 18:41
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    @Starship It's an AMA, so any question is fair game/"the point". When is the next time you expect we'll have to ask for a feature that has a chance of getting directly addressed by the CEO? Commented Feb 10, 2025 at 14:54
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    It's an AMA yes. But it obvious has some limits. For example, trying to engage the CEO in a debate about US politics is just not the point. Nor is promotion of a random feature-request Commented Feb 10, 2025 at 18:23
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    "An opportunity to ask questions, share feedback, and hear from members of the Stack Exchange leadership team." - i.e. not just the CEO. This could be directed at the CTO or COO who would be in a better position to help Commented Feb 11, 2025 at 22:16
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    @Robotnik But it still just the wrong place for this sort of thing Commented Feb 12, 2025 at 1:38
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    @Starship It does not have limits. That's literally what AMA means. There is another term for constrained AMAs called "AMAA" (Ask me almost anything), but that term was not used here. Aside from that, this is a product-specific question that is perfectly within the realm of reasonable requests to pose to the leadership team at an open forum where ALL questions are potentially OK. You'd be hard-pressed to find a more appropriate kind of question than this. If they didn't want feature requests posed as questions here, they'd have explicitly enumerated that in a 'dont ask about...' list. Commented Feb 12, 2025 at 15:12
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    If you disagree re: the importance/suitability of this kind of question in this AMA then you're free to downvote. I've deleted a bunch of comments that were back-and-forths about whether this is a suitable question to ask for this event. I'd generally agree that there's a time and place for a question like this and this might not be it, but the scope of AMAs are intentionally wide. Let's respect that. Commented Feb 25, 2025 at 22:19
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AMA question:

In your opinion, in two to three years of time from now, how widespread will the use of AI based tools, bots or agents on the stackexchanges be?

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  • They are trying (see stackoverflow.ai) but also falling (see answer bot). Let's see how it goes in the future (if there is one). Commented Jul 13, 2025 at 22:44
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What’s one question you wish people would ask you in AMAs—but they never do?

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  • 6 upvotes and 3 downvotes, interesting. Commented Feb 15, 2025 at 7:06
  • Don't worry some people on meta will downvote anything, if they could probably even their own posts :) Commented Feb 15, 2025 at 9:19
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    This is the one question I guarantee they will answer. Commented Feb 17, 2025 at 2:42
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    You're practically asking him to make up a question and answer it, instead of answering community questions. If he wants to blog about something - he can always do that. -1. Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 16:04
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AMA Question

Given Stack Exchange's growth, are there any plans for the company to go public through an IPO in the future, allowing both regular citizens and investors to get involved?

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    Stack Exchange is owned by Prosus, which is publicly traded. Commented Feb 27, 2025 at 8:00
  • Lions, and Tigers, and Bears.... OH MY!! Commented Feb 27, 2025 at 12:37
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Theres a growing problem with the statement in here around including code.

Users are intepreting MVP code as policy and voting to close these kinds of questions.

There are few problems with this for example when resource management comes as a factor. To reproduce there needs to be a peice of hardware involved, a large amount of code needs to be provided, or some of the code is under NDA.

MVP code in the question should be optional, it very much is according to the guidelines. But users have come to consider it as policy, leaving a growing number of questions unanswered or unjustly closed.

AMA Question:

Will Stackoverflow consider start supporting the ability to ask more complex or academic CS questions?

Will it need to do this anyway to stay competitive with LLMs that are already taking over the answering of simpler questions?

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    This seems more like a question for close voters on SO. Commented Feb 24, 2025 at 21:18
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    I can see why it's preferred to discourage low quality questions. but even just adding a flair, tab, category, whatever could be helpful in encouraging questions that arent just directly solving a small coding problem. Commented Feb 24, 2025 at 21:30
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    Don't we have cs.stackexchange.com and cstheory.stackexchange.com for that? Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 16:06
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Nitpick: the date in the banner doesn't follow the standard Stack Overflow grammar & writing mechanics. It should say "February 26, at [...]" instead of "February 26th, at [...]".

Join Stack Overflow’s first live community AMA on February 26th, at 3 PM ET. Learn more

Here's the relevant section (irrelevant part of table removed):

Dates

There is no need to add st, nd, th, or rd to dates.

[...]

Don't Do
September 2nd September 2

Can this be updated?

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AMA question:

What do you think is the best/favourite site in the stack exchange network?
(excluding stack overflow)

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    Best according to what criteria? Is this was a question on the network it would be closed. Commented Feb 13, 2025 at 22:20
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    @NoDataDumpNoContribution according to the people answering the AMA, surely. AMAs tend to ask personal questions that the person answering can just opine on or otherwise answer according to their own knowledge and experience. Rather than ask them objective questions. Commented Feb 14, 2025 at 11:01
  • @VLAZ The asker could of course include a specific criteria in the question and make it a more focused one, if they have one in mind. If not people reading the answer will be puzzled how the respondent came to the conclusion, unless one is included in the answer then. But you always need a metric in order to maximize something. Commented Feb 14, 2025 at 11:42
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    @NoDataDumpNoContribution they could add a criteria. But they don't have to. All AMA questions are an implied "according to you, your knowledge, and experience". It's weird to ask for objective criteria on AMA questions. AMA isn't some sort of research. It's supposed to a more informal conversation. Do you have a chat with somebody and throw in "What is the best ice cream? Here are the list of criteria you have to consider and give an objective answer..."? Commented Feb 14, 2025 at 11:47
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    I’m not sure why this question is unloved. Maybe if you changed “best site” to “what’s your favorite site”? AMAs are not interrogations folks. It might be nice to ask questions that someone can answer as an individual and not as a company spokesperson. Commented Feb 14, 2025 at 12:27
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    @VLAZ Sorry, I was just interested if maybe they had a specific criteria in mind. I'm so trained by now to always ask for more information if somebody asks for something best, that might not be the best response always. Commented Feb 14, 2025 at 12:59
  • Maybe instead you could ask for some favourite individual Q&As - pages that really highlight the best of what SE can be. Commented Feb 20, 2025 at 12:23
  • @ColleenV if the individual answering had any activity or participation on the network at all, then I'd be slightly interested. It feels like this question would take away precious time from more useful questions. Commented Feb 20, 2025 at 13:50
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    @tenfour I think that you're making an assumption about what the answer to this question would be if they chose to answer it, and how much time it would take away from other questions. You have no interest at all in what the CEO thinks is the best site on the network and why? What if he says Parenting instead of Stack Overflow? What if he participates with a personal account so he doesn't get people bothering him about Meta stuff when he's trying to figure out what type of bug is eating his lettuce on Gardening & Landscaping? Commented Feb 20, 2025 at 14:16
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    @ColleenV all very fair points. I am still personally not interested in the answer because I am extremely skeptical that it would be sincere... though that applies to the entire AMA so I remove my downvote Commented Feb 20, 2025 at 14:26
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