Recapping Stack’s first community-wide AMA (Ask Me Anything)

First of all, you deserve A for effort. I see now that you (the company) are actually trying to change and survive, in what appears to you as almost impossible battle to survive in the changing world.

That said, in this current direction, I'm sorry to say, but I think you're going to fail.

I'll repeat my comment:
You try to make Stack Exchange into social platform, and that just won't work.

Why? Very simple, you try to force Stack Exchange into something it's not, was never meant to be, and can't be since the world and the internet are already full with such platforms. People really don't need another one.

People need a good Q&A site in their field of interest, with high quality contents and platform they can trust to give them what they need: high quality content. And that is it. Nothing more.

Edit:

The original post has since been updated to explain the general concepts (the three-pronged approach) to changes to the site, and I'm actually on-board with this and think it will help Stack Overflow continue to be a useful resource. Thank you for responding and updating the post.

I will caution that branching out into different mediums can be tricky, as we've seen with the whole documentation project. I hope that Stack Overflow is willing to try things out, be a little messy, but most importantly be responsive and communicative with their community about what's being tried and how it's going.

Original response (74 upvotes, 3 downvotes at the time of adding the edit above):

As someone who didn't attend the AMA, but has a been a longtime supporter and user of StackExchange (and has actively advocated for using StackOverflow for Teams amongst my university lab and projects), this post is very confusing to me.

It reads to me as "We had an AMA. By the way, we're completely destroying the Q&A site you love for its accuracy and the ability to ask questions to humans and help other humans solve their problems, and instead becoming something like Reddit, a 'front-page' to the coding internet. Here's a link where you can learn more."

Um, what?

I'm still reeling from the fact that there even is a blog site rather than these announcements being made directly on Meta. (Yes, I was here for the whole "Meta is too harshly critical so we're posting elsewhere" phase as well.)

Maybe I'm just getting older and like "how things used to be", but this seems like a huge shift with not enough communication in the ways I would expect - (proposals on Meta with feedback from the community, that, yes, may be negative).

A feature that would be useful for me is if in this post you clearly described what the concepts are for the future of this site, rather than linking me to an external blog to find out more. (In short, I'd like your post to be self-contained.)

Starting with the Stack Overflow home page, this could include videos, blogs, Q&A, war stories, jokes, educational materials, jobs, and fold all these formats (or maybe others, we would love to hear your ideas!) together into one personalized destination.

This would be an absolutely massive change and a complete reversal of the main ideas behind the network. I don't even disagree with the idea in general; I think it is one valid way to try and reverse the decline of the network. But I am very, very skeptical that the company can pull this off, and I suspect you're dramatically underestimating just how difficult this will be.

Previous experiments along these lines (like Discussions) have shown that the company has the attention span of a coked-up squirrel. There is no follow through on big features; they're introduced and then neglected. And SE does tend to forget the social aspects of these features – simply implementing the technical part is only a fraction of the job.

Even relaxed content like this needs rules, and those rules are much, much more difficult to define and to enforce than our usual Q&A rules. Without rules, this just ends up as a pile of junk.

I think there is some value in the idea of having a more relaxed and fun part of the site. The Q&A concept adds a lot of limits and restrictions in the pursuit of quality. But it also limits building a community; it's just all business. But you need to be very careful to avoid compromising the quality of the Q&A part – there needs to be a certain level of separation. But I think a more social-networky Reddit-like site could serve as a raw source of engagement and user activity you could use to distill some Q&A out of. So while I think there needs to be a strong separation to the Q&A part, I think there would be a lot of value in making it easy to reuse/embed Q&A content in this new section. And the other way around, if a discussion or even a joke results in some interesting content, it might be worth it to encourage people to distill the essence into a nice Q&A pair for everyone that comes later so that they can learn from it without wading through all the noise.

I have no idea how to pull something like this off. I can think of all kinds of issues you'd encounter here, and I think the social aspect will be by far the biggest issue. You still need rules, just not so strict ones. You need to convince people to actually participate, and other people to clean up the inevitable mess. And you need to do all that without killing Q&A and competing with platforms that have done similar things for much longer.

The blog states:

We’ll be looking to expand and showcase blogs, news aggregation, coding workshops & challenges, rich videos, coding humor, and war stories from those in the technological trenches. We aim to be an educational resource for the industry and we understand that not everyone learns the same way—so let’s create content geared to all. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to learning!

Who will be responsible for deciding what blogs, news, coding workshops, challenges, videos, humor, and war stories are... in any way even relevant here? The blog has been fairly bad at this so far... ranging from sponsored content that serves only to drive traffic somewhere and old medium articles that were wrong when they were first posted. We already have places that we can trust to bring this kind of content forward in a way that ensures money/partner lobbying isn't driving what gets displayed/featured. Is it more or less going to be a user driven system, where anyone can post content, effectively turning into a system dominated by self promotion?

Starting with the Stack Overflow home page, this could include videos, blogs, Q&A, war stories, jokes, educational materials, jobs, and fold all these formats (or maybe others, we would love to hear your ideas!) together into one personalized destination.

I think you should make a different website and do this stuff with that different website. (Call it Stack Overflow Plus, maybe.) If that website / web app also served as a Stack Exchange client, allowing people to participate in Q&A on the existing sites, then I would not object.

Don't take Stack Exchange away from us, please.

I've been lurking on meta for quite some time since AI has become the topic du jour. I've seen graphs showing the decline in traffic pre-ChatGPT, but AI has accelerated this. After viewing part of the AMA, I'm starting to see a bigger picture here, and I am a little sympathetic to the network's plight.

For years, inexperienced developers had no real alternative than to ask a question on StackOverflow, and then be consummately down-voted, closed, and deleted. Most people, on an individual level, are not maliciously stupid, yet I see question after question where the OP is treated as such — not in comments, but in the general voting and closing behavior of the community.

This is a bitter pill to swallow, but I gotta say, I think us longtime members have a hand in this decline. I asked a question recently on StackOverflow, where I've got about 18k reputation from answering questions. It had an MRE, and I was immediately down-voted without a comment or close vote. I solved my own problem, no thanks to the community, and posted my answer. And my answer was immediately down-voted.

I've been using StackOverflow for over 15 years, and an active member for upwards of 11 years. Asking a question was a frustrating experience, and it wasn't the act of filling in the form fields; it was the community's response. I can only imagine what a new user must feel.

I think what struck me most during the AMA was talk about changing the code of conduct. I'm sorry, but in my opinion we, as the community, have a responsibility to be patient, and not mercilessly axe "sub-par" content as fast as humanly possible.

New users are choosing AI over SO because AI doesn't judge. You can ask it a fantastically stupid question and it will answer without berating you, and as a result you don't risk dinging your ego if you innocently ask something sub-par.

I am most active in the Software Engineering stack. Based on feedback from a lot of people asking questions, we've acquired a reputation of being rather snarky and judgmental. I don't think most of us are, but enough of us are that nearly every question from a new user is met with some kind of negative reaction, up to and including a recent querent commenting on their own post that people shouldn't ask questions in the SE stack; ask AI instead.

We cannot fix this with technology. We are dealing with a people problem that started before AI. Things like ChatGPT gave people a non-judgmental alternative to StackOverflow, and people are voting with their feet (or mice... or mobile phones... or whatever).

Maybe this is completely side-tracking this post, but I've completely changed how I interact with anyone asking a question in any of the communities. I've become much more patient, and I rarely down-vote questions now. I do frequently vote to close, but I address the OP directly with some suggestions to make the question better. I also call out things that are explicitly off topic, and I (attempt) to do this in a way that invites interaction. I also don't expect the world to magically ask better questions. I won't change the world, but at least I can be nice.

This isn't meant to sound weird, but I've been lurking on Worldbuilding for years nearly every day. One user, JBH, has always been friendly to people, even when people ask questions that are way off-topic. It's one of those strange cases where one random person gave me an example that I've applied to how I interact with other members of our community. I just can't help shake the feeling that people are going elsewhere because we — the people casting votes and closing questions — are the ones driving people away.

If we are to compete with AI, then we need to be a friendly, inviting community of people while also curating content. The Internet is full of low quality content, but I would like to see us take a little more time before down-voting, closing, and deleting questions. Give the OP some time to respond, for crying out loud.

I don't know how you can change a code of conduct to fix this, nor do I see how UI changes can fix this. I just know we need to try something, and I have a feeling it will be a combination of people and technology.

The audio quality was poor at times, resulting in missing significant chunks of the event. Is there a possibility of obtaining a transcript and/or improved audio?

Additionally, could we consider providing our upper management with better audio equipment for future events?

Of what possible benefit is shifting focus away from creating and curating knowledge? What makes you think you can do this sort of entertainment content better than the podcasters I listen to, the books I read, or the social media I already participate in? If you want to make a social media site for developers, by all means go ahead. I have my doubts that it will be successful given how relatively little engagement you get on your current social channels, but I am often surprised by what people are capable of.

What doesn't surprise me ever is how this cycle goes with corporations once the founders have moved on to other things. My prediction is a lot of out-of-the-box ideas will get tried, fail, and then there will be a push to return to the company's core competency leaving people wondering why they didn't stick to that in the first place.

Here are three of the main visuals from the AMA presentation. Perhaps easier to visualize.

1. Three-lane highway

   

2. Our current single-lane Q&A-centric highway that enables knowledge sharing

   

3. Our proposed three lane multi-content type highway that enables knowledge sharing, community and careers

   

I posted an absurdly long answer on Monday in response to Slate's question about what can be cut away but maybe a lot of the info in it would have made more sense here.

There are a lot of indications in this question and Prashanth's comments along with the blog that Q&A is perceived as somehow perfected or "pristine" and shouldn't be touched. I would invite y'all to look at the data in my post and determine whether that's actually the case. There are significant failings across the board in every aspect of the Q&A format:

• Finding existing Q&A (so users don't have to ask a new question)
• Indicating/judging quality of answers
• Access to privileges - voting, editing, moderating
• Rewarding participation
• Curating/reviewing aging content & determining what to do with outdated information
• Asking/answering questions well
• What to do when a question is closed
• Getting an answer at all
• Understanding how SE works, why limits to questions exist, how SE is different from forums/reddit.

The company deserves credit, as it has tried to address some of these problems from time to time. Just a few that come to mind include:

• Staging ground has been an effort to improve question asking outcomes - but has limits and relies heavily on curators.
• The Outdated answers project was well-received but the project ended after shipping a new answer sort. Users were intrigued by some of the proposed solutions but they were abandoned.
• The review queue UI and process was updated with an attempt to help make the guidance more helpful but the new UI has flaws and needs improvements.
• The 1 rep to vote change never got community support, largely due to user concerns that the proposed abuse mitigations were insufficient.

I don't know that you (Prashanth) recognize how neglected the platform has been over the years. It feels like most of the time the company tries to fix something, it's through adding new tools or ways to participate like Staging Ground, Discussions, or Collective. Meanwhile, the core Q&A experience stagnates and we're in a situation where more than half of the content created on SO in the last two years has a score of 0.

You say in the blog:

There are many new tools out there and that tab that was so prominent in years earlier may now be relegated to the back of the browser.

So, I'd sincerely ask you -

• Are people solving their problems on other platforms because they find the format of SO less engaging or do they find the content on SO less trustworthy/useful - do they struggle to find answers at all?
• What evidence do you have that your plans will wrest creators and consumers away from YouTube, Reddit, LinkedIn and other existing hubs?

I'm a huge proponent of community. I tie my longstanding engagement here to using Chat. I have friends around the world who share my appreciation of food, film, and SE because of that and it's part of why I'm still here right now. So please do invest in things to make the site more sticky and help garner community. I've been begging for improvements to Chat for years and I've been excited to see balpha poking at it.

Yes, the people on the internet are changing and I'm becoming a dinosaur... I personally find the reliance on video tutorials extremely frustrating and yearn for more text-based guidance. The thing is, people don't want to use platforms that feel like ghost towns, regardless of their name recognition and if it's not clear from my linked answer, SO is starting to look like one.

Despite that, I must speak up - you need to invest in revitalizing Q&A with an equal measure of effort that you're giving to investing in new formats. The community here has been hoping that such investments would happen eventually and y'all still have the opportunity to make that happen.

• Find ways to reward curators - they get nothing for their efforts currently
• Make curation/review of outdated content a priority
• Find ways to make post validation (voting) more accessible while preventing abuse.

By creating new content types you may attract more people to create or consume content but they are not necessarily going to be the sorts of people who will support the Q&A aspect of the site. That's OK! Users are specialists and seldom use all features on a platform equally. But no one is going to become a new curator of Q&A with the system in the state its in.

Now, maybe this is already in the plans you have for the future. If that's the case, you're not talking about it, despite being here on meta talking with the community and - as mentioned before, you kinda seem unaware that Q&A isn't in great shape. So... please, have a team focused on Q&A. Heck, I'd even PM it if you want someone who already understands these opportunities.

I'm not inherently against the company expanding into other realms. I mean, what would Google be if it stuck to only being a search engine?

What worries me is how directionless this feels. You want this to be the go-to spot to find all sorts of resources - articles, blogs, jokes, etc. OK... sure, but there's already lots of other large online platforms that specialize in each of these. What are you going to do differently? How are you going to stand out? What is going to be your killer feature(s)?

Also, each of these content types sounds like a huge product on their own. Don't spread yourself too thin in trying to tackle all of these at once - I'd rather have one really good product over tons of sub-par products. Perhaps start with discussions - what still needs to be done to improve that experience and make it better than competitors? What's supposed to be unique about it that'll actually drive people to use it?

I realize Stack Overflow is the flagship of, well, Stack Overflow, but why this exclusive focus on technology and developers, in this blog post and during the AMA?

Phrases like "we aim to be an educational resource for the industry" and "we aim to build and create an environment for everyone in technology" tend to alienate about 38%^* of the vast user base of the network you're heading.

Please acknowledge that the current network is about much more than software and programming—especially now that you're thinking about adding new types of content: you'll want to address this hugely diverse gathering of experts in a multitude of fields.

^{* Based on the query here (thanks, starball!).}

(Note: I explicitly permit- not that I think should need to- staff to edit this post and use quote formatting to respond to the questions in this post instead of via comments, if they prefer. Comments can be unwieldy for posts like this. I'm happy to maintain formatting and fix any formatting issues here)

Philippe:
Thank you. I've taken a pass through and answered some of the questions you have raised. I also skipped some and there truly is no rhyme or reason to the ones I answered - they just happened to be ones that I felt I could safely speak to by myself without consultation and that we hadn't already answered other places. In a couple of places I put my opinion, and delineated that I was not speaking for the company there. I signed all my edits, in hopes that if other staff comes along after me, it won't get too confusing.

The blog post says:

It might collect videos, blogs, Q&A, war stories, jokes, educational materials, jobs, all these formats (or maybe others, we would love to hear your ideas!), and fold them together into one personalized destination. We want this place to be your “third screen”—your entry point to your own neighborhood on the internet.
[...]
We’ll be looking to expand and showcase blogs, news aggregation, coding workshops & challenges, rich videos, coding humor, and war stories from those in the technological trenches.

• Q: How will licensing for these new content types work?

  Philippe:
  TBD. I'm sure it will be some sort of copyleft license, and my personal (not speaking for the company) desire would be to have a discussion to determine what the correct license should be. I don't think it's in our best interest to assume CC-BY-SA, although we may end up there after a reasoned decision. I just don't want us to default to that because it's 'easy'.

• Q: What will be the referencing standards for these new types of content? Will the inauthentic usage section of the Code of Conduct apply?

  Philippe:
  You're quite a bit ahead of us. You're on step 725, and we're on step 3. We're just to the point of determining what the content types might be, and which should receive experiments. But as with most rules sets here, I think that it's best if the rules are emergent (with conversations to assure that things don't get too stringent in "fast lane" activities, for instance) based on norms and usage.

• Q: I don't understand the identity of this thing. At times, it is framed as knowledge-sharing and educational content, but some of the examples don't sound like that. Ex. humour content and jobs, or being a "neighbourhood on the internet". So what is this?

  Philippe:
  We want to build with users here - figure out what gaps there are, figure out how people want to use this site, and fill those gaps. So if we find that people from the "fast lane" want chat, plus some light hearted content, and that keeps them engaged and consuming Q&A, we might experiment with that, as one example off the top of my head.

• Q: If each content type needs different implementation, that sounds like a lot of additional development work. Not just creating it, but testing, fixing bugs, security, and trust and safety, just to name a few dimensions. And that's just on the company's side. Frankly, the company have a recent history of delivering MVPs and then moving on to something else. Should we expect something similar here? Does the company have the minimum provisioning for security and T&S with all this new stuff?

  Philippe:
  I had this conversation with Jody, our CPTO, the other day. I don't want to speak for him, but I think I can safely say that Jody firmly believes that MVPs should not languish on the sites, and they should be cleaned up and improved or removed. Of course, the devil is in the details, but I think you'll see more attention paid to that moving forward.

  In terms of resourcing T&S, I just added a couple of new folks to the team, and as we see the team reach the limits of its capacity, I'm sure we can discuss more. Nobody wants to leave the site an open target. We've also announced some more hiring on the community enablement/engagement (non-T&S) side of the house, and those folks are all cross-trained as needed so we can surge more support from the CEE side.

• Q: There would a lot more content coming in, and in new forms of media. How does the company plan to prevent or respond to content that violates the Terms of Service and/or Code of Conduct? Ex. spam, misleading information, sexually explicit material, abusive behaviour, sensitive content and imagery, or harmful political content? The blog post mentions flagging. Does the company expect the community flagging system to handle this? How would you monitor or measure that's effectiveness? What will you do if it doesn't work well enough?

  Philippe:
  We do not expect community moderation alone to handle the issues you raise. We've increased our investment in engineering, with a specific focus on tooling, and added folks to the Trust and Safety team. I think the first line of defense here is effective "always-on" tooling, with community moderation and proactive trust and safety work happening in concert with that.

• Q: What is going to make this more valuable to people than what they already have elsewhere on reddit, discord, youtube, etc.? Just the fact that it's in one place? Do you have a plan and budget to achieve a level of UX quality that will make people want to use this?

• Q: What's the plan for if the company tries it and decides not to keep it? What will you do with the content?

• Q: With video as a content type, can we expect to see support in your infrastructure for file storage?

• Q: Some of this content sounds like content that is only relevant for specific time frames. Is the UI/UX design going to take that into account to prevent surfacing of content that is no longer relevant? Ex. on-site workshops, jobs.

• Q: The blog post mentions editing as a feature.

  • Who is going to get to edit what?
  • What are you going to do about people who don't want their stuff to be edited?
  • The existing editing system is built around the goal of building a library of Q&A. It has a focus, and a purpose. The Help Center page says: "Editing is important for keeping posts clear, relevant, and up-to-date. If you are not comfortable with the idea of your contributions being collaboratively edited by other trusted users, this may not be the site for you." What's the rationale going to be for each of these other content types? Who or what is going to decide what edit is appropriate or not?

• Q: I expect that this shouldn't impact your commitment to do Community Asks Sprints (the things that people already here have already been asking for, and which eventually new users who become "power users" will ask for), but I suppose I should ask, given that it sounds like the company is going to put a lot more work on its plate.

  Philippe:
  We made a commitment to do community asks sprints, and that commitment remains unchanged. There's a broad understanding of and appreciation for the value of those sprints, so no, they're not going anywhere (at least for the forseeable future - I don't like absolutes, so I don't want to say "never" but for as far as my magic crystal ball shows, they're here to stay.

During the AMA Prashanth mentioned wanting to focus on Chat and Discussions.
Can we expect the chat to finally be updated to at least contemporary standards before SE Inc. starts investing their time and efforts into this completely new "front page of the internet"/"third screen" project?

How about other outstanding issues and feature requests? Will they receive less attention or be put on hold for the upcoming year?

There currently is a post asking to identify the defects and improvements to the chat here:
How might Chat evolve? Help us identify problems and opportunities

I've just checked the transcript for the answer to Why is attribution optional?:

Lately, the company keeps saying "attribution is non-negotiable", and then using / endorsing systems that fundamentally cannot respect attribution. What's up with that?

… I'm still not entirely sure you get it. I don't say "fundamentally" for no reason! I'll copy the transcript here, inserting my colour commentary.

got it thank you wizz wizz for the question that's that's an important one I think the attribution is absolutely very important we consider it as is completely vital it is a non-negotiable as we engage with Partners but it's also a matter of you know us holding them accountable when they on their road map

Filler (usual for live Q&A).

and as they it does take some time for partners to incorporate that into their AI tools

Attribution isn't something that can just be "incorporated" into existing "AI tools". RAG does not count.

as we do these Partnerships with them and where they get licensed access to the data as an example so it's still in sort of an early infancy stage despite the fact we've struck multiple of these Partnerships

Filler.

they're all in the process of attributing so as an example one recent example is with Google Gemini Cloud assist that which is now attributing Stack Overflow content in the in their IDE right as you write code through that through that tool you will see the sources back to the Stack overflow Content that was was used

I haven't studied Google Gemini Cloud assist specifically, but I would be surprised if it weren't just RAG – which, as we know, isn't sufficient attribution.

Humans are "few-shot learners" because we think about what we are shown, and develop habitual patterns of thought based on our analysis of what we are shown. We make links between it and other things, developing our own perspectives and honing our own learning skills, so even two people who learned from the same textbook can come away with radically different perspectives on a subject. There is a very real sense in which humans "own" what they have learned.

Humans can generalise their knowledge and understanding in unprecedented ways: not only in response to unprecedented situations, but developing unprecedented meaningful concepts as well! So there is a very real sense in which humans can be said to "own" their creative output.

Language model architectures such as GPT, PaLM and Llama do none of this. Their training process is fitting a statistical model to an observed dataset. Their output process is sampling from this statistical model. (Sometimes there is an additional step, refining the model to be more persuasive.) Everything the model "knows" is directly taken from somebody's work, but the creation of this model is a form of averaging that makes a notion of attribution difficult to define – in much the same way that money laundering makes a notion of "follow the money" difficult to define.

you know originally anecdotally also I would just say that you know our head of marketing Eric Martin shared this with me earlier today is that the with open AI we now you begin to see things like sources within there and you can actually see the links again to Stack overflow if you're in and we have actually seen a nice increase in the traffic that comes to our site from from chatgpt actually

That's nice. It's completely orthogonal to proper attribution, though.

and you know obviously the opposite is happening on search for all content sites because that's just a it's a different world for search

Not all search. We can encourage the use of more respectful search systems, like Marginalia Search Engine. See the search results for "branch prediction fail" (image): the first six links (two boxes) are Stack Exchange, and that's organic!

but as gen AI and search trade off on you know you know getting access to users is sort of the primary screen that people spend time on to get access to information on the web

Incoherent. (Transcripts need to be written by actual people: the technology isn't there, and won't be until 2125 at the earliest.)

we're literally seeing that happen on our site where traffic seems to be coming now from both places people are coming definitely from Google but also our search engines and people are definitely coming from now our some of our knowledge as a service integration so it was interesting to see the chat GPT traffic through this attribution point

so it is a long way of saying wizz wizz it is a a work in progress and it is is happening as we keep working with each of these Partners to to hold them accountable to that requirement thank you

I understand "some is better than none" and "harm reduction", but you're not holding them accountable to that requirement. You're holding them accountable to a weaker requirement ("search for and link to relevant Stack Exchange pages"), which – while way better than nothing – is not the same thing as attribution.

DuckDuckGo has been shoving AI slop in my face. Usually I ignore it, but I wasn't concentrating hard enough, so I read this one. It's a good example!

The two "cited sources" are:

• Get Real Or Die Trying Ep 17: The Duality of Man: Human Nature vs. Spiritual Nature (to which we can attribute the "good and evil" and "higher and lower selves" examples)
• The Duality of Man | Know Your Meme (to which we could plausibly attribute "humans have opposing desires" and "humans are complex")

But the claim that "This idea is often explored in philosophy and psychology" – where does that come from? It's completely absent from the "sources", and I'm not sure it's even true. (It's often explored in literary analysis.) If this claim does come from somewhere… where?

This is not attribution.

Kaylee Williams, Sarah Grevy Gotfredsen, and Dhrumil Mehta of Columbia Journalism Review did an experiment, and found that “Content licensing deals with news sources provided no guarantee of accurate citation in chatbot responses.”

On a somewhat tangential note, I looked up the definition of money laundering. The bit about US law was interesting, but I've lost the tabs. The UK's Crown Prosecution Service's page on "Money Laundering Offences" says:

Money laundering is defined in the POCA as “the process by which the proceeds of crime are converted into assets which appear to have a legitimate origin, so that they can be retained permanently or recycled into further criminal enterprises”.

(quoting the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 Explanatory Notes, not the law proper)

This definition is quite broad, so I dug a bit deeper, and… per sections 326, 327 and 340 of the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, large-scale AI provenance-laundering might not just be like money laundering: it looks like it falls under the plain-English definition, hinging only on whether the scraping CC-licensed texts satisfies the legalese "obtains an interest in it". (This'll probably never be relevant, but it's interesting.)

I fear you ofttimes forget that SE is so much more than Stack Overflow; it is the Stack Exchange Network. I have very little rep on SO itself and rarely interact with it as an asker/answerer, while on the other sites I'm on I am much more active. I probably would not be active on the network at all if it wasn't for the community in the other sites, especially Code Golf's. So please, do not forget us.

On a related note, instead of adding more social aspects first, improve the ones you already have. I visit Code Golf's main chatroom every day, and it serves as my own little commmunity-within-a-community. Improving chat would already serve to increase that sense of "community", and speaking from personal experience, it serves to increase engagement with the main sites as well (as an extreme example, PLDI initially started out as users in Code Golf's main chatroom asking each other language design questions, which grew into a formal event, which eventually ended up in a site being proposed and beta'd).

On a positive note (well slightly anyway) it was heartening, and I might have been a little excited, that chat was mentioned. Though, as something that has a long history, has many essential services like SmokeDetector tied into it, and attracts the most passionate of the passionate users, it will be interesting to see what the company has planned, and how sensitive the changes will be to sentiments. It was good to see an acknowledgement that chat is deeply buried and hard to find, and I'm hopeful it gets rectified. A lot of chatbots on the network also kind of rely on chat essentially being static over the last decade — and I hope that there's a better framework considered than running pseudo-users and essentially screenscraping. Chat's a useful tool left to moulder, and I'd like to see my chatrooms active again.

Another thing I'm very guardedly optimistic about is the mention of community hires. I've been pretty vocal for the need for this and…

And y'know, in the future — I'm very happy to say — we'd love to hire more of you into that team. Uh, we've done it in the past; we've got members of the community in the seat in our community management team. But as we open up more roles we'd love to see you nominate… somebody — let's say from the Meta community or the broader community — to join our Community Management team.
Because again, we are looking for perspectives so that we can build the future with you, uh not just for you. And that's something that is very important to us.

Sounds like what I've been agitating for for years. That said, I'm wondering how the interest levels will be and what the company is planning/willing to do to attract this talent. As someone who's applied in the past, I've competed with some excellent folk, and levels of interest in previous/recent rounds that were open to the community was not great — due to a mix of attrition and community/company drama. Would you be open to rehiring previous CMs, or (at a personal level!) being more flexible about where a community manager would be based if there's sufficient support for it? I'd love to see the company acting on this promise but historically, there feels like there's been little enthusiasm about this at times.

I agree with Greg that many people just ask their question to ChatGPT instead of coming here.

But I disagree with lot of the rest of their answer. Being nicer to people may help somewhat, but that dilutes the quality of the site (but I'm also not saying the not-so-warm reception many new users get is a good thing - more on that later). And even still, the fundamental and existential problem remains: asking ChatGPT is just a better experience most of the time, at least when you're not facing some really obscure problem.

Branching out into other things may (or may not) help the company stay alive (i.e. make investors happy). But it doesn't really help the Q&A stay alive (except maybe as a useless appendage to whatever else you'd start doing).

Where Stack Exchange excels, is with canonical questions and answers, e.g. telling you practically every answer to some generic question, like why some exception occurs. Really high quality answers, that you can bookmark and come back to, and point other people to. Unfortunately, this is also really rare, and tends to not happen organically. When someone asks an overly broad question, that could make for a good canonical question, that's typically heavily downvoted and quickly closed, whether rightly so or not. Whereas many answerers focus on the specific details of the question, instead of trying to provide a more comprehensive answer that would help people with similar problems.

The aforementioned high-quality answers is SE's unique selling point (USP), which sets it apart from sites like Reddit, where there are little quality standards and most posts are asked and forgotten within a day, or less. Turning Stack Exchange into Reddit isn't going to help, and we're already a long way towards that.

Stack Exchange Inc haven't paid much attention to their USP for a long time (apart from a few twitches here and there). Users try and have tried to keep that dream alive. But that's an uphill battle, and given the lack of strong (or much of any) top-down support, many have given up, realising it's futile, that their efforts often end up doing more harm than good (i.e. people being unhappy with their questions being downvoted or closed, and people being unhappy with so many questions being closed).

Catija offers some relevant suggestions.

My overarching suggestion would be to fundamental rethink how the Q&A works, what we reward, and how the site's success is measured.

• The site gives reputation for answers, little to nothing for edits, and nothing for casting close votes (which also have a hefty reputation requirement). This incentivises people to post as many answers as possible, as quickly as possible, instead of trying to write a few really good answers, editing other people's answers, and closing questions that are duplicates or that don't quite belong here.
• When people ask a question here, they're usually looking for an answer to their very narrow problem - this is fundamentally at odds with Stack Exchange's USP. Maybe we shouldn't be focusing on asking questions as the main way most users (especially new users) interact with the site. Think less Reddit and more Wikipedia.
• For Wikipedia, they need editors, sure, but their success is measured more by how many viewers they get. It would be an abject failure if they measured success primarily by how many new editors they get and how often those editors create new pages. Stack Exchange's success should be measured similarly. Success shouldn't be measured by how much new content people spit out, it should be measured by how useful people find the content on the site.

Maybe this is a doomed endeavour (or one that'll keep trudging along, as it's been doing, with a few rare diamonds hidden within a whole mountain of things with no long-term value). And maybe someone else should start a new site with this USP as their core founding principle.

As a developer, when it all boils down, I have the following modes:

Modes

1. I'm stuck on a specific issue, and need immediate help
2. I'm stuck (mentally) on a decision and would like to seek input... "should I use a Map? a Set? an Array, or List?... and why"
3. I'm procrastinating or have spare time, and I want to help out the community
4. I'm procrastinating or have spare time, and I just want to chat about code/tech and related stuff (e.g. I'm OK to wander into "Best PlayStation game" conversations)

Actions

1. Go to StackOverflow and post a question... or if I think I can refine a query prompt well enough... ask AI
2. Seek a group to chat about this (SO chat?, Discord?, Discourse? My co-workers Slack/Teams chat, etc.)
3. Go to StackOverflow and post answers, clean up posts, formatting, review queues, etc.) #FeelGood
4. Seek a group to chat about this... knowing full well this will likely go way off topic... Discord? Friend group chat? Twitch stream?

Each mode has a distinct intention for what the user is looking for. For #1, the user needs a super high signal to noise ratio... vs. #4 - I'm expecting a lot of noise... I may start talking about making video games and it devolves into a Marvel vs. DC argument.

No one service can solve all 4 scenarios, nor should one attempt to... attempting to do so will just become a complete mess.

Now, if you want to provide a distinct service for all of these, each with their own well-stated guidelines etc. and wrap it all up under one umbrella (enabling linking from one into the other)... that's fine... just don't mix them together.

The part that is missing for me today, is a good option for #2 and #4.

There are times I'd like to have a good, on topic discussion about returning null vs. throwing an exception... why unit tests are good on good code, but make bad code harder to refactor and it actually increases inertia. I don't have a good place for this currently, please by all means make one!

Likewise, if you can make a really good chat/discussion experience for a narrow well scoped topic, I'd love a solution for more arbitrary topics... "Played any good platformer games recently that you'd recommend I try out?" I'd appreciate a "safe" place for these kinds of chats.

However...

• I don't want a blog aggregator - I'll follow links from Twitter/BlueSky for that.
• I don't want video content - unless it is a specific, on topic "how to" of a particular thing, with links to actual code snippets e.g. "How to 'fracture' a Mesh (e.g. cube) in Unity when it collides with another object"

It sounds a little bit, like you're trying to do something that is a bit like what I've noted, but also quite different.

The key is this... you need to ask yourself as you go:

Does this feel like we are building the Yahoo! homepage?

If the answer is ever yes... you're building the wrong thing.

Stack Exchange currently does something, and does it very well:Q&A

That's...literally the point of this site, high quality Q&A. That's why we are all here.

People who want a social network can go to social media, or Reddit, or something like that. You won't create a better version of social media or Reddit, you'll create a worse version of it.

So...why would someone come here for a worse version of an already existing service?

Why don't you instead focus on actually improving your product rather than trying to do everything for everyone? You can not, and should not, do literally everything possible, and if you try you will do everything poorly.

What would make everyone's life much easier would be the following

1. Have an attention span. You have an existing product. Fix it. Improve it. Don't do half an improvement and then abandon it. Finish old things before you start new ones.
2. Understand the site. You (senior management) seem to have literally no idea how this site works or why people use it. So...please get an idea. Use the site for a bit. Your CEO says one of their biggest mistakes is not using the platform so...how about actually using it!?
3. Don't make things worse. Even if you won't make stuff better, at least don't activity wreck sites (ex. AI Assistant)
4. Listen to and care about the community. What about, instead of constantly coming up with your latest terrible idea since less than 3 weeks ago, how about listening to ideas from the thousands of users who have used your platform for years, and understand what users of your platform want a lot better than you do? I understand why you would be reluctant to just trust "some people on the internet", but honestly...your ideas aren't working. I don't know company financials here, and nor am I an expert in this...but any activity or views graph speaks for itself. This platform is dying and a huge, if not the largest, part of that is that you have been destroying the site.

So...how's "don't destroy anything else, fix the stuff you already destroyed and then maybe its worth talking about how to improve stuff".

I really like the three lane idea (although personally not so much interested in chat, would like to turn that lane off, would be interested in other lanes with articles though). If you can make it a feed that shows really interesting content (based on viewing or voting information), possibly mixing different stackexchanges, that could become a more often go to site indeed. Possible sorting/filtering options could be may be interesting to answer items, popular recent, popular alltime, ...

Only problem I see is with separating content clearly between discussions and Q&A. Discussion is not simply lower quality and faster prepared Q&A. Discussions are asking for opinions, recommendations, partial solutions to broad topics. Basically everything that Q&A isn't. In that way it's not just a different quality but also a different category.

I would be worried that people mix this up and post Q&As in the discussions lane and vice versa, resulting in additional curation effort, possibly friction.

We should pay extra attention to have a clear separation there. For every piece of content it should be clear if it's Q&A or a discussion.

Stack Exchange is splitting it's purpose and it's going poorly. Your own presentation makes the same point. Look at "Canonical Q&A Library" in this image compared to this one. How quickly did you find it in the second image?

The things listed on the second slide are worrying. "Comment"? "Homework"? "Following"? "DMs"? These sound like features of a social network and allowed low quality content.

But, the bigger point to make - How is Stack Exchange going to focus on all of those dots in the second chart, when the one big dot from the first - the reason your users are here - hasn't been focused on.

From the AMA at around the 15:20 mark

More recently, what we've been thinking about is maybe we should just leave that [editor note: Q&A] as is because there is a mission and purpose for that lane. Which is slower in nature but for a reason because quality means, you know, take your time to make sure it's curated, accurate, it's peer reviewed and so on.

How can the company just now be coming to this realization?

But maybe we should open up two other lanes. A medium lane where you are faster. Maybe not as high quality but it's a lot more instant. Why? Because we've heard users - you have told us - that you want more instant answers.

We all know that Stack Overflow sits in the training data of many of the current generations of LLMs. Why would someone want to build there next generation off of less accurate data?

The goal is not to make it a social platform, but to introduce additional mediums for users to communicate beyond just Q&A. As a consequence, the site evolves from primarily a high quality knowledge base to include additional community and career oriented content types and features. - Prashanth Chandrasekar

I already spoke about the social aspects that I'm seeing in the chart about Stack Exchange's focus. Let's look at the career oriented ones.

• Coding Challenge - Please don't make another LeetCode.
• Tech Reviews - Like "this new keyboard is awesome!"? This reads as sponsorship slots to me. Is that the goal?
• Jobs

Jobs is the big one. Stack Exchange killed off an amazing tool for developers with their previous iteration of jobs, with the developer stories. As someone that got hired using that tool and something that hired entire teams of engineers, Stack Overflow's developer stories had the best signal to noise ratio. As a candidate I could set up filters that were useful.

Now it's working with Indeed. Now filters are literally keywords with 10 results per page. No way to sort by recently posted, or to set up useful filters. Additionally, as someone who hires, Indeed has such a low signal to noise ratio.

You HAD a tool for this. If you really wanted to do something in the "Career" space, revive what existed.

Mobile apps

The open web has undergone many changes, and the Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange community and team have had a front-row seat for much of it. From the rise of personal computing in the 1980s to the rise of the Internet in the 1990s to the explosion of mobile computing and cloud computing in the early 2000s.

[...] over the course of the next year, we’ll be focused on ensuring our sites remain a go-to destination for our users, including by modernizing the existing assets we have in place but also by introducing new capabilities and features that promote contribution from all types of users.

The new Stack Overflow will be one built to feel like a personalized homepage—your own technical aggregator. It might collect videos, blogs, Q&A, war stories, jokes, educational materials, jobs, all these formats (or maybe others, we would love to hear your ideas!), and fold them together into one personalized destination. We want this place to be your “third screen”—your entry point to your own neighborhood on the internet.

Do people even use desktop/laptop computers and "home pages" any more?

I get what they are going for I guess, opening up content types so that Stack Overflow can become a Reddit-like content aggregator that algorithmically delivers programming content of all kinds beyond Q&A. Like humor, images, job discussions, industry news, whatever.

But all those social algorithmic content destinations like Reddit, TikTok, Facebook, are mobile apps that people largely use on their phones. They're also not "the open web".

The Stack Overflow apps were discontinued in 2022:

• Updated: Mobile app infrastructure has been decommissioned

Stack Overflow seems to work fine as a website today because programmers mainly use it from their personal computers while working.

If the site is being made more "social", will there be enough traffic/interest in surfing these websites in a browser to make the venture worth it? If you want significant user growth from this new endeavor, will mobile apps for iOS and Android be required and are those being planned?