After 16 years, we’re renewing the Brand

one of the desired outputs of the rebrand process is to clarify our place in the world

So, can you please actually say what you are trying to make your place be?

There was the Answer Bot, which made it seem like you were trying to make Stack Exchange into a place for (community reviewed) AI content. Then you removed that experiment.

Then you had a lot of talk about a "3-lane highway" and how you wanted to make space for discussion and forms other than Q&A. These would be separate from Q&A, and included things like Discussions and Chat.

Then, you seem to have totally abandoned discussions. Now, you also have an experiment where you plan to allow much more noise originally planned to be in discussions into comments, and to change their purpose. You also seem to be planning to find a place for closed questions to be okay.

So, what exactly are you trying to be? An AI platform? A discussion forum? Something else? How are you going to clarify to other's your place in the world if you can't seem to consistently stay with one yourselves?

As usual: While I am an employee of this company, what I'm writing down here are only my personal thoughts and opinions.

To me the question comes down to: Who are the people who care that we exist? (Excluding purely financial interests.)

Those people, among which I include myself, we are hardcore geeks who are curious about a lot of things and always want to find out more about how things work.

I could add "… and who love explaining the things they learned to others", but I think that venn diagram is a circle. Have you met geeks?

"Things" can be very broad. Home improvement, programming, parenting, math, music, theology -- all of those are things you can geek out on to your heart's content.

Somebody who simply wants an answer to "How do I fix this compiler error?" does not care that we exist. They care that some place or entity exists that can give them an answer ready to copy & paste, so they can get on with their job (and more power to them). But they couldn't care less whether that place is Stack Overflow, Reddit, ChatGPT, or the coworker in the next office.

What makes Stack Overflow special is that if they post a question here, they might not just get that copy & paste fix, but also a genius explanation of the underpinnings of the problem, written by a core maintainer of the compiler in question.

Even if that happens, the asker may not care. But the world now has an incredible new artifact for anyone who does, who is interested in learning about what's under the hood.

Remember Pearls Not Sand? This is it. The questions are necessary, but the answers are the pearls.

In 2025, a big portion of the people who just want that simple fix are going to ask the LLM of their choice.

Let us come to terms with that.

The times when the bottom post on the first page of the "newest questions" list was just 4 minutes old are over.

But the people who still come here to ask are (with a higher chance) those that actually want to learn the "why".

There's less sand, but the pearls are here to stay.

And I'm pretty sure that the above also holds for company-internal private instances of Stack Overflow for Teams or whatever it shall be called in the future.

But geekdom doesn't just come with a deep sense of curiosity and persistence. It also comes with a longing for being part of something. And it also comes with its very special kind of humor. Who here remembers the always-friday-in-iceland tag?

We are not Reddit, and we don't want to be. But we can still have fun. The point of the infamous Stack Overflow: Where We Hate Fun blog post is that actually, we don't hate fun. Yes, we're about learning, but we can have fun learning.

And we're a community. Not just in the PR speak sense of the word that has lost all of its meaning, but in the sense that we're all doing this thing together. Learning. Teaching. Caring. Maintaining the platform that hosts us. Democratically electing moderators. And sometimes, well, just embracing all the geeking out together.

That's the good part of what we are.

And that's what our brand should reflect.

As the emergence of AI has called into question the role of Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange Network

Wait, is this what company leadership actually believes?

This is completely backwards. AI has only reinforced the role of places like Stack Overflow. Your marketing team should be having a field day with this. Be vocal and consistent about calling out AI for what it really is and you'll come out on top every time.

Asking an AI engine a question gets you a pile of content whose main goal is to imitate a human as much as possible. Nobody has read that output content before, so there's no telling whether it's right. The content was generated by what's essentially a gigantic algebra equation that was derived by a different machine and that's so complex that nobody knows how it really works. The people who make these AI systems don't care about accuracy, they just add "results may be inaccurate" disclaimers and make it your problem. Verifying the accuracy of the generated response usually takes longer than it would to just find the answer yourself.

When you ask a question on one the Stack network sites, you'll get answers from actual people, who have actual brains and are capable of actual intelligent thought. They can come up with novel solutions to novel problems. Content is peer-reviewed by other knowledgeable people. Incorrect information gets called out or corrected quickly. The entire system has been designed from the ground up to magnify that which is accurate and minimize that which isn't. The academic community has literal centuries of experience operating on these same general principles to prove that it's the most effective way of creating and expanding knowledge.

Consulting with actual experts to solve a problem is the foundation on which the advancements of our modern society are built. In contrast, blindly trusting the output of an inanimate machine whose algorithm can't even be audited is more akin to Michael Scott driving into the lake because "the machine knows". Your creative team could come up with some absolutely killer ads if they went down that line of thought.

This is also where you could lean harder on other sites in the network that don't normally draw a lot of attention. We have a stack for "Interpersonal Skills", something that an AI engine is (by definition) not qualified to discuss. Sites like Information Security or Skeptics are full of questions that you fundamentally would not trust a machine to answer. On many of our stacks (Parenting, Workplace, Academia, Math Educators, etc), the answer to a question involves a personal anecdote, telling a story of something that actually happened to them and how they handled it. An AI engine doesn't have life experiences to draw from. They're completely incapable of providing that sort of knowledge, but we have it in spades. Your Teams platform is the tool for organizations to build the same thing internally, so their employees can share knowledge and get their questions answered without the risk that someone copy/pasted some AI generated garbage into the codebase and now it's completely broken and nobody knows how to debug it. Careers is where you can find candidates who have demonstrated actual skills and intelligence and didn't just ask chatGPT to solve their coding test for them.

That's how you brand the company. Purveyors of actual intelligence, and of the platforms that enable folks to do so. Why trust a machine to regurgitate information it stole from who-knows-where when you can get an answer from someone who you can verify knows what they're talking about? Exceedingly few companies actually talk directly to consumers about the limitations and problems of AI. Most AI users use it because all they see is the hype. Call out the hype for what it is, be honest and clear about what machine learning can and can't do, and lean into all the things you have that no software algorithm could ever do. You're the safe island of quality in a sea of machine-generated garbage.

Please, as part of this renewal of brand... Drop "Teams".

I don't really care who technically got there first or who has a legal claim on what trademark or which additional words mean you can use it, Teams is a Microsoft product. Microsoft is inescapably huge in business software. Everyone knows Teams, whether or not they're forced to use it.

Your "for Teams" branding makes it sound like you've got an add-on to the Microsoft product, it's diluting your branding of the product as something yours, whether you want that to be Stack Overflow or Stack Exchange or just Stack. And, I don't think it really describes the product very well, either. It doesn't convey that it's for a private instance, it doesn't actually seem like a very useful tool for a team-sized group (maybe we have different ideas of "team", but my mind imagines a group of <10, maybe a median 5-6).

Ex-employee of 9+ years here. I rarely comment on matters at Stack since my departure, but I have a few thoughts on this one.

First, I completely agree with the premise

The SO/SE brand did not evolve with the company, at least in the time period that I worked there (2014 - 2023). This was for many reasons, but the most potent reason was fear.

Fear of losing the users and audience. Fear of upsetting meta. Fear of change in general.

For far too long that paralyzed us. I remember the absolute uphill slugfest I had internally just introducing a white navbar w/ one of our designers at the time (Kurtis). People internally - and on meta - were doom-saying it like we'd destroyed the company. But I pushed it through, and within a week everyone stopped caring and moved on. Such is the way of the internet.

It's worth noting that this is not a problem unique to Stack. Many companies are paralyzed by fear.

I am glad to see that Stack has finally broken free of the fear shackles.

However, I also agree that the company currently lacks a clear vision and mission

What is Stack trying to be right now? A Q&A site? An LLM's primary source of human-curated data? Its own LLM and answering system? A knowledge-tool for corporations? Something else?

It's not at all clear to me what Stack is trying to be - it lacks an identity. And knowing your identity is a prerequisite to successful branding. Because a brand reflects an identity.

I guess I'd like to see a bit more clarity on what Stack's goal is right now, so that the (long-overdue) branding updates can properly reflect that goal.

This isn’t just about a visual update or marketing exercise—it’s going to bring about a shift in how we present ourselves to the world which you will feel everywhere from the design to the copywriting, so that we can better achieve our goals and shared mission.

I’m going to be blunt - probably too blunt, but I mean it constructively. Asking the community to help define your brand and just listing your perceived problems instead of telling us what image you want to project is...not good. Any branding discussion needs to start with the single sentence statement of what the company aspires to be for what audience.

I understand getting feedback from the community and being transparent about what’s happening is important to improving our relationship, but the way some of these questions are so open-ended is worrisome. I think in attempting to become profitable, the company has lost its North star. My most optimistic interpretation is that the company is in a very "any way the wind blows" mode right now. My most cynical interpretation is that you're just patronizing us.

How does a mission to build a library of knowledge turn into "a unique advertising proposition"? Is "Come join us to become an audience that we can sell to advertisers!" a winning strategy? You can't lump all that stuff together in one brand, because advertisers are not the same audience as the audience for Teams which is not the same audience as the one interested in the public Q&A. You need distinct branding for distinct audiences. It becomes obvious if you write a single statement summary of what you want your brand to be seen as by an audience.

I worked for a defense contractor that had a photo of a lion with a bloody muzzle aggressively staring at the camera as part of one of its presentation templates. There was a contingent of our customers that loved it. We wouldn't use that template for everyone though. One brand for everything Stack Exchange does is either going to be the equivalent of a scary lion that will be off-putting to some people, or so generic it will be ineffective.

A cautionary tale in 5 logos:

I'm currently in the middle of a rebranding exercise at the OpenSSL Foundation. Our "business model" is encouraging other organizations to sponsor work on the OpenSSL Library. There is a separate OpenSSL Corporation which sells support contracts. People naturally wonder why they should donate when there's already a way for the project to generate revenue. We also have a Mission, Projects, Conference, community site and an umbrella website that all share the same OpenSSL name. It's not easy to explain or even understand. So I certainly feel the frustration with brand debt.

I was also at Stack Overflow when the focus shifted from an expanding network of Q&A sites to Programmer Jerusalem. It didn't happen right away, but since investors had bought the story that Stack Overflow was a tech company, anything not aimed at developers was deemphasized. All's well that ends well, I suppose.

And then there is the rebranding of a community I managed for several years. After a ton of work, including a preview of the concept for community leaders, the new brand went over as well as could be expected. Better even. It felt like the start of a turnaround story worthy of a business school case study. And after a few weeks, everyone got used to the new logo and went back to normal.

The fundamental thing I've learned is that brands are easy to change, but the underlying culture of an organization is not. That means we are tempted to see the brand as low-hanging fruit. On its own, rebranding just isn't sufficient. Without finding and fixing root causes, a new brand merely gives an organization a jolt of enthusiasm. All too often, things go back to the way they were before except with a new coat of paint.

Effective brand exercises align the audience with some fundamental attribute that isn't commonly understood. For instance, the OpenSSL Foundation separated from the Corporation last year and we need to make the distinction between the two organizations more clear. A new brand treatment can help. Even so, as we look at our current way of operating, we are seeing that there are some deeper changes required as well. While I don't know what the result will look like, I do think self-reflection will be valuable and, perhaps, the more important outcome.

We help run a Network of technical and some very non-technical sites, called Stack Exchange (we’re also legally Stack Exchange, Inc.). Stack Overflow is just one of the sites, but we call ourselves Stack Overflow as a company, and most decisions are developer-focused, often alienating the wider Network.

We've been through a few cycles of bouncing between the Stack Overflow brand identity, and the Stack Exchange brand identity. To me, Stack Overflow's a site under the broader stack exchange umbrella, even if its a very large part of it. There's been knock on effects from this over time, from neglect of smaller sites.

I've a couple of thoughts on this, which might not sit well with certain conventional thinking. For a lot of us, Stack Exchange's the community and the smaller parts of it. Stack Overflow is also a community, part of the family (even if its the golden child), and the parts of the product line less attuned with the rest of the network such as teams and jobs.

So some thoughts:

• I'd rather Stack Exchange be the company again, and Stack Overflow as the product(s). None of this "Stack Exchange Inc Doing Business as". There's a certain attraction to having a slightly different branding as an umbrella to put the non public platform SO products under, but I'm not sure that would benefit those products.

• Is overloading a bigger issue, or the lack of coherence?

• Communications involving commercial operations that are already under the SO branding ought to remain under the Stack Overflow branding.

• Have Stack Exchange as a umbrella branding for all Public Platform Products.

• Internal community communications, including but not exclusive to Stack Overflow - including formal announcements - ought to be under Stack Exchange branding. This includes most/all staff communications.

• Stack Overflow-specific communications can be under Stack Overflow, but explicitly talking about how it's "Part of the Stack Exchange Network". My proposal for smaller site branding would be consistent with this. This would reinforce ties between SO and the rest of the network.

• I'm not sure what specifically would need to be branded, but include "Part of the Stack Exchange Network" under communications for smaller sites. Maybe as a subtitle. I'm not sure how it'd work out for site designs and logos, but perhaps it would tie together hypothetical per site swag. I don't really like the idea of making all sites generically branded.

Ponder this quick and very dirty mockup:

I wouldn't use this for site logos, but for, say, things like the 100K mails, or any site-specific communications.

• I recall there was a font used for corporate communications (Source Sans, if memory serves). Switching to that, and a standard/common font stack over the OS defaults so the sites look consistent would be nice.

• With Teams et al., I'm not sure. They're tied tightly to the SO branding, but they are loosely coupled and might not benefit from being tied to "Stack Exchange" like the smaller sites would. Some of these aren't even really SE-created products like Jobs 2.0.

• If the API and AI product cover more than SO/SO data... SO branding for them feels odd. I'm sure there's reasons, but it also feels like painting yourselves into a corner, unless "Overflow" is a branding for labs type things. I wondering if "Stack API", "Stack AI", and "Stack Labs" makes more sense. It's common to SO and SE.

Awareness and the user experience around our paid products makes them feel like ads, rather than obvious and useful parts of our ecosystem. Candidly, we need these to pay the bills.

This is probably worth bringing up on its own. It's not that they feel like ads; they feel tacked on. They do pay the bills, but at times the messaging feels less enthusiastic than... we feel.

Quality and delight matter more than a constant stream of posts no one really reads. SO Inc was founded by a pair of legendary bloggers, and yet that DNA seems lost. It's been a problem for years. Perhaps it's worth considering how you'd convince people Jobs and Teams are useful tools that SE users and their work should explore, rather than focusing on content farming and thought leadership attempts. There's even the occasional, slightly confusing advertorial.

Part of finding your place in the world is finding yourself. Jeff once asked what Stack Overflow wants to be when it grows up. More broadly - What does the company want to be? In the past 16 years, I've seen Stack Exchange struggle to understand what it is.

I've often said meta is storytelling - and well what's the story SE wants to tell to the people who use its platform and products? Jobs/Careers 1.0 and Teams suffered from a certain degree of 'over-expectations' - as products that were a focus of the company's efforts (sometimes to the exclusion of other parts of the network), and often felt not part of the broader network. Do you focus on SO, the broader story of the network, or continue to focus on commercial/SaaS products as a thing 'apart' from public platform? Or work on tying the various strands together? And fundamentally, I really wish the quality of posts were uplifted in general. Make it something people want to read.

I don't have a strong opinion on the name. Although I would prefer Stack Exchange as the overall name and term to describe the whole network, including Stack Overflow, Super User, Server Fault, and the rest of the sites. Following from this, I'd probably expect Stack Exchange for Teams and things like Exchange AI and Exchange API for anything that isn't unique to Stack Overflow.

I'd rather see two things addressed, both of which were called out in the post:

1. Ensuring a consistent tone when talking to audiences. I believe this also includes having the correct tone for each audience, recognizing that the people who use the public network are very different than potential customers for SaaS solutions (like Teams) or partners using the commercial APIs or Talent offerings.
2. Focus on the network as a whole when rolling out features. There's been too much of an SO-centricity happening. SO is unique in its scale, but some features likely make sense. Centering the brand and all of the work on the network could help alleviate that SO-centricity in planning and rolling out new features.

Journeyman Geek's proposal is obviously sensible. Mine is… less obvious, but I think it has merit.

"Stack Overflow for Teams" is a long, clunky, hard-to-abbreviate name. (I write "SOfT", but that's already a word.) It's also not the right name. (Maybe it was, back when it was an auxiliary thing attached to a public Stack Exchange site, and SOfT instances attached to other sites were considered, but) Now they're wholly separate, why is the "private Q&A for any workplace" product named after programming jargon?

Proposal (imagine a breathtaking corporate slideshow here):

• Stack Overflow for Teams
• Stack Overflow for Teams
• Stack Teams
   ^{a Stack Exchange product}

"Stack Team" is two syllables, and easily abbreviates as "our stack". While moderators often say "the team" or "the teams instance", in the corporate world there are a lot of things named "teams", notably Microsoft's.

Rebranding as "Stack Teams: a Stack Exchange product" would also let people say "our Stack Exchange" or "the Stack Exchange" if they have too many things called "teams" and need something better than "stack".

This matches the old SE 1.0 terminology, and and is closer to how the SE regulars talk, so my judgement might be impaired by the mere exposure effect. I also suspect an unreasonable (Microsoft-induced) hatred of the word "for" in product names, to which only "for Dummies" is immune.

Btw, afaict, you're the only ones to use the word "PubPlat". I don't like that word, but if you need a new trademark for the Stack Exchange software, you've already staked your claim to that one.

Brand: HumanExchange

I fully agree with @Olivier_Dulac's words in his comment above

we (informed persons of all creeds) come here to get usefull answers, written by humans that are knowledgeable on the subject

This is what the brand could (and probably should) be.

At some point in the not too distant future, a relevant fraction of the still-thinking-themselves general public will get fairly fed up with the always-same-style kinds of responses from ChatGPT and Co. How lovely to get a tailored (to some degree) response from somebody who actually understands my situation (to some degree) and can judge my knowledge level (to some degree)!

The human touch is going to become more and more relevant over time. I visit half a dozen different StackExchange sites besides StackOverflow and am usually impressed by (at least some of) the people who answer there.

Attracting such people is what you are good at. Make good use of this unique situation before it disappears.

Awareness and the user experience around our paid products makes them feel like ads, rather than obvious and useful parts of our ecosystem. Candidly, we need these to pay the bills.

They are ads though, and there isn't much you can do to change that.

As you said, you need them to pay the bills. However, attempting to direct a user away from the part of your site they are using in order to get them to pay for a product is literally an ad.

I have already commented that I feel grateful for taking this initiative and posting this as an answer to make it more visible and to elaborate a bit more.

I'm a frequent user on Stack Overflow, on one of the ~180 sites, and here. For a long time, I have seen this as something that needed to be done. I know that getting the required "internal" support was not an easy task. Congratulations to all who have worked on convincing the authorities to provide the resources for launching this initiative.

I'm eagerly looking forward to learn how this initiative progresses.

I've recently converted from a "quick fix" searcher to an appreciative member of the platform. I'd like to offer my suggestion to @Prashanth Chandrasekar's question:

Do you believe there are opportunities (e.g., adjacent ones) for us to serve our users beyond Knowledge?

There's a lot of money in academic publishing and a big opportunity to do something none of the publishers do...

I'm a PhD student and I've heard my advisor express his perplexity that publishers are charging publication and subscription prices that used to be justified by printing and distributing physical manuscripts, but in the digital age aren't really justified. In his opinion they should offer a different service to the authors. One service that publishers are expected to offer in other literary genres is marketing. Academics focus on generating and implementing MVP's of new and revolutionary ideas (e.g. internet). Their publishers could have a symbiotic relationship of curating the greatest ideas and then marketing them.

I think acting as a research curator and marketer aligns with some of the platform's knowledge work. Without the baggage of an established publishing company SO seems positioned for innovating on the old business model with a fresh take.

Imagine how helpful it would be to authors and their readers if there was a canonical and well known place to ask and answer questions about their work. I think SO can bring a lot of value here.

Thank you for the transparency and invitation to participate. It’s good to see the company acknowledging that the current brand identity is not working. That said, some of the pain points outlined here have been years in the making, and frankly, they’ve been raised by the community before. It’s encouraging to hear that a serious effort is underway now — but it’s long overdue.

Here are some specific concerns and thoughts:

1. Stack Overflow ≠ Stack Exchange

This has always been confusing. Internally you (and long-term users like me) may know the difference, but externally the terms are blurred. Referring to the company as “Stack Overflow” while Stack Overflow is also just one of many sites causes friction, especially for users active outside the main SO platform. The branding often gives the impression that non-developer communities are an afterthought. If this rebrand doesn’t correct that imbalance, the network risks further fragmentation.

2. Inconsistent Visual Design Across the Network

There’s a disconnect between the visual identity of Stack Overflow (modern, branded, recognizable) and the rest of the Stack Exchange network (minimalist to the point of generic). This inconsistency undermines the idea of a unified ecosystem. A refreshed design system that respects site individuality but ties them together would help significantly.

3. Product Integration and Messaging

You mentioned the paid products feel like ads. That’s accurate. They often interrupt the core experience and feel bolted on. A successful rebrand should treat these products as part of a cohesive ecosystem, not separate revenue initiatives. Clarity and purpose in design and messaging here would benefit everyone.

4. Tone and Communication Style

The original informal tone was part of what made Stack Overflow approachable. Over time, the tone has drifted — sometimes sounding too corporate, other times oddly casual without context. A consistent voice that reflects professionalism but still respects the roots of the platform would be a strong step forward.

5. Community Involvement

Saying the community will have a voice is promising, but vague. Will that voice be meaningful or symbolic? There’s a difference. The name of the company came from a blog comment thread. That spirit is worth recapturing — but you’ll need to build real feedback loops, not just comment threads here on Meta.

Final Thought:

Rebranding alone won’t solve deeper issues of trust and clarity. But done right, it can be a starting point. Be transparent not just about the changes you’re making, but why certain decisions are made over others.

If this is just a facelift, the problems will persist. But if it’s a thoughtful overhaul, including how the company communicates and prioritizes community needs, it could be a turning point.

Looking forward to seeing how this evolves.

I do not see a problem. Stack overflow / Exchange, etc. is working fine. "Renewing the Brand" seems like needless emotional introspection. No DevOps, SysAdmins, C/C++/Python/Rust/Java programmers, DBA's, or other frequent Stack users are concerned about "Branding," the existing set of sites is JUST FINE. Focus on making minor improvements here and there. Too many changes or re-naming of the site will cause needless confusion.

The image in the question is missing the international-sites:

• https://es.stackoverflow.com
• https://pt.stackoverflow.com
• https://ja.stackoverflow.com
• https://ru.stackoverflow.com

Some might argue that their "brand" is the same as https://stackoverflow.com, but they should at least be mentioned in the corresponding box.

I'm going to keep referring to it as StackExchange.

I will focus on the naming parts here. I think that the answer of Sinatr is the most valuable (also among the most downvoted, what irony). Stack Overflow is the only prominent brand here. It must be kept because nothing is better without. The take home message should be that if SO would be renamed, then traffic to it would drop immediately.

Sure, it has suffered over the years and decline in new activity doesn't bode well, but one can strive to keep the SO brand valuable. A clear mission statement for SO, concentration on high quality human generated knowledge with a human touch or else, would help.

Stack Exchange for the other exchanges is much less well known. It never caught on that much although also there is still the risk that any rebranding would actually make things worse than better. It's not so iconic for me. Maybe something better could be found, but must be discussed thoroughly before. Maybe ask the respective exchanges what name they would prefer.

Teams as the name for the software powering the exchanges and the other private instances is maybe not the best, I'm not so much concerned with it. And even less with the name of the company. Alphabet, Numbers, Meta, Super, Universe, Wisdom, ... whatever you like, I'm fine with it.

The internet knows one thing and it's good:

Stack Overflow

The internet doesn't know "Stack Exchange network". This whole network is a menu item in the Stack Overflow menu.

The internet doesn't know Super User, Super Server, Super Whatever. The internet knows Reddit and it's good. Most answers are from Reddit.

There are company projects named for Stack Overflow: SO Teams, SO Documentation, SO Discussions, SO Jobs v.1, SO Jobs v.2, SO Discussions (Reddit killer), (S)OverflowAI (hype hype hype), ...

The internet doesn't know them. A few thousand users do.

Remove Stack Overflow and there is no more company known by the internet.

Remove Stack Overflow from any company project and the project is no more. Add a project to Stack Overflow and maybe somebody even buys it.

Stay Stack Overflow. Don't become S, it's stupid.

Technicians squabble about optimal solutions and remember injustices, but healthcare workers are usually able to overlook failures on patients' shortcomings. SO is a technical body and I regard expectations of behavioural change as unrealistic and sympathy is unlikely.

I have never asked a question, always finding it had been asked already.

Think about the Scope.

In several places, StackOverflow is defined as being Programming Q&A.

However, the popularity of StackOverflow means that it attracts many people who are asking about Cloud, Operating Systems, APIs and many topics that are 'adjacent' to Programming. These Questions are often closed.

Given that the number of Questions has been rapidly dropping, why not expand the Scope?

Let's allow these additional topics rather than closing them. The clever use of Tags means that users only see topics that are of interest to them. If a user is only interested in Rust, then it doesn't matter that there are Questions about AWS -- just like it doesn't matter that there are Questions about Java.

A rebrand is a good time to consider a re-Scope. Utilise the popularity of the StackOverflow name to expand the scope and increase usage. Perhaps merge other computer-related Stack Exchange sites into StackOverflow so users are less confused and the brand can expand. We should be welcoming good Questions, not closing them and pointing elsewhere.

(Disclosure: I am currently #255 for all-time StackOverflow reputation. I have gained this reputation purely through my 7,800 Answers to AWS Questions -- most of which would be Closed if the scope of 'Programming Q&A' was fully enforced.)

Concerns? Questions? Messages of encouragement? We can’t promise we’ll be able to respond to them all, but we would love to hear your thoughts. We will actively monitor this post for two weeks, until May 22.

Concern: A major issue with the Stack Exchange/Overflow brand is that many people associate it with a toxic environment. There are tens of thousands of posts on Reddit (clickable posts), Quora (clickable posts), Hacker News (clickable posts) and other platforms discussing this. Are there any plans to address this brand perception issue?

To answer some comment, those aren't forums designed to bash SO but just regular reddit subs (e.g., r/AskProgramming, r/cscareerquestions r/dotnet r/webdev) and entire Quora + Hacker News. And most people seem to agree as question scores can be high, e.g. Is it just me or is Stack Overflow an incredibly toxic place? on r/cscareerquestions has a score of 823 (which mean 823 more upvotes than downvotes).

IMO things is not about name, things is about stack exchange itself does not actually 'exchange'

every part of it is seperated and the exchange is actually missing.

and stackoverflow seems the only one among the parts which can sell some money.

for others, they be useful, but not be seen by people outside, and be actually somehow jealous to stackoverflow, always think they SHOULD get as famous as sof, and might even have a dream about if sof die their small small group will be able to suck more blood from its dead body and grow stronger...though they would never never admit(of course).

sorry for saying this but you as a company have worse gift in management than even baidu-tieba...at least they have somehow posts suggesting across diffrerent tieba.

anotherthing is do you need sooooo much domains? come on you really think users shall put into their memory that much domains? there be a new technology (from last century) who named menu or index, you should learn about it.

There are articles that get shared on LinkedIn and other outlets that say Stack Overflow (and by extension, the family of stack sites) aren't being visited anymore because "AI/ChatGPT/(etc)". I don't think that's the only reason why. The answers provided by AI resources may be faster, but they are often wrong, just told in a sure voice.

I think the community as a whole needs to take a look at themselves here. How many questions have you come across in the last day or two where you understood what the OP was asking but there are three to five comments or edits with some pedantic nonsense about how they didn't format the question the right way, they didn't present it in a way the user wanted it, or some other trifle that doesn't actually interfere with understanding the ask or providing the help.

Ultimately, stack is a community, not a product. If people aren't coming here, it's because they are not having good experiences. You are either asking for people to donate their time or you are donating yours to communicate and solve problems.

People can spend a lot of time crafting a question and think "you know, I'm putting a lot of information here, and I appreciate someone spending all the time reading this... I'm going to say 'thanks for your help.'" Then some guy comes along, spends five minutes reading this long post with screenshots and code samples and what they've rules out and how and reading the stress the person has experienced trying to solve their problem... gets all the way to the bottom and says "Oh I have to change this" and makes an edit only to remove the thank you, with a link to some post that says not to do that for no other reason than it doesn't add value.

Why? This is the internet equivalent of a dog walking down the street, sniffing a spot where another dog peed, then peeing on top of it and continuing to walk. What are you gaining here doing this sort of thing?

Honestly what kind of community has this become? Why is it so hard for people to just skip over items they can't assist with? You really need to push the kid against the lockers as you walk by? This is the problem stack overflow in particular is facing. When AI is a more welcoming than a community of people that is where they are going to turn first. Not just because it's faster.