Timeline for answer to New site design and philosophy for Stack Overflow: Starting February 24, 2026 at beta.stackoverflow.com by l4mpi
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
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13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 days ago | comment | added | Starship | @SuperJade Just a read only version would probably be doable with a bunch of knowledgeable community members working on it. A full equivalent of SO would be pretty hard though. But we still have to try | |
| Feb 24 at 8:45 | comment | added | l4mpi | @Cerbrus for a functional equivalent to SO, sure. But for continued access to the existing data, a minimalistic read-only pure-html page (plus a bit of styling) showing questions, answers and comments would be enough and could be hacked together in a very short time. | |
| Feb 24 at 8:01 | comment | added | Cerbrus | @SuperJade to build a site from scratch? Months of work... | |
| Feb 24 at 4:17 | comment | added | Super Jade | What would it really take to stand up a new site with the old database? | |
| Feb 23 at 9:36 | comment | added | l4mpi | @KarlKnechtel "losing curation work" - yes, that would not be ideal. But it would be a small price to pay for keeping access to the SO knowledge base in a decent format. Also IMO it would be a good opportunity to clean up the data dump anyways, e.g. get rid of some of the historically locked questions, delete trash posts that escaped the roomba because OP managed to accept an answer, maybe cleanup some old unanswered posts, delete 90% of the java NPE duplicates, remove all posts made by VonC after chatgpt released, and so on. | |
| Feb 23 at 9:28 | comment | added | l4mpi | @Lundin "What you fear that we would have to slowly sit and watch already happened" - from my PoV enshittification is ongoing since roughly a decade which is why I wrote "yet more enshittification", but it clearly is not finished as SO currently is still a usable resource. That's also why I soft-quit (stopped most contributions) ages ago. | |
| Feb 20 at 20:54 | comment | added | Christoph Rackwitz | a few months ago I needed a copy of the database for some URL shortener statistics. I did manage to download something that looks like a database dump. IDK if it was "complete". it at least seems to contain posts and comments. | |
| Feb 20 at 13:55 | comment | added | Lundin | "more slow drawn-out enshittification" is exactly what SO has been doing since 2018-2019 somewhere. So the death is actually neither sudden not surprising. We should all have quit in 2019, but we did stick around to watch the enshittification, mixed with "fire all the competent staff" initiatives. What you fear that we would have to slowly sit and watch already happened. | |
| Feb 19 at 21:07 | comment | added | Karl Knechtel | "an older data dump could be used without losing much of value" — eh, that would also mean losing some curation work, especially identification of duplicates. | |
| Feb 19 at 20:14 | comment | added | Shawn | The work on the new design seems to have been in progress for a while or maybe they'll just task an llm with creating the new site and just toss up whatever slop it spews out. | |
| Feb 19 at 16:25 | comment | added | l4mpi | @ColleenV true, but as a positive side effect of the severely reduced influx of questions, an older data dump could be used without losing much of value. | |
| Feb 19 at 15:45 | comment | added | ColleenV | However, this announcement also describes that SE plans to make the internet significantly worse once they switch off the old design. This is why the company reneging on their commitment to the data dump was such a big deal. If we had a data dump being published to a third party site as originally promised, we could stand up a more useful version easily if they company makes their version unreadable or tanks entirely. | |
| Feb 19 at 14:08 | history | answered | l4mpi | CC BY-SA 4.0 |