[rev12]

Favorite quotes from the answers:

> You're alienating the product that makes you big. But that's okay, all companies do that eventually, giving rise to the competition that appeals to the alienated user base.

Tschallacka is right, it seems the be part of the normal lifecycle of most online sites/apps. Perhaps SO's expiration date is near, for those users who made it popular enough to be "ruined" by the devs.

[smacktoward]

This is a natural consequence of the "build an audience first, figure out how to monetize it later" business model.

At the beginning, the service does all sorts of nice things in order to attract users. These things all cost money, but nobody cares at that stage because they're burning other peoples' money and building the userbase is Priority 1.

Eventually the other peoples' money runs out and the service has to be sustainable on its own. That means it suddenly matters a lot that all those nice things the service did to attract users cost money. The nice things get cut, of course. But the users have all now gotten used to having them, so when they disappear, people start screaming.

As long as we build our businesses around the idea of getting big first and worrying about how to make them sustainable later, this pattern will continue repeating itself.

[jordanpg]

As with most American enterprises, they must continue to grow -- indefinitely. They cannot be content to exist statically, even with whatever profit margins they currently have (if any).

I'm no economist, but this precept is obvious nonsense in the sense that nothing can grow indefinitely. And so things are subsumed by other things which therefore grow, or they morph into things that can continue to grow indefinitely.

SO is morphing into some other thing -- a quasi social/hiring/Q&A/team thing. Something, no doubt, that they can more easily monetize.

[manigandham]

Most American companies are just normal small to mid-size businesses that happily exist for decades. Growth at all costs is the venture capital path and it's choice that requires the (completely expected) payoff for the investment.

[baud147258]

> Growth at all costs is the venture capital path

And since SO raised 68M$, it's the path it has to take

[jordanpg]

The worst thing about this is that I'm _so completely uninterested_ in SO's stupid social/team/hiring product that will supposedly forever revolutionize the tech world.

I'm sure there are little teams of product managers and marketers just brimming with enthusiasm about it, but I have nothing but fatigue for these things anymore. It's not innovation, it's just more suckling at the enterprise teat.

[larkeith]

It seems you could make a law out of this - something like, "The amount a site values its community is inversely proportional to the community's size."

Anywho, seems it's time to look at federating Q&A.

[luckylion]

Or maybe rather "to the accumulated value the community has created"? I don't even think the community at SO is that large, or has grown that much recently. At some point, the users are committed having sunken so much time and effort into making the site great, and the company knows it and wants to squeeze more money out of the user contributions.

I wouldn't be that surprised if they introduced a "pro user, only $7,99 per month" package in 2020 that gives some small perks ("your questions cannot be downvoted", "add a 100 points reward to three questions per month", "animated avatar", "special highlighting of your very important questions").

[bsder]

> Tschallacka is right, it seems the be part of the normal lifecycle of most online sites/apps.

I wish they would provoke a competitor. The number of stale, useless answers on SO is getting quite large.

I suspect the only way to flush that out is to start a new site.

[shagie]

Stack Overflow was born of Web 2.0. Providing the hosting and letting the community do all the work to generate the page views which in turn brings in the revenue.

How many people are investing in new Web 2.0 companies? How many feel that it is a viable business model on its own?

I've seen a dozen attempts at creating a new Stack Overflow (often based on some perceived need that SO isn't providing for - https://www.askquestions.tech was the most recent that I'm familiar with one that was created when two twitter groups clashed).

The challenge is in the curation of the material. Its easy to do when it's small and focused. Unfortunately, in today's world there are some that perceive the curation as being a slight on how they write and their personal identity is tied up in what they write and their own code (I recall one SO user who insisted on writing with the start of the sentence and proper nouns and pronouns being lower case).

I believe that much of the technical world is disappearing into slack and similar. Particular technologies are being answered on Slack where it is understood that there is no history to search and others are disappearing to private invite only communities where the material doesn't need to be curated or moderated because it is only that small social group.

Is the slackhole of knowledge a good thing? Probably not. But it's easier to moderate and curate than having a website with a long tail and a small core group. There is less friction around asking questions or providing answers. People aren't inspired by gamification to the degree that they are on SO. There isn't any resume growth when helping people - and so that incentive is gone. It is just people helping others when they need it.

[rocky1138]

I'm surprised that this hasn't taken longer than it has. Most for-profit ventures slowly destroy what made them great in the first place.

Personally, I've always felt like SO and their ilk are much better suited with a Wikipedia type model.

[humanrebar]

To be fair, most non-profits do too.

[dredmorbius]

Same dynamic or different one, though?