
“New home page seems like Stack Overflow doesn't allow free use any more” - nsoonhui
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/386505/3834
======
jasode
First, it looks like the StackOverflow homepage was changed to not require a
sign-in. The heavily downvoted (about -50) answer[0] by Cesar M at the bottom
of the page also shows the screenshot of the change.

Second, I'm guessing that revenue from job postings (Careers section) and
banner ads did not bring enough money. From what I remember reading, I think
SO also had high hopes of the other StackExchange specialty sites using the
same Q&A engine would be more successful (i.e. more banner ads, more money,
etc) but it turns out they were only a modest impact on revenue. (E.g.
MathOverflow is an interesting community with Fields Medal mathematics PhDs
but it probably doesn't bring much revenue.)

Therefore, this leaves the "enterprise sales" revenue idea of licensing the
Q&A engine to private teams. (Hey, Slack just had their IPO and some companies
pay for Gitlab and Github -- so let's push for selling SO Q&A for
enterprises.) This monetization pressure leads to using the SO landing page as
a giant billboard for their enterprise product. (I'm not making a personal
complaint but just observing that they seem to be in a difficult monetization
dilemma and their actions to improve their financial situation just irritates
the users.)

IMO, I'm skeptical that internal Q&A platforms would actually be useful for
companies and I made a previous comment explaining why.[1]

[0]
[https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/386566](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/386566)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14804834](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14804834)

~~~
Vinnl
Having worked at a large company before that had their own instance of
Confluence Questions (i.e. Atlassian's SO clone): it was incredibly useful. As
a new employee, it allowed me to relatively quickly find the relevant people,
or even to come across answers by them to questions people kept running into
over and over again.

As I became responsible for an internal library used company-wide, I pushed
for the Q&A site to be our primary means of communication, and would always
refer to it after answering questions from people contacting me directly. I
saw the same pattern repeat itself for many new hires.

Otherwise I think your observations are spot on.

~~~
benbristow
Perhaps for a large company with multiple offices etc, sure.

For a smaller company though, other than as a search tool (previously asked
questions) I don't see what advantage it has over just using Slack/Teams etc.
in a relevant channel to your question.

~~~
edanm
I mean, I assume that they don't actually _care_ about small companies, they
don't have much money anyways. In these scenarios, they tend to act as a
"loss-leader" for marketing purposes, mostly.

~~~
caspar
FWIW Atlassian's perspective is generally more like "they don't have much
money _yet_ , so let's get them while it's easy to get them". Small companies
grow into big companies, and small single-team deployments tend to spread into
big whole-company deployments - but small customers are much easier to get
than large customers :)

Disclaimer: long time Atlassian employee but all words are my own.

------
kull
Based on my own experience, the way I find answered on SO is by searching on
Google. Maybe they just see all the traffic coming to them from the search
engines, nobody, unless already logged in, really go to SO.com and type a
question. Maybe not logged in users on the homepage are usually people trying
to buy a software for their team or more business, finance people,
stockholders?

~~~
biesnecker
Same. I had to go into incognito mode and specifically navigate to the page to
see what the fuss was about. I don't think I'd ever seen the SO homepage
before that.

~~~
bscphil
I'll add another same here. I _still_ can't figure out exactly what the fuss
is about, after reading the linked question and many of the comments here. Is
it that the SO home page doesn't offer any way to search questions, instead
giving you links to either sign in or purchase one of their products?

If so, I _really_ don't get the problem. Has anyone without a SO account
_ever_ gone to their home page to try to look up an issue? Surely it's
overwhelmingly more common to just search for an issue directly in a search
engine and check the SO links in the results if they turn out to be relevant.

And right now, visiting
[https://stackoverflow.com/](https://stackoverflow.com/) in a private browsing
window, I still see a search bar right at the top. I really have no idea what
anyone could have a problem with here.

------
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.

~~~
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.

------
adventured
Every profit-driven knowledge service that has ever existed has lost this
battle in time. About.com, Answers.com, Quora, Genius, and so on. You can
serve one pursuit as the primary - knowledge or profit - but not both. They're
inherently in conflict. Given enough time, the profit pursuit as a primary
driver will always destroy a knowledge service. It leads to decisions that are
not solely about being the best knowledge service possible (whether that's
commercial abuse through ads, features that exist solely for commercial
exploit, dark patterns, or forced volume content aka spam). The only
alternative that is viable to maintain a very high quality service over time
is to ensure that being true to the pursuit and presentation of knowledge is
the highest goal of the service (not making money). That requires aggressive
commercial minimalism, operating very thin, never taking venture capital, and
or a non-profit route. Anything else results in corruption that inevitably
leads to a decay in quality over time. Stack Exchange has made it longer than
most with only a few for-profit cavities to show for it. I applaud them for
that, it has been a tremendous service. Their venture backers will want a big
fat return eventually however, and the clock is ticking. I'd expect their
behavior to get worse in the coming years.

~~~
bigfailwhale
Or maybe they actually sell things that are useful to companies that allows
them to invest in making the public website more valuable? But because they
always put the community first, they have until this recent change been
hesitant to even mention anything that they sell for fear that users would
revolt. Of all the services I have used, SO has been consistently the best at
being user and community centric. Without SO, I am pretty sure I would spend
5x longer to get any useful coding done, that is how much value SO has given
me and I suspect the same is true for millions of other developers.

By the way, Quora and Genius are both super useful. I really do not understand
what you mean by "lost the battle".

------
ken
"I will start off by saying that I'm a bit of an oddball. I browse exclusively
in private browsing mode."

I don't think this is odd at all. I do most browsing in private mode, and I
think that should be the default.

Letting every random link I click get added to my URL history is just
distraction bait later. Password managers and autofill make it easy to log in
when I need to. When I'll need to come back to a page later, it's easy to
bookmark.

Persisting cookies and recording every URL clicked is one of those ideas that
was neat 10 years ago, but on the modern web it causes more problems than it
solves.

~~~
fortran77
_Most_ people in the real world don't. You do realize this, don't you?

~~~
ken
Yes. I thought that was implied by "I think that should be the default", i.e.,
that this is better behavior but most people won't go to the extra effort, but
I can see how it might have been ambiguous.

------
wpietri
I get it, and I'm sure that if SO hadn't driven me away from contributing
years ago, I might be upset too. But for me this is in the category of "cows
realizing that all that grain wasn't free after all". That these people are
expert SO users doesn't make them experts in marketing and revenue
maximization.

~~~
lucb1e
You're being a little condescending and are not exactly making a good
comparison. Stackoverflow was (is?) a really cool company and website, and as
far as I knew they were making a reasonable profit. Consider that they allow
visitors to post questions and answer, edit other people's questions and
answers, and even query the database for any info that's public (e.g. not user
passwords, but pretty much anything else), all without having an account.
That's unique.The moderation model (that it's based on reputation except for a
few _elected_ members) is also also very unique. It's really a site by
programmers for programmers, moderated by everyone who spends time there.
Having them change the site completely, solely for making more profit, is
unexpected. It would be similar to Linux announcing that the kernel will have
a license fee from now on - you can be snarky about the cows and the grain,
and indeed the kernel project is of huge value so it would make sense from a
commercial perspective, but the kernel becoming paid and stackoverflow using
annoying UI patterns are both not in line with their previous ways.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" Consider that they allow visitors to post questions and answer, edit other
people's questions and answers, and even query the database for any info
that's public (e.g. not user passwords, but pretty much anything else), all
without having an account."_

This is not unique. Wikipedia's Reference desk[1] allows asking/answering any
question by anyone -- even unregistered users.

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk)

~~~
dwaltrip
Does anyone use it? By some combination of skill and luck, stackoverflow was
clearly better positioned to fill this role, at least for software related
content.

------
snazz
Given the fact that Stack Exchange has been community vs. company for years
now, and all SE answers are Creative Commons licensed, I wonder how hard it
would be to create a clone, import all the old questions and answers, allow
the existing (community, not SE staff) moderators to moderate, and create
accounts for everyone who had one on SE.

Appearing as high in Google search seems impossible, but if the community got
behind it this could fix the SE problems once and for all.

~~~
eitland
I think it would be wise to leave a good chunk of the mods behind.

It has been an idea for me for a while to create a site where

\- questions are answered

\- and useful answers rewarded.

Note there is no "good" in front of questions, and answers are rated by their
usefullness, primarily to the person asking the question and secondary to
everyone else, not by how well they conform to a site script.

In particular, if someone wants to ask what JavaScript framework should I
choose in 2020 and someone finds it worth answering and the asker of the
question likes the answer, then: Fine!

Duplicate questions? Fine! Answering by pointing to a previous question? Fine!
Answering again without mentioning the previous question? Fine!

It should be a site for people wanting to ask or answer questions, not a site
for people who want to be mods.

Now, since that would be the purpose of the site and not something abstract
like: make a repository of everything we know, all these questions and answers
will be fine.

There should also be some inflation or maybe even better "karma tax" so both
accounts and questions lose something like 10% (or a dynamically calculated
percent) of their value each year, so we aren’t stuck with "Top JavaScript
libraries for 2019" on top of the lists forever.

Another thing I would consider is making it harder to create accounts as soon
as possible.

~~~
jasode
_> I think it would be wise to leave a good chunk of the mods behind. [...]
Note there is no "good" in front of questions, and answers are rated by their
usefullness, primarily to the person asking the question and secondary to
everyone else, _

Yes, the moderators are often vilified instead of praised but this gives a
false impression that an alternative Q&A site with different mechanics (i.e.
no moderators) would be superior.

The "game theory incentives" problem with your proposal is that the _desirable
experts who answer_ the questions _benefit_ from the strict moderation.

Almost every proposed Q&A alternative to SO prioritizes the question askers
and _underestimates the answerers_.

These 2 perspectives contradict each other:

(1) Moderators are useless: The question askers just want to ask their
question. There are no "stupid questions". They don't care that their question
is a duplicate. Therefore, the mods are just a-holes on a power trip and just
get in the way.

(2) Moderators make the site usable: (Unpaid) experts with some spare time to
answer questions _don 't want to wade through duplicate questions_ or _do
someone else 's homework assignment disguised as a Q&A_, etc. The mods
aggressively filter out as much junk as possible to keep the expert answerers
from abandoning the site.

When discussing "platform economics", economists often like to identify the
"constrained supply" because that dictates where to prioritize efforts. In
Uber, the constrained supply is the _drivers_ , not the passengers. In dating
apps, the constrained supply is _women_ , not men. In a Q&A website, the
constrained supply is the _expert answerers_ and not the question askers.
(This matches our intuition that generating new questions is "easy" and a
larger population can ask them but answering questions is "hard" and therefore
it's a smaller population that can do it.)

Therefore, the mods make the site a little better for the _people answering
the questions_.

Another economics thinking framework is Frédéric Bastiat's "seen vs unseen":

\- What's seen : a question gets "closed as off-topic". This action is very
_visible_. It feels like an insult to the question asker and adds to the
perception that SO is unwelcoming to newbies.

\- What's unseen: cleaned up questions make the queue a little more sane for
experts willing to spare time looking for (hopefully interesting) unanswered
questions to answer. This positive effect on the queue is _invisible_. It's
not easy for experts to comment on moderator actions _they don 't see_ because
that's the whole point: filter the queue down to something more manageable and
make it less annoying for the answerers.

If you deliberately optimize a new Q&A website for the question askers (i.e.
no mods) at the expense of the contributors answering the questions, the
experts will avoid it. That leads to a hypothetical website with less answers
and lower quality answers. That will make it less popular with the question
askers which is opposes the goal of making the site better for those seeking
good answers to their questions.

~~~
patrick5415
This is a perspective I’ve not heard before and helps me take a less dim view
of the SO rules.

While Im pretty sympathetic to the “RTFM” style rules, the one that really
annoys me is the prohibition on question that will elicit answeres which are
opinion based. It appears to me that experts often love to answer such
questions. I don’t see how this fits into your framework of making things
better for the answeres. Would you disagree?

~~~
jasode
_> , the one that really annoys me is the prohibition on question that will
elicit answeres which are opinion based. It appears to me that experts often
love to answer such questions. I don’t see how this fits into your framework
of making things better for the answeres._

I agree that questions seeking opinions are valuable. I'll attempt to explain
why opinions are discouraged and then I'll offer up my idea of how they can be
added.

The "Q&A" aspect of Stackoverflow is widely misunderstood. From what I've read
from SO's creators (Joel Spolsky & Jeff Atwood), they intended a "wikipedia"
style authoritative site that was seeded with questions. But not just with
_any_ kind of question; only questions with _objective answers_. Yes, opinions
are also valuable but they discourage it because they invite endless
_discussion_ and they thought the best place for that was Slashdot/Reddit/HN.
Therefore, the ideal question had an objective authoritative answer instead of
triggering debate, controversy, and meta-commentary. To add to the issue, the
question's "discussion" eventually degrades into arguments with low signal-to-
noise ratio. (Fyi if you didn't know: some mods tried to move "opinion
questions" to _" programmers.stackexchange.com"_ but that triggered a meta
discussion discouraging that[0].)

All that said, I agree that many experts would enjoy providing their opinions
on SO and question askers would also benefit from reading them. For opinion-
based questions to avoid the problems mentioned in the previous paragraph, SO
would have to put restrictions such as... only users with a certain karma
threshold (e.g. 10k+) could answer them, and only if the question got a high
amount of votes (e.g. 200+) which broadcasts to the community that members are
_desperately_ seeking quality opinions. Another rule might be the an answerer
must also provide the opposing view to try and minimize bias. Whatever the
mechanism, the game theory and secondary effects must be considered so trolls
don't degrade the site.

If that was pursued, StackOverflow would be surrendering the original ideal of
"no opinion questions"... but on the other hand, they could also embrace it
with a new slogan: _" Yes, opinion-based questions are subjective but with our
tough rules, StackOverflow has the best collection of high-quality opinions
anywhere on the web."_

I'd like to see some good ideas on how to handle opinion-based questions.

[0] [https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/73382/please-
stop-u...](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/73382/please-stop-using-
softwareengineering-se-as-your-toilet-bowl)

------
GordonS
I visit StackOverflow on a daily basis so I haven't seen this - I just tried
in incognito mode, and wow, this wasn't an exaggeration!

I've always felt like the owners of SO have had good intentions, and for the
most part felt like I trusted them.

But there are now some worrying signs - first they allowed obtrusive ads onto
SO, and now this looks like a PI data-grab. Clamouring for PI is always
worrying, because it means that PI has _value_ to them - but why?

~~~
chii
because the questions and answers have not made them enough money. Engagement
on the platform is declining due to strict editors and lazy question askers.
and with a majority developer audience, the ad blockers are stopping
advertising revenue.

this is when a site start compromising its stated morals. not out of greed,
but out of necessity.

~~~
GordonS
But what of Jobs? Their cheapest package (which allows max 1 job ad at any
time) is around $7,500/year. They have 5572 jobs advertised right now, so I
guess it's pulling in 30-41M a year.

------
sklivvz1971
"We <3 people who code"

...so we'll remove a useful home page and replace it with a marketing junk
page which confuses everyone.

~~~
baud147258
> We less that 3 people who code

No wonder there's no progress on moderation tools and the new ask question
page has just been rolled out /s

------
softwaredoug
Depressing, hopefully it gets remedied.

Yet another reason to share your knowledge on a blog you control and not give
your invaluable content over to someone else’s business.

Do these kids of communities all become just crowdsourced content farms in the
end?

~~~
ghevshoo
The problem with personal blogs is that they are likely to get labeled as a
“personal” site and blocked by some stupid corporate filter.

~~~
paulryanrogers
How common is this?

At the smaller companies I've worked for the only filtering was of the big,
distracting sites like Facebook.

~~~
alxlaz
At one of the large companies I've worked before, the corporate filter barred
access to
[https://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html](https://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html)
because it was a hacking website. Which it cleverly determined, you've guessed
it, by checking the URL and seeing it had "hack" in there. _Everything_ with
"hack" in the URL was banned.

Pretty sure all those JavaScript ninja hackers they'd hired were a little
baffled that they hire hackers but don't let them view nasty hacker pages...

~~~
zrobotics
I also take it that this company didn't have any offices in es _sex_?

~~~
stordoff
Scunthorpe is a common example for this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem)

~~~
D-Coder
The standard joke is "Scunthorpe, Arsenal, and Manchester fucking United."

------
japhyr
I don't quite get this. I'm not logged into SO at the moment. I went to the
home page, and the first thing I see is "For developers" and "For businesses".
I clicked "For developers", and under "Public Q&A" There's a big button
"Browse questions". I click that button, and I'm on a page that looks exactly
like SO always looks: questions, answers, and a big blue "Ask Question"
button.

To ask a question you have to log in, but that's standard practice. Am I
missing something?

~~~
snazz
The answer with a score of -49 on the linked thread is a response from SE
staff telling us that they’ve made the change to address the immediate
concern.

------
jasonhansel
To be honest: I think SO is in a difficult position here. They're absolutely
essential to the software dev community, but their service is incredibly hard
to monetize without alienating users.

~~~
everyone
"They're absolutely essential to the software dev community"

Posting a question there has been pointless for years. I also dont think I've
seen any answers there via duckduckgo useful to me in a long time. I dont
think I'd even notice if it disappeared tomorrow. (I am not a web dev btw)

~~~
lordnacho
> Posting a question there has been pointless for years.

Isn't that mainly because it's already been answered? (Apart from new tags)
I've got dozens of questions on my SO account, but it's been quite a while
since I wrote one now.

~~~
everyone
No, The trend I noticed starting years ago, which according to various
articles Ive seen is now complete and institutionalized there, is that:

High ranked mod/troll types, who seem to spend all day there trying to get
more karma for some reason, constantly cruise for new questions. They dont
know much about programming in general, and have zero knowledge of my
specialist field for example. If they see a question that superficialy
resembles or shares certain keywords with another one they will close it as
being answered already (pretty much acting like particularly dumb bots) even
if it has nothing to do with the existing question, or if the existing
question is massively out of date and irrelevant because of updates to the
software in question.

~~~
lordnacho
You may have a point there. It happens quite often that I google for
something, and the article containing the answer is marked closed or off-
topic.

~~~
patrick5415
Yes. Some of the best, most valuable questions and answers are closed for
pedantic reasons.

~~~
chessturk
I upvoted you and the gp, but I also would like to point out that the useful
answer often still arrives before the pendatic closure.

Some of my own questions followed that route, without being dupe questions and
while being a code-based success or fail state. The closure of tickets is
detrimental to the site, but somehow, it's still worth asking a question.

------
eaurouge
The response here is over the top. SO have been building Teams for some three
years now. I know because I signed my company up for the beta, but we weren’t
in a position to try it when it became available. The value prop should be
obvious. It would archive and surface institutional knowledge.

Many companies are currently using Slack for this, but then your search terms
have to be precise to reveal what you’re looking for. And if you’re on the
free plan, your data will eventually get deleted.

Obviously this doesn’t affect the free product.

~~~
shagie
How does that value proposition for an organization of 100 compare to
Confluence?

Comparing it to slack, I believe, is a apples to oranges. Slack isn't a
knowledge management system and was never meant to be.

~~~
eaurouge
I haven’t used Confluence but I imagine one advantage SO Teams would have is
familiarity. Many developers/engineers already know about its benefits and how
it works.

Yes, apples and oranges with Slack. But if you’ve ever found yourself
searching Slack for some piece of knowledge from a colleague then you’ve used
it for that off label use case.

------
tylermauthe
Running a business is hard. It takes cash. As others have said (and better) it
is likely that they're doing this in the hopes of raising cash. Not because
they are jerks, but because they need to. So they can eat. I worry this tactic
may kill the golden goose eventually, though! Newcomers may be daunted by this
experience, but I'm sure they thought of that and have tested it. Easy enough
to pay some college kids for an afternoon. I suspect that SO is enough of a
(hacker) "household name" that newcomers will already know the legends with no
help from any marketing team. As others have said, primary access is by way of
search engine results.

It would be tricky to do it well and proper, but perhaps they could introduce
monetary rewards for question. Take a cut of transactions, pass on cash to
recipients. Could obfuscate the % of the cut by using tokens or similar.

I've definitely received answers so good I'd have paid for them! I've also had
questions that were difficult enough to warrant attaching a real monetary
bounty.

Perhaps another angle would be something like CodeMentor. A system where you
could pay someone to mentor you, but buying from a user profile backed by the
credibility of answering questions on the subject at hand.

------
losthobbies
They need to do more with the World building section. It’s fun and educational

------
nurettin
Not sure where SO would have been without google obviously giving it a leg up
for all these years. I literally cannot for the life of me find another search
engine that brings me to the correct question no matter how vague my search
terms are.

~~~
toddh
Exploiting Google's SEO was the plan from the very beginning. They just did an
excellent job of it.

------
Havoc
Sounds like quora implosion v2

------
malinens
Lately I have seen many SO clones on google which show crawled SO content or
translated copies. Maybe google does not care ir actively try to sink SO?

------
wombatpm
There is a big search box at the top of the page. Type in what is foo? and see
answers.

------
evncr
In all my years, this is literally the first time I see the Stack Overflow
home page. Why would I ever want to go there? All the information is in the
pages with questions and answers.

~~~
nemanjaboric
I used to go to stackoverflow.com to check for the new questions and write
answers.

------
AviationAtom
Sounds like an argument for a decentralized knowledgebase, similar to how P2P
social networking services work (ala Matrix?)

~~~
billfruit
It was already there, the usenet newsgroups.

------
known
This is like Google not allowing free use of its search

