We’ve also recently introduced Coding Challenges to our site! These new challenges represent a new, fun way for developers to level up by tackling captivating puzzles and earning recognition for your skills and creativity. It’s a rewarding way to practice and expand your knowledge with the Stack Overflow community in a space that celebrates diverse and unique approaches.

aka

>pls provide training material for the LLMs for free :pray:

lol. lmao, even

Boy oh boy, what a post. Somehow they managed to make it less clear than ever what they even want to do with the platform, here are my favorite highlights:

With the use of AI now ubiquitous and ‘AI slop’ rapidly replacing the content we see online, this trust gap is where we think Stack Overflow can play a role. Our renewed vision and purpose moving forward is to be the world’s most vital source for technologists. By providing a trusted human intelligence layer in the age of AI, we believe we can serve technologists with our mission to cultivate community, power learning, and unlock growth.

That’s some advanced corpo-speak, doubling down on AI but also acknowledging that people don’t like AI-generated answers and providing a “human intelligence layer” to “unlock growth”. Did an AI write this? Lol.

As AI becomes more pervasive, the efficacy of AI systems will increasingly depend on access to verifiable and accurate knowledge. That will extend to job opportunities too as people look for guidance on exciting career prospects, and this is why we aim to Unlock growth for those who come to Stack Overflow or use our products.

I can feel the growth unlocking the more of this I read.

Knowledge Ingestion converts high-value content from tools like SharePoint, Confluence, Google Drive, and others into structured, trusted knowledge inside a Stack Internal instance. It’s designed to eliminate silos, accelerate onboarding, and scale institutional wisdom.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to ingest knowledge, but now that I can eliminate all these silos, I’m sure that my team can finally gain some institutional wisdom. Also I’m having a stroke. Help-

I- What? This reads like some AI slop meant to be read by investors in a corporate setting.

Yeah… This doesn’t sound promising. Refusing to acknowledge the obvious fact that AI and hostile mods have driven away 99% (not an exaggeration!) of their audience. A visual makeover before the change anything. Trying to sell the Q/A database for AI despite the fact that you can download it for free. They even talk up their job advertising product that they inexplicably cancelled a few years ago (btw I found levels.fyi has a pretty good job database if anyone is looking).

If it were me I would:

1. Use AI to improve question quality - if people post obviously bad questions get AI to improve it via a conversation.
2. Make it waaaaay harder to close questions. Like, require 10 votes and allow the asker to reopen it for free once.
3. Make it so questions can’t go below 0 points.
4. Make it impossible to close as duplicate. You should be able to mark questions as possible duplicates (and the asker can say “yes it is”) but if they don’t it should stay open.
5. Maybe even make it impossible to close questions at all. What actual purpose does it solve apart from driving people away?

Apart from the AI that’s all stuff they should have done 10 years ago.

It’s probably too late anyway.

So many words…

<img alt="" src="https://programming.dev/pictrs/image/1b45699b-e075-4edc-a681-2aa74a8fd7d5.png"> to <img alt="" src="https://programming.dev/pictrs/image/e01aa842-f35e-4493-83e5-8d4c5659a3dc.png">

oh god please no

wth is all that coloring [in the design samples]

The whole point of SO was to let experts answer specific questions and build a trusted knowledge-base. Having AI answer questions removes the need for humans to even try answering anything.

These are all great ideas for enterprise (especially training on their internal knowledgebase). Not sure it’s worth their while to have a consumer-facing side any more.

The signal to noise ratio on Stack Overflow has been low for a long time now, even before LLMs showed up. I was once a high-rep contributor there. Nowadays, I usually won’t even bother clicking web search results that lead there, let alone share my knowledge with them. (And with Cloudflare, which is now a man-in-the-middle between the site and its users.)

IMHO, the community could use a distributed Q&A network, with no instance able to interfere with anyone’s access to our accumulated knowledge.