this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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The fall from grace of StackOverflow is something both mesmerising and horrifying.
An invaluable repository of programming knowledge ground into dust as the last tokens of good will are cashed in for stinky money. It was a unique place, where self-moderation by the community actually worked to a large extent.
How the fuck did we get here? First the AI debacle, now this. Joel Spolsky always appeared as a reasonable guy, I wonder how much him stepping down is intertwined with SO making some of the worst possible calls in the past few years.
This is apparently not totally true, it was apparently (I read people talking about it, I have no source on it) not a great place for non-white people. But it is unclear what was wrong with it to me. (I saw this when there was the backlash against the AI moderation thing). So minor point, but I have no more information.
That's the worst part about this situation - Joel's burning the coder's Library of Alexandria in pursuit of that cash. Whatever comes to replace StackOverflow is gonna be a pale imitation of what came before, and I suspect the entire field of programming's gonna be feeling the setbacks for a long, long time.
Joel's no longer associated with SO, though, right? He's not even a chairman at this point.
According to wikipedia he left, rejoined and left again in 2022.
Kinda checks out? 2022 is around the time it became clear the admin was clueless about what makes SO actually a valuable research, and then genAI was the perfect spark to go full rot.