The consensus seems to be that SO has peaked some time ago although I still get a lot of value out of it.
Why then does nobody seems to think there's an upside to the acquisition? Maybe they can fix some of the problems.
Why then does nobody seems to think there's an upside to the acquisition? Maybe they can fix some of the problems.
The examples are endless. Keybase, Winamp, Trello (to a lesser extent), MySQL/OpenOffice, the recent drama surrounding the addition of telemetry into Audacity, anything folded into the core product of some tech giant two years after the acquisition when the core stakeholders from the original team left.
In short, it's rare for an acquisition to work out well in the long term, so it's understandable to be very sceptical of them.
My biggest concern is that they'll ruin it with ads. Historically, Stack Overflow has had some of the least-offensive advertising, to the point that I didn't even need an adblocker (although lately I do). They're going to want to monetize it for a return on their investment, and that can only lead to bad things.
I can think of a few (not that this hasn't been discussed to death already):
How to properly moderate a site like that.
How to keep answers updated.
How to keep answers updated without mods shutting things down due to duplication. A lot of html and JS questions are garbage in 2021 but there's no way to improve the situation without mods screaming "duplication".
How to allow for answers that are more than just what you'd find in the documentation. A lot of the value of the site came in the first few years, when you were allowed to expand on your answers and provide useful information. The amount of new value created by SO is decreasing rapidly.
One final one is that they need to stop worrying about low-quality questions. That's the only problem they've tried to solve in the last decade, and it's already solved by upvoting and search.
1) low-quality questions ("do my homework", etc.)
2) over-zealous moderators closing things they don't like
With the vast data SO accumulated maybe some kind of deep network thing? I'm a DNN skeptic but would love to be proven wrong in this case. If someone could extract a quality metric and then add a bot that prompts users to improve the question we'd be a long way towards getting higher quality content.
In part, due to a lot of their subtle UI and reputation choices. Really well designed.
Massive scale may at one point break that, but another cause may be found in the change of tone by the team behind SO. They're on the "inclusive" train now.
Don't get me wrong, being inclusive is good, but there's a difference between somebody being a beginner or not proficient in English, and somebody being plain lazy.
This "softening" I do not consider a good development. I prefer the tough love approach that weeds out garbage from good stuff. If that mechanism is compromised, its unique value is lost.
nothing that helps the product/user base.
Acquisition that improves things are extremely out of the norm.
There don't appear to be downsides in this acquisition, but acquisitions usually destroy the thing that gets acquired (because they either get overhauled, regardless of whether it needed it, or they get folded into a different product, destroying its identity if the old product is even kept around at all), so the expectation for an announcement like this is that the acquired thing is now living on borrowed time.
We'll see what happens.
I don't think so. Most of their problems are things that they don't even think are problems. They've attracted a large community of moderators who think similarly.
Once you get to that point it's too late. Any changes you make to fix things (e.g. allowing users to block nuisance users, making it harder to close questions, etc.) will just anger your mods who are a vocal minority that love closing questions and are nuisance users.
The only way is a new site.