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.
I think very aggressive karma decay might work. Let's say your karma that is older than 1 year does not count for moderator powers. That means you need to be actually productive member of community to have the moderation powers.
I'm not sure what problems you're hoping they'll solve. I think the biggest problem with Stack Overflow is the endless stream of low-quality questions. It's hard to find interesting, helpful-to-others questions among all the "do my homework for me" type questions, repeats, poorly-worded unresearched posts, etc. That only gets worse as more people use it. I used to moderate, and got sick of it because it's not rewarding to wade through all the garbage. I don't know how they're going to grow the business and improve the quality at the same time.
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'm not sure what problems you're hoping they'll solve.
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.
Well said. Especially during the early years, I always found the signal/noise ratio of SO to be head and shoulders above anything on the web.
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.
This is why I keep going back. I'm afraid it will get worse with this but it may be just entropy of existence as a web service. It's inevitably doomed to mediocrity and replacement by a new hotness.
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.
> Why then does nobody seems to think there's an upside to the acquisition?
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.
Maybe. They definitely want a return on the investment. So either they have a plan where SO complements some of their other assets or they just want to milk it for money.
I literally cannot name an acquisition of a useful but not maximally profitable product that I was a user of that has worked out better for me. So that's why my expecatations are low.
What would an upside even look like? We expect SO to be free, which it is, always online, which it is, and have decent enough moderation to weed out the nonsense posts, which is generally the case. So the best thing that can come out of an acquisition like this is that nothing changes, so there just isn't really anything to get worked up about one way or another.
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.
Why then does nobody seems to think there's an upside to the acquisition? Maybe they can fix some of the problems.
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