Stack Overflow is still far and away the best site of its kind, but it has stagnated significantly over the last several years. The site runners aren't tackling the big meta problems any longer, and they aren't pursuing innovative solutions either, they're just continuing the status quo into the future.
Stack Overflow is declining, except it's still so well populated with moderators that the author of the article struggled to be able to answer a question quickly enough for it to matter, and he can find no alternatives to it that work as well.
I dont know anything about the internal politics of SO, and I dont think Ive ever asked (or answered) a question, but I use it every day.
It is absolutely the single best resource for developers on the internet, and thats amazing.
That's appropriate considering Jeff hasn't worked there for more than half the life of the company. Stack Overflow is a piece of software that I would consider complete. I hope their future is just more of the same. Sure there will be small improvements to be made over time, but the radical days of product changes are far behind. I'm going to guess that in 10 years the site will still be recognizable to anyone who uses it today.
I think the initial design principles of Stack Overflow - basically that the balance of incentives will determine the outcome - is still sound. And the initial years of the site showed the people in control were very smart and thoughtful about structuring and fine tuning the incentives.
The problem is that fine tuning (and occasional restructuring) needs to be an ongoing process, and it has stopped. It feels like the original creators left and the site has been coasting on auto-pilot for a few years now.
That's what worries me about the future of SO. It was an enormous improvement over what came before (in fact was created as a reaction to the horrible status quo - expertsexchange anyone?). But if it's left to continue to wither it will eventually become like those sites.
In my experience, Stack Overflow is still one of the only places that I can ask questions and expect to receive useful information within the same day. I admit I don't answer questions as much as I used to, but there still seems to be plenty of people around to help. Also, as a general corpus of knowledge it really can't be beat - I often find useful answers to questions that were asked years ago.
I know it's currently in vogue to hate on it, but for me it continues to be a great source of information.
I think stack overflow peaked a few years ago - its grown more and more useless over the last few years - the last questions I wrote 10 or so years ago have long been modded off topic and locked, despite being within the rules at the time - the culture of the site has got hostile - and no one answers any difficult questions any more and it's full of incorrect misleading out of date information.
I find the most useful information in github issues nowadays....
I used to be a heavy stackoverflow user in the early days, and I have enough karma to put me in the moderator tier now. However, I don't use the site much anymore, except for getting questions answered.
In a way I suppose that's a testament to the fact that the site still works, and works well. They solved most of the problem they set out to solve originally, which is a major achievement. Nevertheless, I still have a nagging feeling that some further iterative improvements could turn stackoverflow into something that would be even more useful, and would be more inviting for people to continue to participate in actively even without having expert knowledge in some tiny sub-category or a desire to constantly tidy everything up day-in day-out.
Edit: to clarify I mean that it's hard to visit stackoverflow on a regular basis instead of just using it as an answer generating machine. Which I think is something not unique to myself and probably hurts the overall quality of the site considerably, notwithstanding the many experts who use the site heavily. Specifically I find it hard to peruse interesting topics to comment on, since the site is now very aggressively tightly focused. Even worse I find it difficult to use the site as a learning tool. Often times when I want to learn something new I'll get it in my head to go to stackoverflow first, but that's never worked very well for me. It's just too difficult to sort or filter all the data into something that is actually useful.
Overall I think the biggest problem is that the people behind the site(s) have decided they've done their jobs, that what they've presented is good enough and at most needs only minor tweaking. I think that's a huge mistake personally and I think the result is going to be that the stackexchange sites end up as a footnote in history after having been rapidly eclipsed by "the next big thing" in a similar vein.
Most of the people behind Stack Overflow are still here...and we haven't changed our stack and are quite happy with the performance we get...and there's always more to squeeze out.
We can and sometimes do run Stack Overflow (currently 3.3 billions hit a month) from 2 web servers and 1 SQL server...I think that's pretty good for any stack.
I'm 48 and working on shifting back into coding after too much time doing more generalized IT consulting/support/admin/etc. for medical practices, and I'm not nearly as likely to spend time on Stack Overflow as I was 6-7 years ago.
There's still useful stuff on there and some gems, but it feels like there's a lot more cruft to wade through as well and I'm not feeling the same desire to surf the site or look for questions to answer because that's just not as personally rewarding as it once was.
It feels crazy to say this, but I find StackOverflow useless in 2023. It's crazy because ten years ago or even six years ago StackOverflow was everything. There were all the jokes that you couldn't even code without it or that StackOverflow being down would halt all programmers worldwide or whatever and they were for a large part actually true. If you tried to set up a new library or framework or whatever you would eventually run into an issue that would just take way too much time to figure out by yourself and you'd find the solution on StackOverflow in minutes (or ask a question yourself and often get a good answer.) Sure, it was a bit of a hostile community but most of the time if you phrased your question well you'd get a good answer that would solve your problem. You could even use it exclusively - restrict your searches to site:stackoverflow.com and you'd be fine. I found many solutions on StackOverflow that were absolutely not anywhere else on the web.
Today, I use a combination of Github issues, documentation and ChatGPT/Copilot - and it's way more powerful than StackOverflow, it's not even close.
One underappreciated part is that the rate of change of programming has significantly increased. Two months time today brings more change in our world than a whole year in the 2000s. Not even just AI stuff but also the frequency and magnitude of change in frameworks, best practices, services, APIs... I once learned things from paper books, now by the time you've written and published one it's already outdated. Keeping a massive resource like StackOverflow up to date in 2014 or so required a similarly massive effort, but with today's rate of change it's crazy.
I hope they can turn it around but I fear it's already dead.
I always feel a bit sad and wistful when thinking about Stack Overflow. It was a great idea and at the beginning it worked well but the moderation culture destroyed the site.
There's too much emphasis on closing questions that are duplicates (when in fact they are not, and technology changes so a duplicate question asked 2 years later is going to get different responses), closing questions because they are too open ended (but those tend to give the most interesting answers) and moderation is both too heavy handed and opaque (no records of deleted comments).
Also, often enough the accepted answer for a question is not the best answer and instead the best answer can be found by looking at other answers or the comments (which I agree with the author should not be seen as ephemeral but are instead critical)
So, all in all, Stack overflow was great when it came out, the concept is good and it could be great but falls well short of that.
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