12:42 AM
Hey folks; sorry to intrude, but I was scanning the conversation from earlier & wanted to provide a few corrections
@JosephWright SE sites provide very little in the way of advertising. That's true both in the sense of "advertising for Stack Overflow" (SO gets nearly all of its traffic from folks searching Google for programming problems) and in the sense of "serving ads" (a handful of sites do run ads, but there's not a ton of money in it).
The best way to think of SE sites is probably... They exist because folks wouldn't allow non-programming questions on Stack Overflow.
Most other sites got their start from people who used Stack Overflow and liked the way it worked, but had some other vocation or interest that they prefer to spend their time on.
@JosephWright Canonical graciously allows us to use some of their branding for AU, but they don't pay for its operation. The closest thing to a "paid site" that we have currently is
Quantum Computing, which is sponsored by (but not owned by) Strangeworks.
@FaheemMitha First venture capital investment was, I believe, in 2010. That was what led to the creation of Stack Exchange - prior to that, there were 3 Q&A sites (SO, SF and SU) and meta, all funded by ads, and a separate product called Stack Exchange that allowed folks to pay to run their own sites (with their own rules on their own domain).
> Stack Overflow is the big city in the middle.
Because the programmer-city worked so well, people wanted to ask questions about other subjects, so we let them build other Q&A villages in the catchment area of the programmer-city. Some of these Q&A villages became cities of their own. The math cities barely even have any programmers and they speak their own weird language. They are math-Jerusalem. They make us very proud. Even though they don’t directly serve programmers, we love them and they bring a little tear to our eyes, like the other little villages, and they’re certainly making the …
Regarding the health of the company... It's in reasonably good shape. That is, we're bringing in more revenue than it costs to operate, which is an improvement over a year ago.
That revenue comes primarily from three sources: advertising on the sites, the Jobs product, and the "private Stack Overflow" products (Enterprise and now Teams). The first is mostly Stack Overflow, while the last two are exclusively Stack Overflow.
That's not really much of a change. For better or worse, Stack Overflow has always been the only part of this that's really made any money; the rest of the sites are something we operate primarily as a service to the folks who make Stack Overflow work.
A long time ago, we had this idea that we'd be able to scale out each site in much the same way that Stack Overflow had scaled, funding the development of new sites with revenue from the ones that were growing. But, while collectively these sites have quite a number of people using them, no one site is even a tenth of the size of Stack Overflow.
And, that's ok. They're still useful, they're still mostly making the Internet a better place to find information. But, that left us with the problem of how to pay for their continued operation.
For a long time, the idea was that the Jobs (formerly Careers) product would solve this. But... Hiring is a bit of a fickle market. It's a good product and it makes a fair bit of money, but it also takes a pretty hefty amount of money to operate.
Perhaps more problematic: there's very little overlap between the product itself and what we're doing here with Q&A. Programmer jobs are hot; mathematician jobs, not quite so much. There's no benefit to the vast majority of people using the network from the work we put into building out Jobs, beyond the fact that the sites continued to exist.
That's what led to Enterprise and Teams: the work that's being done on them goes back into the same software that runs all the other sites. Bug fixes, new features, improved performance, etc... It doesn't just feed out bottom line, it has the potential to benefit everyone who uses this software, private and public.
...but that's also where the present bitter pill presents itself: while nominally the same software as the rest of the sites, the truth is that Stack Overflow had diverged significantly.
This is particularly true for the designs, which in some cases differed in major ways from those present in the base software.
If we want this to work, we need to get back to a state where every site is running the same software, where a bug doesn't have to be fixed dozens of times (or left unfixed on some sites), where a new feature can't be enabled without first investing time into styling it for every site.
That's a nice idea in abstract, but the problem we're facing is simply that... Some sites worked better than Stack Overflow. They had had more time put into their designs, into their typography, etc.
So it's a major step down when that's tossed away to bring the site in line with the base software.
Now... Long-term, the solution is to improve things for everyone. To fix all the bugs, to smooth the rough edges, to make things adjust smoothly to the needs of each community and individual.
But that's long-term. And that's only if we're both diligent in listening to feedback, and actually get feedback.
In the meantime, this isn't much fun for anyone.
And... We probably could've been a bit more clear about that. I apologize; it wasn't our intent to mislead or blindside anyone, but I suspect a fair bit of that happened all the same.
We'll try to do a better job of it next time around.
And with that, I'll stop messing up the place with this wall of text & wish y'all a good evening.
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Unregistered vistors view
Picture worth a thousand words:
The issues:
IT'S ALL BLACK! If I came to a site with this amount of black, I would frighten away! The middle black thing is so dominant that you barely see anything else. Maybe it's the intent, to sep...
feature-requeststatus-review
Instead of adding a "hide" option in user settings, have you considered making the sidebar toggleable with a button instead?
Advantages of a togglable sidebar:
Site maintains a consistent look and feel between users.
More intuitive than searching through setting...
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