That's a hard one. SO's hostile community to newbies, like any expert community, comes from the longstanding users having seen the basic questions 1000s of times and understandably not wanting to answer variations of them over and over, while for the newbies those questions genuinely are there and they don't have the routine knowledge yet of where to look or how to even look for solutions in the first place.

In an ideal world, LLMs would take all of the basic RTFM style questions, and leave SO for the harder, but still general enough to be applicable to others-questions. LLMs seem to be getting pretty good at those as well though, so I don't know where that leaves us.

SO for discussions of taste? I have these two options to build this, how should i approach this? They tried to sell their own GPT wrapper for a while, didn't they? The use case I can see for that is: User asks question - LLM answers it - user is unsure about the answer - it gets posted as a SO thread and the rest of the userbase can nitpick or correct the LLM response.

Edit: I also seem to remember they had a job portal in the sidebar for a while, what happened to that? Seems like a reasonable revenue stream that is also useful to users.

They should focus on high-quality expert answers.

Now that we have LLMs I don't need basic questions answered. I do still need hard questions answered by experts and AI has normalized paying money for QA.

I would definitely pay for a "human ChatGPT" service where the answers are written by experts who get paid per answer, e.g. grad students. Then they can resell this data to AI companies. Or maybe the economics are such that they can take enough money from AI companies to pay the experts and I don't need to pay anything at all.

This won't bring in as much money as advertising used to, but that business model is dead anyway. There's no future for a QA site at the low end.

ideally, slowly grinding down duplicates into canonicals, keeping the ones whose answers are subject to change (with developments in languages and tools) up-to-date, removing cruft and making it more like a library (à la Rosetta Code) that's easy to find things in

and a change of form from (questions being asked primarily as a means to an end for one person) to (Q&A pairs being written as reference materials)

and requests for comment on which approach would be the most idiomatic or whether one has fallen into an XY trap or other things that rely on human 'taste' rather than LLMs' blithe march of obedience

> How could Stack Overflow succeed in a post-chatgpt eta?

As a data source for LLMs, and by becoming the place someone goes where ChatGPT can't produce a sufficient answer.

Be chatbot first ig. I had envisioned a portal where you land on the front page and drop your question in the box. It would do some rag thing over the SO question database then try to answer your question. You could chat back and forth with it. If you figured out your problem then you would have the option to turn it into a question answer pair with help from the ai. If you didn't figure out your problem, then it would turn it into just a question, which would then show up for the experts of SO to answer. Something like that.

I’m not aware of SO’s plans to remain profitable and relevant, but I do know they have an enterprise offering. I’ve seen ads on LinkedIn recently for MCP functionality tied to the enterprise SO offering that lets you use it as a knowledge base. I could see that potentially being a path to stay relevant.

It will turn into a meme subreddit and/or die. What else is there?

Allow AI to ask questions. Since the point of the site is to build a knowledge base you don't really need humans to be that involved. Humans running into problems and then asking question was just one way to do this in the pre AI era. Now with AI we can reevaluate if we really need humans as much as we did.