Prashanth Chandrasekar Replacing Joel Spolsky as Stack Overflow CEO

Re:Prashanth Chandrasekar Replacing Joel Spolsky as Stack Ov... by duxup on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @02:20PM (#21063118)

Yeah the pattern of:

- Find thing that gets traction and growth.

- Demand more growth than the thing you do well is providing.

- Focus not on the thing you do well....

Seems to happen time and again. I always think of the story on HN about the guy who bought back his startup from the VCs for $1 after it "failed" and he went and ran it without the same expectations, and it is doing just fine.

There are maybe just some good ideas out there that aren't meant to be unicorns, but are productive none the less but they get buried in other expectations.

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Re:Prashanth Chandrasekar Replacing Joel Spolsky as Stack Ov... by dmix on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @03:07PM (#21063516)

Bringing in outside management away from the original company founders is a common way this happens. Especially if they come from another traditional public company that only cares about share prices as the key metric.

I can’t imagine someone messing up Stackoverflow, but Digg managed to do it so there’s always a way (although SO doesn’t have a high quality direct competitor like Reddit...yet.). The best time to take on a business is when they’ve peaked and get distracted, they forget about being the best in the market. I should note I don’t think SO is near that point yet.

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Re:Prashanth Chandrasekar Replacing Joel Spolsky as Stack Ov... by DEADBEEFC0FFEE on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @11:30PM (#21067339)

Digg was so long ago now, I think it losing its relevance as an example. Has to be nearly a decade ago.

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Re:Prashanth Chandrasekar Replacing Joel Spolsky as Stack Ov... by throwaway2048 on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @11:37PM (#21067371)

Digg was longer ago than that..

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Re:Prashanth Chandrasekar Replacing Joel Spolsky as Stack Ov... by SnarkAsh on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @03:44PM (#21063811)

Joel has already killed Stack Overflow beyond repair.

Prashanth is a grave robber trying to find a few valuables to snatch for investors.

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Re:Prashanth Chandrasekar Replacing Joel Spolsky as Stack Ov... by dmix on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @04:30PM (#21064302)

I don't really use Stackoverflow besides coming across answers in Google like everyone else. Not familiar with any internal community problems, so I can't comment. Can you share the story here?

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Re:Prashanth Chandrasekar Replacing Joel Spolsky as Stack Ov... by frandroid on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @05:26PM (#21064798)

Stack Overflow has a much smaller version of Wikipedia's God-complex moderator nerd problem, where some people with no life moderate and focus on their own vanity metrics rather than the quality of what they moderate.

But SO is still pretty damn useful, like Wikipedia.

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Re:Prashanth Chandrasekar Replacing Joel Spolsky as Stack Ov... by wpietri on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @11:53PM (#21067457)

Yeah, definitely. A bunch of thoroughly dickish moderation persuaded me to never contribute content again. And honestly, I'm done doing free labor for for-profit companies. I'll still edit Wikipedia despite all its issues, as it's all for the public good. But anybody after "hyper growth" can pay me for my labor.

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Re:Prashanth Chandrasekar Replacing Joel Spolsky as Stack Ov... by dmix on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @12:50AM (#21067699)

Was this a moderator for a particular tag or one that oversees answers in general? How does it favour vanity metrics over value? Aren't the best answers chosen by the end users?

I'm genuinely curious, I'm not familiar with SO besides having answered a few top questions and getting some points long ago.

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Re:Prashanth Chandrasekar Replacing Joel Spolsky as Stack Ov... by DocTomoe on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @02:46AM (#21068347)

A good answer cannot be chosen by an end user if they do not get to see it because Mod-without-a-life deleted it 15 seconds after it was written.

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Re:Prashanth Chandrasekar Replacing Joel Spolsky as Stack Ov... by sytelus on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @05:00AM (#21068997)

Saying SO is “useful” is vastly understated. The developer world is filled with memes such as “coding is 99% looking up thing on SO”. World’s one of the highest paid profession is powered by SO. They have rigid community rules that everyone likes to complain but it is exactly what has kept quality standards up.

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Re:Prashanth Chandrasekar Replacing Joel Spolsky as Stack Ov... by airstrike on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @05:13PM (#21064697)

Not necessarily agreeing with the parent, but here's one recent issue: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/332974/is-se-allowi...

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Re:Prashanth Chandrasekar Replacing Joel Spolsky as Stack Ov... by xjoins on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @04:09PM (#21064088)

Can you elaborate on what you mean when you say “Prashanth is a grave robber trying to find valuables to snatch”?

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Re:Prashanth Chandrasekar Replacing Joel Spolsky as Stack Ov... by BigJono on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @06:30PM (#21065337)

I don't know if Joel has done anything, it seems to me that the users have killed SO more than anything. The quality of most accepted and upvoted answers is so low relative to even the worst documentation or IRC channel that I find it barely worth using.

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Re:Prashanth Chandrasekar Replacing Joel Spolsky as Stack Ov... by inimino on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @02:17AM (#21068171)

The environment selects the users.

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Re:Prashanth Chandrasekar Replacing Joel Spolsky as Stack Ov... by shmageggy on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @04:44PM (#21064426)

> Focus not on the thing you do well

Except SO for businesses could probably work quite well. I work for BIGTECHCO and the natural language query interface into institutional knowledge is very ad-hoc, being distributed amongst Slack histories, internal mailing list archives, etc. It would definitely be improved if consolidated with a decent UI.

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Re:Prashanth Chandrasekar Replacing Joel Spolsky as Stack Ov... by sterlind on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @05:59PM (#21065079)

We use it at work. It keeps me sane... search is very good, tons of people internally use it, and teams tend to do a decent job of monitoring for questions tagged with their component.

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Re:Prashanth Chandrasekar Replacing Joel Spolsky as Stack Ov... by jcims on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @09:01PM (#21066506)

We have it running at work as well. It had some traction but now we have an enterprise chat software that everyone gravitates to and it has become a ghost town.

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Re:Prashanth Chandrasekar Replacing Joel Spolsky as Stack Ov... by thefj on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @08:59PM (#21066488)

I always think of the story on HN about the guy who bought back his startup from the VCs for $1 after it "failed" and he went and ran it without the same expectations, and it is doing just fine.

Agree with the general point, but the guy burned 8 million dollars in investor money to get to the point where the business is "just fine". It's not really a good example IMO.

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Re:Prashanth Chandrasekar Replacing Joel Spolsky as Stack Ov... by fisherjeff on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @02:34PM (#21063235)

Anyone have a link for that?

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Re:Prashanth Chandrasekar Replacing Joel Spolsky as Stack Ov... by duxup on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @02:37PM (#21063268)

I found it:

https://marker.medium.com/reflecting-on-my-failure-to-build-...

Also here is where the project started on Show HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406614

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Re:Prashanth Chandrasekar Replacing Joel Spolsky as Stack Ov... by shreyas-satish on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @02:36PM (#21063256)

https://marker.medium.com/reflecting-on-my-failure-to-build-...

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Re:Prashanth Chandrasekar Replacing Joel Spolsky as Stack Ov... by thunkshift1 on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @06:16PM (#21065206)

thats an interesting story..could you share the link for the 1$ startup

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Re:Prashanth Chandrasekar Replacing Joel Spolsky as Stack Ov... by duxup on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @06:19PM (#21065223)

https://marker.medium.com/reflecting-on-my-failure-to-build-....

Also here is where the project started on Show HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406614

Really to cool to see a Show HN and know the story years later.

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Re:Prashanth Chandrasekar Replacing Joel Spolsky as Stack Ov... by splittingTimes on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @06:30PM (#21065332)

FYI, The medium link 404s.

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Re:Prashanth Chandrasekar Replacing Joel Spolsky as Stack Ov... by imadethis on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @08:55PM (#21066463)

Try https://marker.medium.com/reflecting-on-my-failure-to-build-...

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