While I agree that it is annoying whenever one reads something put out by the actual SO people, I notice that (thus far) if I simply ignore that and go there to look up the answers to questions (and very occasionally ask or answer them), it still works fine. As long as the new owner doesn't make it "pay to see", I can probably ignore them.

There is, of course, no guarantee in this. But, while I find what I hear about Mozilla's internal politics obnoxious, I am also able to just use Firefox and ignore all that, thus far.

Plenty of examples of a purchase being the beginning of the end, but it's not inevitable. Microsoft owns Github. Google owns Youtube. So far, both are still functional, if compared to other real-world products rather than some theoretical ideal. Now, you could put hundreds of counterexamples on the other side of that, but at least it is possible for the buyer not to completely screw things up.

Since when is Stack Overflow dying, or focused on social justice? That's not my experience at all. The purpose of the site (as well as the many, many sister sites) is to succinctly ask and succinctly answer questions. It does so admirably.

Occasional drama is just what happens when you become the effective Wikipedia of everything that is possible to ask about any technical topic. The actual Wikipedia is also not free of drama or political struggles in the background. But, much like Stack Overflow, it's also far from dead and continues to be a priceless resource to all of humanity.

>The honeyed words of social justice are more important than great, well executed products, apparently.

I like how all the other comments are pointing out that the forces behind an acquisition are never good for 'focused products' and then there's this comment that shows us the truth, it's those damn kids and their social justice that ruins the products.

Since when is stack overflow dying?

It has nothing to do with social justice; Stack Overflow and Mozilla had a user base that scaled with network effects, but both in markets with low switching costs. They’re constantly vulnerable unless they can come up with products that are harder to dislodge. Thus the mission statements that are vague because they’re trying to find a way out of the corner they’ve painted themselves in.

One annoying reality of the business world is that to prevail there you need to drink the full BS cool aid. You have to start talking business lingo (growth, empowering, success) to even get access to the financial support to grow the business and hire others. If you're down to earth and don't stand the whole BS, your chances in that area are very slim.

> Now their products are withering. Dying a slow death.

What is SO business model? Is it ads-based?

Just hope it won't devolve into news-sites free-article quota with account points mixed in for some throttling. IMO, the most attractive part of SO is that low friction to contribute an answer, oftentimes seeing a relevant topic to suggest an answer in passing or when looking for answers myself.

Also SO's value is tied to the intensive community moderation effort, hope this would not be discounted in any future roadmap (wonder if there's anysuch).

Sounds like it is merely a dialect of "suit-speak" for the 2020s, aka "lip-service."

While suit-speak often marks the decline of a business, it is not clear lefty-politics makes that much difference in regards to the decline.

TBF, the notion of community at least started off as more than marketing speak or social justice trend chasing. Arguably, it is a substantive basis of our inter-networked connectedness, even if it was later assimilated by the same marketing machinery that also spits outs empty (but apparently effective) buzzwords.