Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B • Hacker News Board

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#111

Post by dystroy » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 4:42 PM UTC

munk-a wrote: post #43

dested wrote: post #11

I always thought Microsoft would be a natural buyer given the tech stack and Microsoft's support for developers. Unrelated story, I have a day one Stack Overflow account. I don't remember how I found it but I'm sure it was posted on digg or slashdot or something at the time. I had a lot of posts in the first few years about some generally broad concepts, and completely inactive since. In spite of this, I am in the to…

It's surprising what sorts of things people will buy for prestige - that might be worth a good deal of money for resale when you're looking to retire.

I doubt it. I'm in the top 0.07% with 300k+. Even such an account is worth nothing. Almost never did a recruiter pay attention to this. My low-rate GitHub account has a much bigger impact.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#112

Post by iKevinShah » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 4:42 PM UTC

efficax wrote: post #94

Either the rest of the private equity world is insanely overvalued or this is a really small price for such an important part of the software engineering community

I agree with this sentiment as a technical person but no matter how we put it, stack overflow's primary market will be technical people no matter the various *.stackexchange.com sites. That leads to a limit in reach / monetization / RoI which leads to lower price (IMO)

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#113

Post by wayoutthere » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 4:42 PM UTC

cheschire wrote: post #76

romanovcode wrote: post #66

Let's just hope there will be no "Pay to see the answer" thing happening like this one website experts exchange or whatever it was called.

For the first couple months I couldn’t shake this feeling I was looking at a shady site. Then one day it dawned on me I had been subconsciously reading “expert sex change” the whole time. Terrible domain choice.

I always had the same issue with Microsoft Exchange which was frequently abbreviated as MS Exchange, which translates to msexchange if you want to use it in DNS.

Anyway after years of dealing with that I went ahead and got the sex change and everything is good now. ;)

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#114

Post by xmprt » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 4:42 PM UTC

jmkni wrote: post #29

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t want to seem like a jerk saying this, because I’ve put effort into supporting the site and helping with moderation, I know it’s all very challenging and difficult, but: I think stack overflow has been dead for a while. Maybe you and I wanted different things from it and you still find it useful, but I haven’t really enjoyed it for many years. I loved it over a decade ago, these days I generally avoid it. I wa…

I found it incredibly useful as a beginner. As long as you could put together a decent question and were a little patient you would usually get your answer. The more experienced I got, the less useful I found it. These days, if I’m stuck, most of the time so is everybody else reading my question. Quite often it’s actually because I’ve encountered a bug with whatever framework I’m using, or a mistake in the documentat…

That's a great point. I haven't really noticed it but over the last few years, the first place is rarely Stack Overflow unless it's basic things (like how to use a git or tar feature). Checking Github issues or even just reading the code. Maybe the Google algorithm or Github SEO was improved to bring it up in the results but it has helped so I'm not complaining.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#115

Post by croes » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 4:43 PM UTC

"The group’s expansion into internet platforms began in the 1990s' spanning online consumer services, including:

E-commerce - including its subsidiary, OLX (100%)

Takealot.com (96%) Fintech - including its subsidiary, PayU (98.8%)

Food delivery - including its subsidiary and associates, iFood (54.8%), Delivery Hero (22.3%) and Swiggy (38.8%)

Etail - including its subsidiary, eMag (80.1%)

Travel - including its associate, Ctrip (6%)

Mobility - Bykea

It is also the largest shareholder of social Internet platforms:

Tencent (28.9%)

Mail.ru Group (28% in 2019)"

Doesn't sound to good for me.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#116

Post by josefx » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 4:43 PM UTC

gerikson wrote: post #17

dt3ft wrote: post #6

How much am I going to get for all the answers I posted? :) (Hint: not a dime)

Uh, you knew that going in, right? Aren't all answers CC0?

I think they use CC BY-SA 4.0. There was some criticism when they moved from CC BY-SA 3.0 even when it was considered an improvement since it wasn't clear if stackoverflow needed additional consent to change the license for already existing content.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#117

Post by swman » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 4:43 PM UTC

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #8

tanepiper wrote: post #4

You had a good run Stack Overflow - sad to see it die this way (because we know it all will)

I don’t want to seem like a jerk saying this, because I’ve put effort into supporting the site and helping with moderation, I know it’s all very challenging and difficult, but: I think stack overflow has been dead for a while. Maybe you and I wanted different things from it and you still find it useful, but I haven’t really enjoyed it for many years. I loved it over a decade ago, these days I generally avoid it. I wa…

I mostly build apps and services, so SO (lol) continues to be very useful for me. For instance, there are a myriad of bugs and glitches that come up in mobile app dev, or when using any popular programming language or framework. SO continues to have relevant, up-to-date information for the types of questions I'm seeking to answer. For example, I recently found out an issue I was pulling my hair out over was happening only on a particular version of a simulator...

Personally, I have never heard anyone say SO is not that good anymore, and certainly not that it is dead/dying.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#118

Post by AbrahamParangi » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 4:43 PM UTC

yaitsyaboi wrote: post #99

Everyone is saying how 1.8B is a ton, but I’m kinda surprised that it’s “barely” more than the Depop acquisition today at 1.6B.

Stack overflow is probably responsible for increasing global developer productivity by maybe ~1000x the acquisition price. In a sense it’s a tragedy of the commons.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#119

Post by oezi » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 4:43 PM UTC

bena wrote: post #49

armchairhacker wrote: post #21

Has anyone found any other Q/A sites similar to Stack overflow or what it used to be? My experience with Stack overflow from early 2010s to now, is that it used to be an amazing, "must-have" site. Always the #1 result on Google. I used it for basic web and iOS dev (remember Objective-C) and it had better documentation than most of the official docs. But now the quality of the questions and answers is worse, official…

The problem with StackOverflow or any "community-driven" effort is that every single community is driven by those who dedicate the most time to driving the community. In the beginning, this isn't largely a problem because the owners of the site can manage the load. Then as the site gets marginally bigger, you can trust on volunteers who have demonstrated expertise or something. But eventually, skilled people will get…

I think this is an incorrect assessment. The value doesn't come from those that dedicate most of their time. The value comes from the sites ability to integrate the long tail both for answers and questions. Certainly it is valuable to have the super star posters with a million reputation. But the site was build by random people answering random questions.

I also don't believe in the value of "community management" at SO. Moderation is just senseless busywork which discourages people to participate. Closing questions as if there is any value in this instead of letting people play the game of asking and answering questions which matter to them and let Google do the filtering.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#120

Post by robjan » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 4:43 PM UTC

dt3ft wrote: post #23

gerikson wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, you knew that going in, right? Aren't all answers CC0?

Of course, I never expected anything in return, but when you see that a small number of people get 1.8 Billion by essentially selling contributions from users, you start to wonder how much each accepted answer is worth :)

They are selling the community, not the content. Similarly, when Instagram got bought by Facebook the users didn't get cash and stock