Holy cow. I did not see this coming. Hopefully the service stays free.
Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
121–130 of 881 posts
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#122Is there really so much money in SO to justify $1.8B? AFAIK they just run some some ads and show relevant job offers.
It's in the top 50 websites of the world. Probably worth something. https://www.alexa.com/topsites
Is it though? Genuinely curious.
It has been show time and time again that users of free websites likes this won't pay and ads are only worth so much.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 :)
The way I see it as a user is that while I may invest time in a community like Stackoverflow, my actual responsibilities are practically non-existent and my direct monetary investment is literally zero. Whereas the company maintaining the site as a whole has to invest a whole lot of time and money into keeping the site running, and have a huge responsibility in continuing to do so if they want to site to even stay in…
But your answers clearly had value, otherwise they couldn't have sold the site as it would have nothing on it.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#124This is absolutely phenomenal. Naspers/Prosus are some of the savviest and most forward-thinking players in tech investment — would you have been smart enough to give Tencent all that money, way back when? And remember, they were a bunch of nobodies based out of South Africa when that happened. This is much more interesting than a monopolist like Microsoft buying SO, and I’d be keen to see what the growth strategy is…
Ever heard of survivorship bias?
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#125I find parallels between Stack Overflow and Mozilla. Both started with fairly focused products that were best in class. The user base grew and the network effect multiplied. Both were started and largely staffed by engineers. Then both companies started focusing on "bigger", more ambiguous goals. Their about pages are riddled with the latest marketing-speak: Authentically empowering dignity, community, and inclusivit…
Since when is stack overflow dying?
Now?
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#126I 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…
The vast majority of users never post an answer or a question, and most of those that post only once or twice never get upvoted (or get downvoted more than upvoted), so their reputation stays at 1.
I think they said a couple years ago that over 50 or 60% of registered users have 1 reputation.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#127I find parallels between Stack Overflow and Mozilla. Both started with fairly focused products that were best in class. The user base grew and the network effect multiplied. Both were started and largely staffed by engineers. Then both companies started focusing on "bigger", more ambiguous goals. Their about pages are riddled with the latest marketing-speak: Authentically empowering dignity, community, and inclusivit…
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.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
They certainly have bought a lot of very useful "user-generated data", would be a shame if they restricted access to it now or in the future.
The user generated content is under a fairly liberal license so if they restricted access someone could just create a mirror.
in that case I've jumped to conclusions, that's great
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#129I can’t read the whole article, but did this deal include the entire Stack Exchange network or just Stack Overflow?
Here's the article de-paywalled:
I'm guessing it's the whole shebang. They renamed Stack Exchange to Stack Overflow back in 2015:
https://stackoverflow.blog/2015/09/15/were-changing-our-name...
Stack Exchange appears now to just be a brand for the whole network of Q&A sites, but stackoverflow.com is the golden goose.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#130I find parallels between Stack Overflow and Mozilla. Both started with fairly focused products that were best in class. The user base grew and the network effect multiplied. Both were started and largely staffed by engineers. Then both companies started focusing on "bigger", more ambiguous goals. Their about pages are riddled with the latest marketing-speak: Authentically empowering dignity, community, and inclusivit…
>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.