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Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

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Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#141

Post by halfdan »

andrewljohnson wrote: post #135
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…

Top 3% for me, I guess on the strength of being early in the iOS ecosystem, inactive for a decade My questions seem lame and my top answer is my own question: https://stackoverflow.com/users/108512/andrew-johnson?tab=pr...

You just made me check - "top 0.84% overall". Haven't posted in a long long time and it looks like my points keep growing pretty much linearly.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#143

Post by sangnoir »

numair wrote: post #28

This 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…

> And remember, they were a bunch of nobodies based out of South Africa when that happened.

Hard disagree - they weren't nobodies, Naspers was already a media juggernaut by 2001 (print and TV). Naspers was founded in 1915 (as De Nasionale Pers Beperkt - National Press) to promote Afrikaner Nationalism in the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer war. One of Naspers founders was also the founding president of the National Party (you might know them from their hit - Apartheid) and the mutually-beneficial, cozy arrangement between the NP and Nasionale Pers lasted until the very end of the Apartheid government in 1992.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#145

Post by throwaway158497 »

numair wrote: post #28

This 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…

What is good for the company is not necessarily good for developers or community.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#146

Post by mitchdoogle »

meh99 wrote: post #106
numair wrote: post #28

This 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…

If I had access to their business network, data analysis, and knew in the end it wasn’t my money, society will just bail us out, sure why not make that choice? You’re making it sound like they had real skin in the game. If it fails they walk away with enough to retire on anyway. Let’s not make celebrities of the biggest grifters out there, emotionally coloring them in as possessed of magical insights. They’re people…

It's crazy the kind of hero worship towards anyone who makes a ton of money. When you account for all the smart people hustling trying to make their startup work, you realize it boils down to luck. Which, of course, is not a great comfort to most people since we all want to believe we can achieve anything if we only work hard enough.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#147

Post by linsomniac »

I ended up losing access to my ancient account (it was using the OpenID providers that they don't even support anymore and the provider I used isn't around). I had gone fairly inactive, but recently wanted to contribute some content.

This was on the DIY stackoverflow, there's a fairly common problem on my stove, but an easy, low/no cost fix, it's just very involved. The DIY SO had a good discussion of the problem. To contribute back, I spent ~3 days making an instructional video on the replacement. Posted it to Youtube. Then went over to the SO to post it there as well, and realized it'd take like a month of dicking around to get a new account up to the point that I could post a response in the thread.

I reached out to site support about getting back into my old account, but have never heard back.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#149

Post by ttul »

bigdict wrote: post #131
croes wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever heard of survivorship bias?

Yeah but why do those who survive survive?

Mostly it’s random chance. The reality of investing is that it’s mostly down to chance. Take an equally skilled set of investors and give them the same market access and some will do exceptionally well.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#150

Post by plorkyeran »

ectopod wrote: post #96
amackera wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, the domain is experts-exchange.com. There's a dash there to prevent this mistake from happening.

They changed it.

The domain was experts-exchange.com from the very beginning. Archive.org even has the 1997 version of the site: https://web.archive.org/web/19970421013342/https://www.exper...
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