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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

#151

Post by arp242 »

systemvoltage wrote: post #52
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…

I don't see how giving money to Tencent has anything to do with the ability to steer SO. The best thing would have been the status quo. SO has been running on its feet for many years. This consolidation, while disputably better than Microsoft acquisition, is no worse than large companies buying out small ones usually guaranteing their demise. If anything else, Microsoft has left Github untouched so far. I am not conv…

> If anything else, Microsoft has left Github untouched so far.

Actually, I think it has gotten better. I don't like the consolidation of independents like GitHub to big corporations like Microsoft, but I can't deny that thus far, it actually worked out pretty well.

Stack Overflow is a difficult company/website to manage though; it's not "just a website with a SaaS product" and really requires a good understanding of the social dynamics and such to run well, much more than e.g. GitHub.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#153

Post by addicted »

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.

The biggest problem for SO in terms of monetization is how freely available their data is.

For example, if you simply want an answer, Google itself will extract the top 1-3 answers and present them to you without ever opening SO.

Further, SO has explicitly avoided the most intrusive advertising, further limiting their monetization potential.

The one area where I think SO could have done a lot better was building a better social network out of their website.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#154

Post by abhijat »

tomp wrote: post #108
nostrademons wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way back in 2008, Google had a feature called SearchWiki that let you X-out or upvote search results. It was little used, but apparently the most frequent usage was to delete ExpertsExchange results. IIRC we ended up making some changes to webspam that resulted in ExpertsExchange links falling off the front page, and then SearchWiki was unlaunched because it was no longer necessary.

I’m dying to have that feature again. I just want to downvote/remove W3Cschools and upvote MDN.

Yes, I want to remove quora from my results. I vaguely remember you could block websites forever in google a long time ago, but I may be misremembering it.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#155

Post by alpaca128 »

iSnow wrote: post #71
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 relatively easy if you really take the time to answer questions. Around 2016, I wanted to get deeper into some tech and used the learning curve to answer SO questions. I basically stopped the same year, but I am still in the top 8%, used to be top 1% for a couple of months. Contribution rate must be an extremely uneven distribution.

> Contribution rate must be an extremely uneven distribution.

Probably another case of the 1% rule[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#156

Post by TchoBeer »

the_local_host wrote: post #59
gerikson wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I believe the answers are CC-SA. But the parent to your response has a point - knowing that the answers are CC licensed and knowing that the owners might have a ten-figure exit are different things. If the community were more aware of the latter, they might have been more canny about donating their efforts.

That's rather callous

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#157

Post by asadlionpk »

lurkerasdfh8 wrote: post #100
marcodiego wrote: post #55

I'd love to see SO be replaced by some collaborative ad-free solution like wikipedia.

SO will never be wikipedia and that is OK. What we miss the the middle ground. And that is open for the taking! (hint) SO is transient and disposable. It is about the error message of the day and by chance hits the language/pattern of the year. Wikipedia is about stablished knowledge already accepted and published. The open spot in the middle is about accepted techniques for the pattern of the recent years. Those are…

How would that work? A site to collect common code snippets?

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#158

Post by jayd16 »

nickserv wrote: post #74
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 for me is that generally the highest ranked answers are the oldest, and in a fast moving tech stack this leads to really outdated advice. I do a lot of Python programming and some of the answers only work in 2.7 for example. Same as you, these days I'll just look at the official docs.

Just take the extra 20 seconds and read through all the positive answers and commentary. Its not like you need to only look at the top ranked answer.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#160

Post by dt3ft »

the_local_host wrote: post #65
Graffur wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it's the same as if a busy pub was sold. The customers making it busy (and profitable) don't get anything.

Your analogy only holds if the customers to that pub were also supplying the drinks, the food, and handling the orders.

This is exactly what I was trying to say.

Imagine, in some distant future, where users who contributed were also rewarded for their contributions when their community "gets sold". One of the comments above mentioned that their investment into the site is 0, that may be true for them, but I most definitely invested dozens of hours of my time in order to write a well informed and solid answers (as was demanded by their community guidelines, mind you).

I am not the best example either, I know people who have written thousands of high quality answers and god knows how many hours of their time into writing these.

My gut tells me that it would be fair, and make the world a better place, if such users were rewarded as well.

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