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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

#21

Post by armchairhacker »

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 docs are usually much better (at least in my experience), and there are a lot more random sites, so you can Google most programming issues without checking SO. SO is still a great resource for its archived content, but not for anything new, and it's no longer a "must-have".

But even with better documentation and more sites, old SO hasn't been completely replaced.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#23

Post by dt3ft »

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?

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 :)

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#24

Post by johannes1234321 »

tyrust wrote: post #5
falcolas wrote: post #3

That's unexpected. Then again, 1.8B is a lot of money for what I'm guessing is a small number of major shareholders. After seeing how Tencent purchased gaming companies have fared (that is, typically with few changes), this probably won't have much of a negative impact on the site.

Tencent isn't the buyer. Prosus, a Tencent investor, is.

True, but they have a large enough stake in Tencenz to have relevant impact on Tencent's acquisition culture.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#25

Post by est »

wpaladin wrote: post #10

I hadn't heard of Prosus or Naspers before this. Apparently Naspers owns 31.2% of Tencent. Time to revisit my assumptions with respect to how companies are owned.

Reminds me of "Tencent owns reddit" threads on reddit then someone points out that Naspers owns Tencent. Hilarity ensures.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#28

Post by numair »

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 here. This might very well be one component of a larger suite they will assemble to create something very interesting and valuable for the developer community. They’ve got the money and the brainpower to put it together.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#29

Post by jmkni »

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 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 documentation.

I find raising an GitHub issue more useful than asking on SO.

It’s still great as a knowledge bank thought, as others have pointed out most of the time when you Google an issue the answer will be on SO. The only issue there is when the top rated/accepted question is actually no longer correct, or best practice, as the language/framework has changed or evolved.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#30

Post by oezi »

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…

Yes, people have gotten so mean. Even well researched questions are often downvoted within minutes. The whole moderation fiasko is just mirroring Wikipedia's decline.
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