Jeff said it minted 61 new millionaires. Not bad.
Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
201–210 of 881 posts
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#202The consensus seems to be that SO has peaked some time ago although I still get a lot of value out of it. Why then does nobody seems to think there's an upside to the acquisition? Maybe they can fix some of the problems.
> Maybe they can fix some of the problems.
I don't think so. Most of their problems are things that they don't even think are problems. They've attracted a large community of moderators who think similarly.
Once you get to that point it's too late. Any changes you make to fix things (e.g. allowing users to block nuisance users, making it harder to close questions, etc.) will just anger your mods who are a vocal minority that love closing questions and are nuisance users.
The only way is a new site.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
They changed it.
I can assure you that they have not. The landing page for expertsexchange.com just says "Coming soon.", and if you view it with redirects turned on, you're sent to a page offering to sell it, owned by Venture.com. # curl expertsexchange.com expertsexchange.com expertsexchange.com Coming soon. # dig +short expertsexchange.com | head -3 | paste -sd, 96.126.123.244,45.79.19.196,45.33.2.79 # dig +short experts-exchange.c…
According to DNS expertsexchange.com was registered in 2005. However, it definitely existed earlier:
https://web.archive.org/web/19990429180417/http://www.expert...
Edited to add: so the domain lapsed and then was reregistered later. If you click on any of the links in that archived page they are redirections to experts-exchange.com.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#204Earlier 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 :)
Stack Overflow the company does more than you think. Aside from building and running the software, there's a lot going on behind the scenes to stop abuse and the like.
Stack Overflow wouldn't be a success without its users, but its users also wouldn't be a success without Stack Overflow.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#205I 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…
> In spite of this, I am in the top 7% of accounts on the site, which is a nice reminder on the power of compound interest! That's how I'm in the top 5%. My old posts that are still relevant get votes. Every time I log in there is a new notification about how many more points I have.
Yeah, top 3% for stuff like being the first person to ask about terminal colour codes and explain typedef.
Hard to see that many new questions with such broad appeal that weren't already asked or answered for any new users to get their rep as easily
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know that old scammer trick? Pick 512 wealthy people, pick a stock, write half of the the people the stock will rise, the other half the stock will fall. Wait for the real development, dump the addresses of the losers, pick a new stock and start again. Write one half stock will rise, other half, stock will fall. Repeat until only one address is left. Now give him the opportunity of an large investment. You have s…
And how does this apply to modern investment funds who have to regularly provide client reports and make disclosures?
Because people don't know the performance of dart throwing monkeys
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rickferri/2012/12/20/any-monkey...
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#207You had a good run Stack Overflow - sad to see it die this way (because we know it all will)
Good thing there are many spam knock-off sites re-using their content, so we don't need to start an archiving campaign like with Geocities.
They provide data dumps and everything is liberally licenced
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In spite of this, I am in the top 7% of accounts on the site, which is a nice reminder on the power of compound interest! I'm also in the top 7%. That's down from 12% or so from five years ago. However, I haven't gained many points during the same interval. That leads me to believe it's not about compound interest but new users joining.
> I'm also in the top 7%. That's down from 12% or so from five years ago. Isn't being in the top 7% up , not down , from being only in the top 12%?
His point stands nonetheless.
The "top n-%" contribution would also improve if the lurker userbase increases. No need for continuous up-votes of old answers
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#209Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I agree that it is annoying whenever one reads something put out by the actual SO people, I notice that (thus far) if I simply ignore that and go there to look up the answers to questions (and very occasionally ask or answer them), it still works fine. As long as the new owner doesn't make it "pay to see", I can probably ignore them. There is, of course, no guarantee in this. But, while I find what I hear about…
> As long as the new owner doesn't make it "pay to see", I can probably ignore them. There was a very similar site about a decade ago, that would absolutely dominate in the Google search results - but of course, the answers were behind a paywall. Today, I don't even remember what their domain was called.
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