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Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

wsj.com

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Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#271

Post by prepend »

marsrover wrote: post #222
croes wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever heard of survivorship bias?

I hate when people bring up survivorship bias about something like this. It's such a negative outlook. It's like a "don't even try because it's just a fluke that happened to them" type of mindset. It doesn't help anyone.

I read this more as “make sure to account for survivor bias and don’t say stupid stuff.”

Survivor bias doesn’t mean that everything is a fluke. It just means that some things are flukes and it’s important to include that in our models so we don’t think something random is non-random.

This is very different than everything being 100% random.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#272

Post by selfhoster11 »

zwieback wrote: post #12

The 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.

> Why then does nobody seems to think there's an upside to the acquisition?

The examples are endless. Keybase, Winamp, Trello (to a lesser extent), MySQL/OpenOffice, the recent drama surrounding the addition of telemetry into Audacity, anything folded into the core product of some tech giant two years after the acquisition when the core stakeholders from the original team left.

In short, it's rare for an acquisition to work out well in the long term, so it's understandable to be very sceptical of them.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#273

Post by nitins »

barreira wrote: post #221
croes wrote: post #115

"The group’s expansion into internet platforms began in the 1990s' spanning online consumer services, including: E-commerce - including its subsidiary, OLX (100%) Takealot.com (96%) Fintech - including its subsidiary, PayU (98.8%) Food delivery - including its subsidiary and associates, iFood (54.8%), Delivery Hero (22.3%) and Swiggy (38.8%) Etail - including its subsidiary, eMag (80.1%) Travel - including its associ…

OLX is the most popular Craigslist-type website at least in Portugal (and maybe in more places in Europe as well?)

Popular in India also

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#274

Post by Loveaway »

irrational wrote: post #241
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…

Ironically I was one of the first ones too but never really participated since I didn’t think the site would actually have lasting power. Never ask me to pick the winning horse. Same thing with Bitcoin. I knew about it from the first day, but never mined any since it was such a dumb idea. Face palm.

Mined about 100 on some old Radeon. Sold them at $30, because I thought they peaked. Trying not to think about that too much:)

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#275

Post by Noumenon72 »

brown9-2 wrote: post #133
softwaredoug wrote: post #53

A bit odd there’s no announcement on stack overflows site? There is just this meta question: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/408138/what-will-ha... Has anyone seen anything?

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2021/06/02/kinda-a-big-announ...

Interesting that he seems to still believe that part of the value of StackOverflow was the software recommendation questions.

> almost anyone I talk to is too young to imagine The Days Before Stack Overflow, when the bookstore had an entire wall of Java and the way you picked a Rich Text Editor was going to Barnes and Noble and browsing through printed books for an hour, in the Rich Text Editor Component shelf.

The site provided me more value back when opinions were allowed.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#276

Post by lordnacho »

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…

Something about how mean people are with voting keeps it this way. It's just very hard to get a vote at all. I happened to get a gold badge today for 10k views on an old question. Of those 10k people 17 decided to upvote.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#277

Post by praptak »

zwieback wrote: post #12

The 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 definitely want a return on the investment. So either they have a plan where SO complements some of their other assets or they just want to milk it for money.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#279

Post by passivate »

richardwhiuk wrote: post #233
passivate wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many times can one person win the lottery? The large firms seem to successfully bet on winners quite a bit.

_Somebody_ wins it every week.

People lose money in lottery tickets, casinos, equity investments, etc all the time. If a VC is successful over a period of time with a history of investing in winners, then there is something more than simply randomness.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#280

Post by furgooswft13 »

Top 0.54% apparently (what do I win?). Though my top answer has thousands of up-votes, and my next top one around 100...

And it was for a question that was already LMGTFY worthy at the time, so I was just a bit quicker with my documentation copy&paste than the next guy.

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