Looks like Joel Spolsky is cashing out. Fogbugz, Trello, and now Stack Overflow.
Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
291–300 of 881 posts
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#292I 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.
Possibly related: SO requires you reach some number of upvotes before you yourself can upvote. When I use SO and try to upvote a useful answer I'm always reminded that I don't have the privilege of upvoting.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#293I’m always amazed at how we price stuff. A social media startup being bought for $10B is not surprising but a cornerstone of modern day software development is a mere $2B. But I’m biased of course.
When I think about it. I still consider 2B to be a lot... And those social media startups just being just a mess...
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#294"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 Poland as well.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's surprising what sorts of things people will buy for prestige - that might be worth a good deal of money for resale when you're looking to retire.
I doubt it. I'm in the top 0.07% with 300k+. Even such an account is worth nothing. Almost never did a recruiter pay attention to this. My low-rate GitHub account has a much bigger impact.
That’s definitely not true. I’m getting contacted by recruiters (and occasionally directly by companies, including for my current job) because of my Stack Overflow profile.
That said, my profile is very clearly linked to a real person, I don’t see how resale would even work (not that I’d consider it).
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#296How much am I going to get for all the answers I posted? :) (Hint: not a dime)
You already have your Internet-points, what more do you want?
As really, SO really was all about gamification, at least I think I remember them talking about it...
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#297Has 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…
For me, SO has been an outstanding resource; I probably use it 2-3 times a day during the working week, and often on weekends for experimenting/self-learning/crunch time.
It's amazing how many people have asked the exact question I am asking, and the responses and comments are usually high quality.
W3schools has also been helpful. I hear dismissive comments about it; maybe it's weak and dated for "advanced" full-stack types, but when I need to remember something about style sheets, javascript, HTML, etc., it's just very quick and easy, especially with the "try it" interactive widget.
Back in the day, usenet comp.lang.* and comp.os.* were like this -- terse, to the point, contributed by seasoned professionals. It's like a crowd-sourced interactive user manual. I just hope this acquisition doesn't mess it up :)
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ja true, but don't we Saffers all wish we bought more Naspers on the JSE before their gamble on Tencent.
A bit ironic that the “nationalists” made their money from a Chinese company though…
Nationalists always like each other, it's not like China is asking SA to marry a chinese girl for each yuan invested...
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
But your answers clearly had value, otherwise they couldn't have sold the site as it would have nothing on it.
IMO, That is a bit of an odd position to take. The terms of the deal were very clear going in. I don't owe Donald Knuth anything more than the $100 (placeholder) for his books, even if they helped me get a 6 figure job right out of college. Yes, his books had a lot more "value" than $100, but those were the terms of the deal.
I don't expect any monetary recuperation, you're right in that the deal was clear to begin with. Just like I don't expect a cut of ad-revenue from a forum or what-have-you.
I just don't feel it's correct to say that the contributions actually had no monetary value, they definitely did, it's just that we handed it to Stack Overflow for free in exchange for participating in the platform.
I don't think it's unreasonable to feel a little bit jaded about it either. I'm not, I didn't contribute nearly enough to feel entitled to squat. But I get it.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, GH lags SO considerably on the size of the knowledge base, but I don't think that's very important since, due to the rapid pace of tech, content rapidly loses value with age (consider all of the jquery or flash content, or content pertaining to old versions of libraries or frameworks). What matters more is the rate at which content is generated, and I think GH has a pretty competitive story considering that peo…
> Sure, GH lags SO considerably on the size of the knowledge base, but I don't think that's very important since, due to the rapid pace of tech, content rapidly loses value with age (consider all of the jquery or flash content, or content pertaining to old versions of libraries or frameworks). This is a weakness of SO and really the whole knowledge base business model (Q&A or not). You think you're building up this n…
I think it's perhaps a little clearer to frame it this way:
SO has a network effect moat, not a corpus-size moat (I don't know that SO was ever thinking the size of its corpus would stave off competitors--they probably were correctly assuming that their user-base was their moat). The network-effect moat keeps the rate-of-change of the corpus higher than competitors, which is where the value is (not the size of the corpus). This moat has held up really well apart from (maybe) GH Discussions, which seems (to me) likely to succeed because GH has a similarly large network of experts.