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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

#301

Post by gus_massa »

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.

The whole idea was that if they become evil, or sell the site to someone evil, all the content was CC-SA, so it was possible to anyone to make a clone and continue from there.

I guess most of the posters understand that they may sell the site, but the content was safe because of the license.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#302

Post by selfhoster11 »

RandallBrown wrote: post #20
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The StackOverflow community has always been extremely abrasive. People will constantly be rewriting or deleting your questions or leaving unhelpful comments complaining about something silly like the formatting. With that said, it's still extremely useful. It makes my job easier and saves me a ton of time.

> People will constantly be rewriting or deleting your questions or leaving unhelpful comments complaining about something silly like the formatting.

I will mercilessly soft-rewrite and spelling/formatting correct every question and answer into oblivion if I can be bothered, and find the issue annoying enough.

I treat SO like a Wikipedia of sorts, so presentation is important. Each topic will inevitably be read by a thousand other people in the future, so I might as well leave it looking presentable. It's a commons thing. "Don't leave trash behind and clean up if others didn't", basically.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#303

Post by gus_massa »

lordnacho wrote: post #276
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.

As a rule of thumb here in HN, the number of visits of a post is like upvotes*100+50. There are a lot of lurkers.

[In particular, I don't have an account in SO.]

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#304

Post by yawn »

couchdb_ouchdb wrote: post #46
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…

Same for me. Day 1. I'm user 25 on the site as I listened to the podcast about them making it. Just for answering a few questions early I'm in the top 0.76% overall. https://stackoverflow.com/users/25/codingwithoutcomments

I miss that podcast. The 2 of them disagreed on some technical things, which made it more interesting. Listening to them all the way to success was pretty cool.

Is there anything else out there like it?

EDIT: People mentioning that they could remember where they were when they listened to the podcast makes me remember where I was when they had Jason Calacanis on the show who informed them that they were sitting on a gold mine.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#305

Post by selfhoster11 »

oezi wrote: post #30
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wikipedia's decline? It still has no viable competitor whatsoever, and certainly not one that's open for reading to all. It's not going away for a long time, and maybe not ever.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#306

Post by vultour »

macando wrote: post #92

Since switching almost completely to JavaScript, Node.js and React I noticed that my time spent on Stack Overflow dropped significantly. I found my answers in API docs and GitHub issues most of the time. I never created an account. Once I had listed most recent Redux and React questions, had an answer to one that was pretty tricky within one minute since posting and while I was typing out the answer in my editor some…

JavaScript is consistently in the #1 spot on their yearly developer survey, and remains as one of the most common tags on questions, so your experience certainly doesn't translate to the average JS developer.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#307

Post by manojlds »

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…

Swiggy is the most popular food delivery company in India

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#309

Post by forgotpwd16 »

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.

W3Schools is also nice because, though MDN are more comprehensive and have a higher quality appearance, their examples are more on point and they've a playground functionality where you can test any of them on an online editor with a complete code rather than just change the property on a limited demo.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#310

Post by bryanrasmussen »

jmkni wrote: post #289
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #281

suggested Stack Overflow game - for all of those with top X% despite not contributing for years - see how quickly you can move from the top X% to the bottom X% by doing Y. Y can be combinations of asking or answering questions. If you get banned before reaching bottom X% you lose. I guess would need some sort of site to keep track of stats of those playing.

Can I git stash my current SO profile before starting?

I thought HN people liked to play hard and for keeps!

anyway if you've got X% and haven't done anything for it in years it can't be worth that much to you.

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