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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

#311

Post by b112 »

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…

And now, they can compete with Linkedin!

First, buy a site with 14 million+ accounts, all guaranteed to be developers of some sort. It even has a job board apparently, already!

Next, bring in synergy. Mine the data to find out who does what. Make a "better linkedin".

Doh.

(They clearly want to "monetize" it somehow, so... how I wonder? The above?)

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#312

Post by Ekaros »

iSnow wrote: post #194
jrockway wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. I think what happened is that the early users answered all the most frequently occurring questions, and the questions honestly haven't changed much. I think my most popular answer is like how to diff with git. People are using git even more than they were when SO started, so it gets upvoted regularly.

There really should be some karma decay system to prevent early users hogging 5-figure reputation. I didn't do much there in the last 5y but I am still way up in reputation.

Gradual 5 year drop-off for effective karma might do community good. As such any post older than that would have zero effective karma, but you could still show historic karma. Maybe this would make moderation better for new users as old hostile ones lose their power if they don't keep participating in the same pit as rest new userbase...

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#313

Post by JohnWhigham »

armchairhacker wrote: post #21

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…

there are a lot more random sites, so you can Google most programming issues without checking SO

That's because programming has exploded in popularity in the past decade, there's now a myriad of ways to host a blog, and a lot of people find blogging about their issues a way to solidify understanding and to help others. Doesn't mean SO is declining in quality.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#314

Post by selfhoster11 »

hu3 wrote: post #39
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…

> stack overflow has been dead for a while Yep. SO has been read-only for me for years. When I need help with something it's usually advanced enough to merit a Github issue otherwise I seek Slack/IRC/Discord/Gitter comunities of the technology I'm having trouble with.

Realistically, does it have to be read-write? I'm at the knowledge level where I can navigate my way around most things I need to without having to ask questions that haven't been asked already. RTFM has been drilled into me by online communities since my teens, and SO is to me exactly that "TFM".

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#315

Post by Wowfunhappy »

zaptrem wrote: post #186
throwaway894345 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like GitHub Discussions is sort of filling a similar niche--I'm guessing they're banking on being able to build that out for less than $1B--since they already have GitHub, they don't benefit as much from the StackOverflow user network / brand. I think that makes sense.

Easy to build out the platform, difficult to build out the knowledge base (especially since so many areas have already been covered on SO)

Could they potentially integrate the existing StackExchange content, given that it’s creative commons licensed?

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#317

Post by karmicthreat »

I remember back in the day Jeff or Joel came on the somethingawful forums and started talking about their idea. They were resoundly trolled about how horrible their site idea is. Why would we want un-certified randos on the internet giving people advice?

Stack Overflow succeeded and SA is just kind of limping along. Though maybe now that Lowtax is gone it can just kind of maintain.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#318

Post by ddingus »

While I'm happy for the people who made a lot of money in this transaction, I always read these announcements with a bit of angst.

From a user point of view, I expect this to go like Reddit has, for example. Everyone building that value saw high use value, returns on their investment in the form of information they need, lean, easy to find, high signal to noise.

Now there is a debt to be paid. The new owner needs to extract the purchase price, and whatever additional additional returns they intend. Everything costs something.

So what will it be?

Subscription access?

Less favorable signal to noise?

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#319

Post by zem »

nosianu wrote: post #80
digianarchist wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually find myself landing on a Github issue after a Google search to diagnosing an problem these days. >But now the quality of the questions and answers is worse I see a lot of new users digging up 10 year old questions and cloning answers. They've really hit a spam problem that's difficult to solve.

Well, you make it a game - people start playing. The disadvantage of gamification. I'm not sure that people giving good answers and help are well matched by a system designed for people who like "leveling up". I think that system pulls in a mismatched crowd over time, too focused on the game goal. The solution creating a match is supposed to be what you get the points for leveling up for. However, that does not reall…

they aren't "purely virtual achievements", they're, as you say, points in a game. i can (and have) spent hours at a time playing scrabble or civilisations, and they aren't for "fake scrabble points" or "fake civ points"; similarly here, for the people who do get more into the gamified aspect of stackoverflow, they aren't chasing fake internet points, they're accumulating real stackoverflow points.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#320

Post by Ekaros »

IshKebab wrote: post #202
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 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 minor…

I think very aggressive karma decay might work. Let's say your karma that is older than 1 year does not count for moderator powers. That means you need to be actually productive member of community to have the moderation powers.
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