Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B • Hacker News Board

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#321

Post by b112 » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 6:11 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #192

rossdavidh wrote: post #75

Earlier 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.

The parallel is more striking than your post suggests.

Experts Exchange had no paywall for years. Endless people built the site up, provided help, then suddenly?

All their posts, content, and more were one day monetized, and locked away. Same thing happened with IMDB too, at the start. It was all, all of it, user contributed.

Then one day, they locked it all up. Of course, IMDB has grown a lot since then, and allows you to download the database if you wish regardless...

But point is, this sort of thing happens all the time...

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#322

Post by aixi » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 6:12 PM UTC

wpaladin wrote: post #10

I hadn't heard of Prosus or Naspers before this. Apparently Naspers owns 31.2% of Tencent. Time to revisit my assumptions with respect to how companies are owned.

>Time to revisit my assumptions with respect to how companies are owned.

And what would those be? I'm curious

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#323

Post by ravenstine » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 6:13 PM UTC

selfhoster11 wrote: post #286

ravenstine wrote: post #249

I hope they dismantle it and start over. So many outdated answers on there that I don't find it worth using anymore, whereas it used to be a staple of my software development.

That depends on what stack you're using. Anything based on Linux and Java will be fairly applicable even years later. Even if it's not applicable, it's often possible to tell this from the answer and the date of the question. IMO, two things would improve matters greatly. One, add a mechanism to mark questions as "potentially obsolete" based on thresholds that can vary per-topic, or per StackExchange site (so e.g. Ja…

That's the disappointing thing. They seemed more interested in implementing cute little badges and stuff than working on features that benefit the core function of the site.

If you're doing web development, IMO SO is doing a disservice to people at this point. It's either totally useless if you're a seasoned dev or very misleading and harmful to beginners.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure they have the incentive to really fix things because all the obsolete answers probably still bring in a ton of traffic. The only way to fix it might be to tell people to stop using it.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#324

Post by wg0 » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 6:14 PM UTC

Napster has a track record of buying companies, squeezing every single penny out of it and then toss them around to someone else to do the same.

We might see aggressive monitization and closures of sub sites with cost saving concerns.

This will fast become the Yahoo Answers of technical Q&A probably.

Also, it is smart on the part of former owners of stackoverflow to sell it off as the product is past its prime time. A downfall was inevitable.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#325

Post by rhizome » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 6:15 PM UTC

gk1 wrote: post #292

lordnacho wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is (part of) why I upvote anything even remotely helpful, explaining that some command switch does (or doesn't do) X, or syntax clarification, or even having the best formatted and/or written answer, asking a question I didn't know I had, and so on. I'm not a power SO'er, but I have some privileges and I do try to help the site be good.

It's kind of like Craigslist for me in that random people like me are also the source of poor-quality and low-effort participation, one-sentence or obviously-homework questions. However, I do realize the structure of the site and the Ponzi-like nature of voting there makes the n00b experience difficult if you want points and privileges. But at the end of the day, question choice and moderation are the comb and brush of informative crowd-driven sites.

That said, I assume there is plenty of action to be had if you're participating in cutting edge, new version, or new technology topics. Unfortunately that conflicts with the low-effort/homework population who I assume are constrained by their curriculum and so they have only C++ questions to ask. By that token I wonder how many questions even remain to be asked of common and popular topics like Java. It could just be that SO is "full" in certain topics.

The way to grow an economy is to participate in the economy, but this acquistion is no doubt going to change things for me.

I also speculate that there's a certain mindset that sees unmonetized ratings (or even points) as a market failure, which is what generated acquisition interest.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#326

Post by jiofih » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 6:15 PM UTC

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…

Most of these are very successful businesses, just not as fashionable as the SV ones you know. If this is their complete list of investments their hit rate is insane.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#327

Post by jacksonkmarley » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 6:16 PM UTC

throwaway894345 wrote: post #251

zaptrem wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

Anecdata incoming: a few years ago when I was doing stuff with c# it seemed like everything I needed was already on SO answered by some dude with like a million kudos or whatever.

Recently I need some python + mariadb answers and most of the top ones are out-of-date enough that I can't even use them (deprecated packages). I was a bit surprised TBH.

Also TIL GitHub Discussions is a thing.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#328

Post by passivate » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 6:17 PM UTC

ehnto wrote: post #299

passivate wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think we would largely agree on the meat and potatoes - we just have a small disagreement of opinion, no biggie :)

>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.

How did you know the answer had value when you typed it up? The value is not solely determined by you or me - It's by the large number of visitors/viewers actually benefiting from the answer. And you need both, the platform attracting tons of readers, and the high-quality answer.

Certainly, there is lots that can be said here to expand on that and add more nuance, but not in a comment box.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#329

Post by kennywinker » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 6:17 PM UTC

bidirectional wrote: post #247

kennywinker wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can invest in Apple stock in the early 90s because you are a savvy investor who sees the massive potential, or you can invest in them because the stock shows up at the top of an alphabetical list. Either way you're rich, and get called a brilliant investor, while all the people who invested in ZZCO because they picked the bottom of the alphabetical list, or some other similarly random choice, are bankrupt.

Of course you can invest at random and it will sometimes work. But it does not explain the realities of the industry. Even just one of the top funds has an infinitesimally small chance of existing randomly, let alone a glut of them.

The impeccable track record of index funds suggests that "Even just one of the top funds has an infinitesimally small chance of existing randomly" is not actually correct.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#330

Post by haakon » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 6:21 PM UTC

pan69 wrote: post #97

couchdb_ouchdb wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 loved listening to the Stack Overflow podcast with Jeff and Joel. It was kinda crazy that they were doing a podcast like that while they (Jeff mostly) were building it and coming up with the name, etc. Still have all the mp3's somewhere. Edit: I'm in the top 2%. Most of my rep. comes from interest earned on questions/answers I posted very early on.

After all these years, I still remember exact locations I walked while listening to that. Funny thing, memory.