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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

#331

Post by sillysaurusx »

ddingus wrote: post #318

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…

I dunno. Reddit seems like an example of a successful acquisition. Conde Nast managed not to destroy Reddit after buying it.

But I agree with you overall. I'm a bit nervous too. Stack Overflow is so good, and its fate is now entirely in the hands of the purchaser.

EDIT: In the other announcement post (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2021/06/02/kinda-a-big-announ...):

Today we’re pleased to announce that Stack Overflow is joining Prosus. Prosus is an investment and holding company, which means that the most important part of this announcement is that Stack Overflow will continue to operate independently, with the exact same team in place that has been operating it, according to the exact same plan and the exact same business practices. Don’t expect to see major changes or awkward “synergies”. The business of Stack Overflow will continue to focus on Reach and Relevance, and Stack Overflow for Teams. The entire company is staying in place: we just have different owners now.

I wonder how true this will be over time.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#332

Post by TheCapeGreek »

mssundaram wrote: post #174
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…

Interesting. I've hardly heard of any of those companies - are they mostly non-US?

Takealot Group (subdivided into Takealot, Superbalist, and MrD) is basically a trinity of Amazon, [insert fashion e-tailer here], and UberEats, for South Africa.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#333

Post by vp8989 »

phillipcarter wrote: post #268
eric_b wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, since you're being deliberately obtuse - I'll expound. My point is that these companies are moving focus away from the products that got them to where they are, to a set of vague handwavy concepts that are completely unquantifiable. And, in my experience anyways, this usually comes at a cost to the existing products.

Corporate branding efforts to be more "woke" are cheap. It doesn't cost Raytheon much to paint their logo as a rainbow and do an "employee story" about how they have also have LGBTQ employees (building missiles). But don't get under the impression that Raytheon still isn't focused on building missiles. It's just an easy corporate branding win for most of them, so they just do it. I don't think social justice messages…

Hah, bingo. I suspect all the people who left Basecamp will soon realize this when they finish their paid sabbaticals and move on to other companies.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#334

Post by wwweston »

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.

The dynamic makes sense: the more popular the question, the more likely it is to get asked early on. That means early answerers will reap benefits from the popularity of the questions down the road.

There's definitely an "interest" dynamic to it, but there's also something like consuming the solutions with a good effort-to-reward ratio inside a search space early and then subsequent solutions get harder (kindof like a cryptocurrency?)

Niche questions do present an interesting opportunity, though. My highest-ranked answer was about rolling your own setInterval / setTimeout function for JavaScript implementations running on the JVM that didn't have them. Not a hot topic, but apparently a few dozen other people cared about this over the years.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#335

Post by lylo »

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 loved this podcast. It came about when we were a year into our first startup (freeagent.com if you wondered) and it was really influential. I loved Spolsky and he was a major influence, and we ended up colocating our infra on our own hardware for 10 years and I can attribute a lot of my faith in that strategy to some of these early discussions! Worked out very well indeed.

We’re now on AWS, go figure ;-)

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#336

Post by dystroy »

saalweachter wrote: post #265
dystroy wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you feel like a digital sharecropper[0] now that the company has sold, or are you happy what you got out of contributing? [0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/are-you-a-digital-sharecropper...

Those questions, anybody having spent time answering thousands of questions had to think about it. When you realize an SO account isn't really worth much for your brand, you may realize other benefits of your participation: the rare pleasure of really helping somebody (sometimes, not when answering trivial questions), the enjoyment you get from a very fun game (if you're into it) and the knowledge you build for yourself (I forced myself to watch some tags just because they were about technologies I didn't knew and that I wanted to learn). IMO you have to stop when it becomes boring. I stopped participating for 3 or 4 years before I learnt Rust and felt the need to see what other people were asking about the language and the approaches other people had to solve problems.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#337

Post by skunkworker »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #331
ddingus wrote: post #318

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…

I dunno. Reddit seems like an example of a successful acquisition. Conde Nast managed not to destroy Reddit after buying it. But I agree with you overall. I'm a bit nervous too. Stack Overflow is so good, and its fate is now entirely in the hands of the purchaser. EDIT: In the other announcement post ( https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2021/06/02/kinda-a-big-announ... ): Today we’re pleased to announce that Stack Overfl…

Conde Nast also owns Ars Technica, which personally is my favorite tech-news site and has high and consistent quality.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#338

Post by skeeter2020 »

ddingus wrote: post #318

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…

They'll double-down on the enterprise offer I would think. I don't think jobs was the money-maker they planned on, and the public individual site doesn't have a lot of revenue approaches that justify ~2B purchase price. I'm sure they original VCs made money but not sure it's their typical unicorn multiple.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#339

Post by lylo »

haakon wrote: post #330
pan69 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s funny, so do I!

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#340

Post by rhizome »

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)

And that's why this line of concern is worthless: SO already exists. GHD can refer to that all day long without having to reinvent the Library of Alexandria (which in hindsight could have used a backup, but still).

Unless..."Prosus" pulls a Google+DejaNews and obscures SO's availability or paywalls it or, or, or...

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