One of the first 300 users, SO was revolutionary when launched, I followed their development via Codinghorror and Joelonsoftware blogs (probably in an RSS feed). I've since moved into management and away from day to day coding, so I use it very infrequently, but, I have to imagine more than a few software startups only exist today because SO democratized software development Q&A.
Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
341–350 of 881 posts
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#342While 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…
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Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#343Well, I guess they won and experts-exchange.com now finally lost? :)
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#344While 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…
"Log in to see 8 answers on Qu^H^HStack Overflow!"
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't think the Reddit transition has gone very well. But there is still a lot to be seen on that front. Ars is an example of a successful acquisition. I totally agree.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#346Fun fact and one of my dinner party anecdotes; I have the accepted answer for one of Ross Ulbricht’s (Silk Road’s Dread Pirate Roberts) SO questions that got him busted.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9563675/destroying-a-spe...
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#347While 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…
>> The entire company is staying in place: we just have different owners now.
I've been a part of a couple of these. This statement is somewhere on the spectrum of absolutely naive to willfully disingenuous.
"Someone just paid 2 billion dollars to buy us, but they're not going to change anything, exert any influence or expect payback beyond what we've already been doing."
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with StackOverflow or any "community-driven" effort is that every single community is driven by those who dedicate the most time to driving the community. In the beginning, this isn't largely a problem because the owners of the site can manage the load. Then as the site gets marginally bigger, you can trust on volunteers who have demonstrated expertise or something. But eventually, skilled people will get…
I think this is an incorrect assessment. The value doesn't come from those that dedicate most of their time. The value comes from the sites ability to integrate the long tail both for answers and questions. Certainly it is valuable to have the super star posters with a million reputation. But the site was build by random people answering random questions. I also don't believe in the value of "community management" at…
The first time I posted on SO someone edited my question within a few minutes. I was initially annoyed/embarrassed (on other forums, a mod only edited your post if you had broken some rule) but I realised they were just improving my formatting as I had some dodgy markup in my question. That kind of thing is definitely busy work but it probably does contribute to the overall quality of the site more than you might realise.
The question closing thing though I agree is annoying.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#349While 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…
"Log in to see 8 answers on Qu^H^HStack Overflow!"
Yes, could very well be that. However I wrote a bit of angst because maybe they'll be smart about it and this will be okay.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#350Earlier 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…
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.
Yeah, GHD has not been well-marketed, but I've used it a couple of times and it has been very useful. I have similar experiences where SO questions can be pretty dodgy based on age--for example, for Rust I rarely bother looking at answers from 2016 because so much has changed since then. Some technologies are more stable than others.