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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

#361

Post by mixmastamyk »

eric_b wrote: post #64

I find parallels between Stack Overflow and Mozilla. Both started with fairly focused products that were best in class. The user base grew and the network effect multiplied. Both were started and largely staffed by engineers. Then both companies started focusing on "bigger", more ambiguous goals. Their about pages are riddled with the latest marketing-speak: Authentically empowering dignity, community, and inclusivit…

Sounds like it is merely a dialect of "suit-speak" for the 2020s, aka "lip-service."

While suit-speak often marks the decline of a business, it is not clear lefty-politics makes that much difference in regards to the decline.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#362

Post by dredmorbius »

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…

Reddit's managed that on their own.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#363

Post by wyldfire »

TchoBeer wrote: post #93
eric_b wrote: post #64

I find parallels between Stack Overflow and Mozilla. Both started with fairly focused products that were best in class. The user base grew and the network effect multiplied. Both were started and largely staffed by engineers. Then both companies started focusing on "bigger", more ambiguous goals. Their about pages are riddled with the latest marketing-speak: Authentically empowering dignity, community, and inclusivit…

Since when is stack overflow dying?

Stack Overflow suffers from a mismatch in expectations. The community is seen from the outside as "a place to find answers" so many people go there to ask questions. But in order for your question to be eligible to be answered (and not closed/on hold) it must be: (1) objectively answerable (no opinions!), (2) completely specified (reproducible problems).

#1: lots of people want answers to subjective issues. "Should I do it like this or like that?" "What's the best way to ..."

#2: many of the people who ask the questions just don't know the right way to ask their questions in order to get answers. Also, taking all the steps to make something reproducible can often make the problem apparent, eliminating the need to post the question.

SO has these rules so that they can be a canonical place for people to be pointed by people who go to search engines looking for answers. But I think it's a big turnoff that they close so many. They might have been better served if they had created roles to prune questions that they don't want indexed or shuffle them to a sister site. Pruning them without telling the user they're "closed" or "on hold" would be a much more friendly experience.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#364

Post by bachmeier »

caymanjim wrote: post #248
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.

I'm not sure what problems you're hoping they'll solve. I think the biggest problem with Stack Overflow is the endless stream of low-quality questions. It's hard to find interesting, helpful-to-others questions among all the "do my homework for me" type questions, repeats, poorly-worded unresearched posts, etc. That only gets worse as more people use it. I used to moderate, and got sick of it because it's not rewardi…

> I'm not sure what problems you're hoping they'll solve.

I can think of a few (not that this hasn't been discussed to death already):

How to properly moderate a site like that.

How to keep answers updated.

How to keep answers updated without mods shutting things down due to duplication. A lot of html and JS questions are garbage in 2021 but there's no way to improve the situation without mods screaming "duplication".

How to allow for answers that are more than just what you'd find in the documentation. A lot of the value of the site came in the first few years, when you were allowed to expand on your answers and provide useful information. The amount of new value created by SO is decreasing rapidly.

One final one is that they need to stop worrying about low-quality questions. That's the only problem they've tried to solve in the last decade, and it's already solved by upvoting and search.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#365

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#366

Post by joelbluminator »

travisjungroth wrote: post #284
throwaway894345 wrote: post #251

Earlier 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…

> 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). This is a weakness of SO and really the whole knowledge base business model (Q&A or not). You think you're building up this n…

> Since my loyalty to SO is approximately zero

That's you though. It's not about loyalty, it's about Stackoverflow almost becoming a verb like Google. Many many people are used to using it, it's brand is very powerful. I don't see some competing tool stealing lots of mind share. Btw the thing about talking to maintainers directly is already done on small communities on discuss pages (ElixirForum for instance), on Discord, IRC and many other channels. None of it actually hurt SO.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#367

Post by bredren »

gus_massa wrote: post #303
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.

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.]

Is there public data behind this, or your estimate?

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#369

Post by dotancohen »

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.

Interesting. I'm also in the top 2%, but I'm far from being an early adopter on that site, with a userId in the hundreds of thousands: https://stackoverflow.com/users/343302/dotancohen

I was never even very active. I can only suppose that only 1 out of every 50 signups ever accrues any real significant amount of rep.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#370

Post by lilyball »

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…

I don’t remember how I joined but my profile is apparently older than the official launch date according to Wikipedia? Anyway, I used it heavily for a few years, then pretty much stopped entirely in 2012. And like you I’ve continued to rack up karma, such that I’m still in the top 0.06% somehow. It’s kind of nuts.
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