From their website:
> Operating and investing globally in markets with long-term growth potential, Prosus builds leading consumer internet companies that empower people and enrich communities.
Builds -> buys
Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
371–380 of 881 posts
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#372Earlier 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). 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 Dis…
Brand is not a moat.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Recently I need some python + mariadb answers and most of the top ones are out-of-date enough that I can't even use them (deprecated packages).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.
Usually a highly voted answer that is no longer correct will be updated through time. I don't have any data to support this claim but it's what I see happening.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#374While 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…
[deleted]
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#375Why didn't Microsoft go after this? it seems like an incredibly powerful community that blends really well with linkedin AND github
Total speculation, but Joel is ex-Microsoft (he worked on Excel for years) and I don't think he would sell to his former employer. I've worked with a number of Microsoft alums; all of them have seen how Microsoft acquisitions usually turn out.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#376I 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…
Top 7% as well, but most of that came from shitty questions (both by my own standards now and SO standards) that happened to get a little traction so I don't put much stock in the score.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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".
To me, SO is the very opposite of TFM.
A manual contains all the possible answers to all the possible questions in a single document. To get an answer to your question, you just have to read, re-read, assemble, interpret and then you have your answer. It could take you 5 or 10 minutes depending on the quality of the manual and the complexity of the question.
With SO, you bypass all that and simply get an answer. You don't gain any understanding of the bigger picture, but then again, maybe you don't need to. Maybe you're diving into say esp32 to build your smart doorbell. Your don't want to become an esp32 expert, you just want your question answered.
Horses for courses
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess it's the same as if a busy pub was sold. The customers making it busy (and profitable) don't get anything.
Your analogy only holds if the customers to that pub were also supplying the drinks, the food, and handling the orders.
They're certainly providing the ambiance and the conversation.
Also stickers and writing on the walls
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#379I 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.
Naspers' market cap is 98B, yet they own 31% of Tencent which is worth 775B - am I missing something? I'm aware of conglomerate discounts but I suspect there's something else going on here.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's surprising what sorts of things people will buy for prestige - that might be worth a good deal of money for resale when you're looking to retire.
One could try selling answers as Non Fungible Tokens, especially if you have some wierd ones. Lots of geeks have crypto to mess around with, and might want to pay for some bragging rights. Which is the only NFTs can really hope to be good for.
Hahah, neat idea. I can't think of a more "NFT-able" answer than this one https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...