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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

#391

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…

GH Discussions is great when the question is closely tied to a particular repo. I don't see how it competes with SO for things like design patterns, algorithms, programming language usage, etc.

I wonder how much of SO fits in the "particular repo" category? Not so much for my interests, but I imagine the chunk for popular web frameworks is huge.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#393
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…

Mail.ru Group, btw, is a nasty Russian trash internet holding with interests everywhere, including food delivery

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#394
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, people have gotten so mean. Even well researched questions are often downvoted within minutes. The whole moderation fiasko is just mirroring Wikipedia's decline.

Wikipedia's decline? It still has no viable competitor whatsoever, and certainly not one that's open for reading to all. It's not going away for a long time, and maybe not ever.

Decline in being an inclusive community where a wide range of people contribute rather than a semi-professionell league of gate-keeping white old men.

The internet just leads to new monopolies of the mind where "The winner takes it all". Wikipedia would deserve a competitor but there is 0% chance for one any time soon.

Same holds for SO.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#395

Earlier 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 managed not to destroy Reddit after buying it. Their current plan seems to be a race to the bottom; a new re-design for the default landing page that rewards infinite scroll over in-depth content. Meanwhile, the moderation tools are still garbage.

Their app is 2x slower than their mobile site and their new mobile site is 4x slower than their old site. Why do these brands feel the need to make everything a fucking SPA.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#396
post #28

This is absolutely phenomenal. Naspers/Prosus are some of the savviest and most forward-thinking players in tech investment — would you have been smart enough to give Tencent all that money, way back when? And remember, they were a bunch of nobodies based out of South Africa when that happened. This is much more interesting than a monopolist like Microsoft buying SO, and I’d be keen to see what the growth strategy is…

I heard that the deal got closed by the mods

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#397

Fun 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...

details:

* https://web.archive.org/web/20140705203439/http://www.slate....

* https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/199353/did-the-stac...

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#398

Fun 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...

Woh, how did this lead to his demise?

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#399

Has anyone found any other Q/A sites similar to Stack overflow or what it used to be? My experience with Stack overflow from early 2010s to now, is that it used to be an amazing, "must-have" site. Always the #1 result on Google. I used it for basic web and iOS dev (remember Objective-C) and it had better documentation than most of the official docs. But now the quality of the questions and answers is worse, official…

The problem for me is that generally the highest ranked answers are the oldest, and in a fast moving tech stack this leads to really outdated advice. I do a lot of Python programming and some of the answers only work in 2.7 for example. Same as you, these days I'll just look at the official docs.

Git is the poster child for this. Ignore any accepted answer to a Git question on Stack Overflow if it is older than two years old.

This may also be a testament to Git's terrific development, or to Git's obtuse early versions.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably, SO is already a Wikipedia for techie matters. It's just very poorly maintained and quirky.

Just like regular Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is usually much more presentable, in my experience.
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