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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

#401

Post by cjpearson »

lurkerasdfh8 wrote: post #100
marcodiego wrote: post #55

I'd love to see SO be replaced by some collaborative ad-free solution like wikipedia.

SO will never be wikipedia and that is OK. What we miss the the middle ground. And that is open for the taking! (hint) SO is transient and disposable. It is about the error message of the day and by chance hits the language/pattern of the year. Wikipedia is about stablished knowledge already accepted and published. The open spot in the middle is about accepted techniques for the pattern of the recent years. Those are…

It's debatable whether they achieved it, but at one time Stack Overflow explicitly stated that their goal was to be a middle ground between a transient Q&A site and a wiki. That philosophy is why they allow everyone (even those without an account) to edit posts and why they close duplicate questions.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#402

Post by jakub_g »

chairmanwow1 wrote: post #395
pavel_lishin wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Plus the constant nag to install the app on mobile, and sometimes even downright blocking access and "see in the app". (For now there's still "old." subdomain which works if you enable desktop emulation on mobile, but it can shut down any day).

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#403

Post by crispyambulance »

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)

SO is OK for very narrow questions that have concrete definitive answers. Unfortunately, SO's self-appointed police force will shut people down for any deviation from "the rules" (as they interpret them), or sometimes for no reason at all.

Github issues, on the other hand, seems to be receptive to open-ended "why" questions which would be smacked down hard on SO. Github has a higher barrier to entry. You have to know where to go, but if you're in the right place it's a much nicer community with more classy and professional conduct. Also, it doesn't have a gamification aspect to it, unlike SO, and thus fewer irritating/persnickety types are attracted to Github because they can't really score points.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#404

Post by cobby »

barreira wrote: post #221
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…

OLX is the most popular Craigslist-type website at least in Portugal (and maybe in more places in Europe as well?)

Same for Ukraine

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#405

Post by tharne »

irrational wrote: post #241
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…

Ironically I was one of the first ones too but never really participated since I didn’t think the site would actually have lasting power. Never ask me to pick the winning horse. Same thing with Bitcoin. I knew about it from the first day, but never mined any since it was such a dumb idea. Face palm.

Don't be too hard on yourself, it's next to impossible to guess which things are going to be transformational and which aren't. Look at some of the early early emails from Linus Torvalds on linux. In his mind the original linux kernel was just a cool toy that other devs could play around with. He invented linux and even he never saw it becoming the OS of practically the entire internet.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#406

Post by wizzwizz4 »

rho4 wrote: post #102

Wow, I just wish there was some real competition from a site owned by some independent foundation. Also, what is Jeff Atwood's and Joel Spolsky's net worth now?

Well, there's Codidact (Community Interest Company): https://codidact.com/

And TopAnswers, which isn't yet a charity: https://topanswers.xyz/

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#407

Post by joelbluminator »

bredren wrote: post #372
joelbluminator wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

How do you define a moat? For me it's anything that gives a company an advantage over it's competitors. It can be patents, tech, but also brands. Take Coca Cola for example. Now obviously it has a moat right? Where is this moat coming from then? If you think about it it's mostly the brand, not anything to do with taste. Same can be said about different beers or about Nike, Levi's, Apple (arguably) etc etc.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#408

Post by usr1106 »

This makes no sense. Stackoverflow is a useful resource for programmers, but it's difficult to monetize.

More than average users will have an ad blocker or otherwise mostly ignore ads. Not enough users would pay a subscription.

My prediction would be they start to introduce obnoxious features to try get their 1.8B back and will annoy users away slowly. I have nothing against my prediction turning out wrong.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#409

Post by milkytron »

ddingus wrote: post #345
skunkworker wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I don't think the Reddit transition has gone very well.

I would agree, although I do not think it has been particularly bad either. If they had broken apps the enhance reddit and removed old.reddit.com, then I would think otherwise. For the most part, I am still able to use the site as I have since 2011.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#410

Post by [deleted] »

TenJack wrote: post #398
sjclemmy wrote: post #346

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?

[deleted]
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