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Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

wsj.com

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Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#411

Post by pishpash »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #251
zaptrem wrote: post #186

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…

Is it just Stack Overflow or Stack Exchange over all? If the latter, that's a lot more content that doesn't expire that quickly.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#412

Post by spurgu »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #347
sillysaurusx wrote: post #331

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…

>> 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."

Naive indeed. I flew to meet a company we had just acquired and I personally promised them that nothing would change. Even though I believed it at the time of course it didn't pan out that way and to this day I regret saying that.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#413

Post by ddingus »

thefz wrote: post #387
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.

Yes and no. Article comment can be toxic downvote brigades to anyone who does not adhere to the hive's opinion and Ars is a mala fide Apple boot licker to the bone. Ars forums have gone to hell in this regard.

Not sure the fourms are caused by acquisition.

I do see the UX experience being more thick, less favorable signal to noise happening due to acquisition. There may be editorial conflicts of interest too. I do not notice at present.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#415

Post by berkes »

yaitsyaboi wrote: post #99

Everyone is saying how 1.8B is a ton, but I’m kinda surprised that it’s “barely” more than the Depop acquisition today at 1.6B.

Such valuations are most based on future revenue.

Depop already makes solid revenue and showed growth of 100% last year. Stackoverflow is still struggling with revenue.

It is not about how many users you have, or how much value you offer to those users. But all about how much money you make off them.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#416

Post by craftinator »

sokoloff wrote: post #263
mitchdoogle wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's crazy the kind of hero worship towards anyone who makes a ton of money. When you account for all the smart people hustling trying to make their startup work, you realize it boils down to luck. Which, of course, is not a great comfort to most people since we all want to believe we can achieve anything if we only work hard enough.

I think of hard work as being more of a necessary but not sufficient condition for most of these outcomes, so to some extent: "The harder I work, the luckier I get..." You can't control your luck, but you can control how hard you work. Some will read that sentence and conclude that working hard is a fool's errand. Others will read it and conclude the opposite. Neither is entirely wrong.

If you really want to be rich, don't work hard; either inherit, or get other people to do hard work. Working hard is easy, hundreds of millions of people do it, the trick is getting the hard workers to give you a percentage of what they earn, and scale that model up.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#418

Post by johnchristopher »

gk1 wrote: post #292
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.

Possibly related: SO requires you reach some number of upvotes before you yourself can upvote. When I use SO and try to upvote a useful answer I'm always reminded that I don't have the privilege of upvoting.

I have given up on participating on SO because more often than not I am told I don't have enough reputation to do something (I don't know if it's commenting or giving an answer or giving an upvote but there are some questions for which answers are wrong or need some updates and I can't participate. So I just don't by default. I think I can't upvote on some stack and I find this weird).

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#419

Post by spockz »

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...

Wow CodeIgniter, blast from the past. Funny at the time it was a pretty nice ORM/Framework. Apparently I still used SVN also. https://alessandrovermeulen.me/tags/codeigniter/

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#420

Post by shagie »

usr1106 wrote: post #408

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.

My crystal ball says...

* Improve channels from Stack Overflow to other properties - kind of like what they tried to do with the Developer Story, just with more reason to do it. ( https://www.pluralsight.com/newsroom/press-releases/pluralsi... )

* There are a lot of eyeballs hitting SO, and a lot places to send people - https://www.prosus.com/companies . As they control the server, they can inline those ads more easily.

* Job portal expansion. Supposedly this is profitable now, just not VC deals profitable. There are quite a few classified sites that Prosus has already.

* Expand links to edtech - Skillsoft, Codecademy, Udemy to name a few of them.

* Have the resources to spend on making that enterprise content product if it's not too late (Atlassian and Microsoft have been there for a while). People kept wanting a SO instance they could host locally. They were willing to pay a bit for it (but not the Big Tech prices that SO was supposedly selling it for). SO tried to do this with Teams, not sure how well that works/went. So, maybe they'll get that product finally made.

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