Just when you started to think Stack Overflow was bad.... it's about to get a lot worst.
Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
421–430 of 881 posts
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#422Everyone 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.
Stack overflow is probably responsible for increasing global developer productivity by maybe ~1000x the acquisition price. In a sense it’s a tragedy of the commons.
Why should they capture all of that value, most of which was generated by the community itself? They should get paid for the generated efficiency but should not be paid for the gross value passing through the network.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think most of it is really down to the quality of the answers you've given combined with the vast amount of users on SO. I'm user 537XXXX with an account that can't be more than 8 years old but I did spend a solid 6 months actively posting detailed solutions to problems I ran into - ~50 in total. And some more general answers. Which has amounted to ~4.900 points. Which isn't _that_ much. Just 490 upvotes. Or 10 per…
Yeah, the reputation model is nowhere near representative of the significance of your contribution. Just try not to take it overly seriously... I got my reputation asking > 1,000 questions and answering > 1,200 , and I can't say whether I should be higher up than people with 10x less reputation than me or 2x more than me.
You're exactly where you should be. Reputation isn't an assessment of skill or knowledge, it's how useful you are/were to the site (as you state, contribution), and the site needs questions as well as answers. The person with 1000 reputation purely from asking questions is no less deserving of that score than the person that got the same score purely for answering some.
It's probably better to think of the points as something akin to money paid out by mechanical turk for doing things the site needs, including cleanup and formatting in some cases. At that point, your contribution and what it means is fairly clear.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#424This 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.
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Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#425From their blog post: > It allows us to continue to operate as an independent company with our current team and with the backing of a global technology powerhouse. Sure, sure.
Prosus has taken a backseat in most of their investments, though.
That is no guarantee that it'll leave SO running as it does, but it gives a good hint that this statement is probably right, with prosus as owner.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#426Has 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…
While its less useful for future people with problems, I have better luck on discord communities when they're available.
As an infrequent stack overflow user, I find the platform very user hostile, especially to new users. If you write a question that's not great, it's just locked, and you're not really told what to do, often with a vague suggestion like "lack of clarity or detail" which are orthogonal concepts. Are you supposed to just leave a comment in a dead question thread and hope that someone responds? You're mostly just left for dead.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#427Earlier 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."
I agree.
Why buying a company if you don’t want to make any change? Investment firms make profits by buying low and selling high, and it is hard to sell higher than the purchase price if things are kept the way it is.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think most of it is really down to the quality of the answers you've given combined with the vast amount of users on SO. I'm user 537XXXX with an account that can't be more than 8 years old but I did spend a solid 6 months actively posting detailed solutions to problems I ran into - ~50 in total. And some more general answers. Which has amounted to ~4.900 points. Which isn't _that_ much. Just 490 upvotes. Or 10 per…
Yeah, the reputation model is nowhere near representative of the significance of your contribution. Just try not to take it overly seriously... I got my reputation asking > 1,000 questions and answering > 1,200 , and I can't say whether I should be higher up than people with 10x less reputation than me or 2x more than me.
I like their approximate people reached metric. I've answered at lot of VBA questions which get a lot of views but not necessarily from developers who might have an account. I suspect they are mostly anonymous users and thus the answers get a lot of views but relatively few votes.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#429I 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.
>In 2001, Naspers made an early, successful investment of US$32 million, in Tencent. As of 2018, Naspers had approximately a 31 percent stake in Tencent, becoming its largest shareholder
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naspers
its probably because of their early investment in Tencent.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The dynamic makes sense: the more popular the question, the more likely it is to get asked early on. That means early answerers will reap benefits from the popularity of the questions down the road. There's definitely an "interest" dynamic to it, but there's also something like consuming the solutions with a good effort-to-reward ratio inside a search space early and then subsequent solutions get harder (kindof like…
It's always interesting to see what SO posts I participated in - either as an asker or answerer - that became popular over time.