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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

#431

Post by bhandziuk »

johnchristopher wrote: post #418
gk1 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

The threshold is very low.

https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges

You need 15 points to up vote which means you need to have received 2 up-votes yourself on either a question or answer or have edited 7 questions/answers and had those approved. It's quite easy to hit those numbers. Once you have 1000 points (I think) on any site and you join a new site you get 100 points by default which means you always have those base privileges wherever you are.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#432

Post by dbingham »

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.

One possibility is that they invest heavily in Teams and Jobs. Those two both solve problems that many teams really struggle with and would be willing to pay a premium for tools to help them solve: documentation and hiring.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#433

Post by throwaway894345 »

joelbluminator wrote: post #407
bredren wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good question. It might be a difference in degree rather than a difference in kind. Consider the social media space: if you want to build a Twitter clone, you could do so in a pretty short amount of time with a pretty small team. You could buy ads to get everyone to know your product's name. Those ads will bring in enterprising early adopters, but no matter your ad spend or the quality of your platform (you could even include an edit button for pete's sake--and for free at that!), you're very, very unlikely to unseat Twitter. The reason is that Twitter's product isn't its platform or even its brand--the product is the social network i.e., the network of users and the interactions between them. That's moat.

> 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.

Brand is king in fashion (and to a lesser extent, low margin consumer products like cola or cereal) because fashion is largely about signaling status. I don't think this effect extrapolates to SO.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#434

Post by 1270018080 »

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.

The entire field of front-end engineering needs to take a step back and think about the user instead of overengineering every problem and constantly changing things just to justify their job existing.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#435

Post by adrianb »

jacobajit wrote: post #379
wpaladin wrote: post #10

I 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.

The same was true of Yahoo in its last days as an independent company. Their holdings in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan (an independent, successful company) were worth more than Yahoo's market cap.

Selling Yahoo to Verizon meant splitting the web properties out from the company, leaving it as a shell for its holdings.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#436

Post by skinnymuch »

lordnacho wrote: post #276
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…

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.

Not completely true. I’m active on SO and other stack exchange sites as a consumer and bookmark tons of questions. They sync with https://Larder.io for me too. I can’t upvote though.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#437

Post by MikeKusold »

macando wrote: post #92

Since switching almost completely to JavaScript, Node.js and React I noticed that my time spent on Stack Overflow dropped significantly. I found my answers in API docs and GitHub issues most of the time. I never created an account. Once I had listed most recent Redux and React questions, had an answer to one that was pretty tricky within one minute since posting and while I was typing out the answer in my editor some…

> I found my answers in API docs and GitHub issues most of the time.

I noticed this a few years ago and I think it is more about experience than language. As a beginner, your code doesn't work and you aren't sure why. As an experienced engineer, your code doesn't work, you tracked it to a specific section, that section calls into X framework so you go to those API docs to learn how it works.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#438

Post by throwaway894345 »

joelbluminator wrote: post #373
throwaway894345 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Probably, but that furthers my point: that "update" is new content. The original content is not especially valuable; the new content--the user activity--is where the value is.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#439

Post by skinnymuch »

pishpash wrote: post #411
throwaway894345 wrote: post #251

Earlier 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). 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.

The latter. The initial wordings described multiple q and a sites in the article.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#440

Post by bhandziuk »

usrusr wrote: post #358
TylerH wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of users never post an answer or a question, and most of those that post only once or twice never get upvoted (or get downvoted more than upvoted), so their reputation stays at 1. I think they said a couple years ago that over 50 or 60% of registered users have 1 reputation.

After all those years of being merely a reader I felt like transitioning from reader to contributor recently and the amount of roadblocks you get at reputation one is simply too much. There's an answer you think could become more useful with your comment warning of a pitfall to be aware of? Sorry kid, no can do, you need to grind away with top level answers before you can spread you finite wisdom in the small print.…

Just positively edit a few questions. You'll get rep for that.

https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges

Questions by new users usually need a lot of editing so there is no shortage of things which need editing. You'll get 15 rep after 7 approved edits. Things will accelerate from there.

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