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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

#471

Post by int_19h »

dotancohen wrote: post #369
pan69 wrote: post #97

Earlier 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.

Interesting. I'm also in the top 2%, but I'm far from being an early adopter on that site, with a userId in the hundreds of thousands: https://stackoverflow.com/users/343302/dotancohen I was never even very active. I can only suppose that only 1 out of every 50 signups ever accrues any real significant amount of rep.

There's definitely a strong compounding effect over time. I have a 6-digit UID there, but haven't been active for years now. However, I'm still in the top 0.16%, largely thanks to a steady trickle of rep from all those old answers that are still relevant.

But any such "interest" does apply to the magnitude of the initial contribution, so merely being around for long is not enough - you had to have a sufficiently productive period of activity to capitalize on.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#472

Post by polynomial »

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...

Where did his 3,675 reputation come from? He only asked 2 questions and has a small number of badges.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#473

Post by skinnymuch »

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.

If you read up a bit on Naspers and Prosus. They have been trying to solve the discount problem. That’s the reason for Prosus being listed in Europe. Naspers is too big for South Africa’s stock market. It still is a bit too big.

Share buy backs and one or two other strategies are their next options along with the recent sale of some of Tencent to diversify. Like one strategy is for the two companies to exchange their stocks to own one another more. Own one another more.

SoftBank has a similar massive discount. I believe SoftBank is worth around as much as their Alibaba stake. While they also have stakes in T-Mobile US of around 8% (Tmobile market cap is $175B so that’s $14B) and 50% of Z Holdings (Yahoo Japan + LINE) which has a $30B market cap

One caveat to the T-Mobile stake is that U believe Deutsche Telekom is currently and can in the future buy back a considerable amount of Softbank’s shares. Perhaps at a discount. Nonetheless their stake is still going to be very sizeable.

So SoftBank is like Naspers and Prosus in that their market values and claim to fame and money rested on one moonshot. Now their valuations are awful.

SoftBank of course has other issues possibly with the founder and CEO and their vision fund but it was undervalued even five years ago.

—

Another issue is what is the final value of those stakes. How would they get taxed etc. It is rare for big companies to have the majority (or even say 50%) of their value come from a stake in an unrelated company. I don’t think there are any other examples of this.

For related stakes. I think Deutsche Telekom is not worth much more than their T-Mobile US stake and they do more than just that.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#474

Post by linsomniac »

raydev wrote: post #445
mathgenius wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad to hear I'm not the only one that lost their S.O. account because they decided to try the amazing sounding OpenID.

It’s been several years now but they had a long (1 year?) window where you could migrate to a supported login method.

Oh, I know it's entirely my fault for letting it be inactive and all, I'm not blaming them.

It IS unfortunate that there's both a fairly high barrier to entry AND apparently no real way to recover older accounts.

It's hard to justify the time investment to improving an existing answer on stackoverflow, when I've already posted it to Youtube and that's 95% of where I get my DIY education.

Backstory: SO has a post about this stove that has several people showing bad solders of one joint on a relay in the bowels of the stove (really, it took me and my son almost 2 hours to disassemble it to get to it). My video details disassembly, location, repair, and a quick reassembly. ~8 minutes of video. Sadly, people report most repair services just recommend you replace the whole stove, because replacement boards are ~$700, and you can't tell which of 3 boards until you've spent 2 hours on disassembly/reassembly. Most repair services aren't willing to re-solder a joint.

Here's the video I made, FYI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbxugIpIiS8

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#475

Post by city41 »

couchdb_ouchdb wrote: post #46
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…

Same for me. Day 1. I'm user 25 on the site as I listened to the podcast about them making it. Just for answering a few questions early I'm in the top 0.76% overall. https://stackoverflow.com/users/25/codingwithoutcomments

I'm in the top 0.35%. For a while around 2010ish I was answering a lot of questions. I've barely even logged in in many years. I don't think the percentile is very useful. SO always tried so hard to find a way to assess devs and hopefully use that to spin up the jobs board side of the business, but I feel like despite a lot of effort it just never quite happened.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#476

Post by zem »

nosianu wrote: post #441
zem wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they aren't "purely virtual achievements", they're, as you say, points in a game. i can (and have) spent hours at a time playing scrabble or civilisations, and they aren't for "fake scrabble points" or "fake civ points"; similarly here, for the people who do get more into the gamified aspect of stackoverflow, they aren't chasing fake internet points, they're accumulating real stackoverflow points.

If you shift the coordinate system to within the virtual system nothing is fake any more. I left the context that I used for the words "virtual" and "fake" outside and with their actual real life at the center. My reddit or HN or SO points don't have any influence there. That it means something right on those sites - does that have to be said? You get to keep everything that you achieve in your own head, like "having…

yes, but people only seem to toss around terms like "imaginary internet points" or "fake points" when it comes to gamification of things that are inherently not games.

the point i'm making is that to the people playing them as games, the rewards are the points, there's nothing to take out. no one says i'm playing a video game for "imaginary videogame points" that cannot be taken out into the real world, they understand that the score is part of the intrinsic nature of the game.

i think people feel there is some intrinsic reward to participating in stackoverflow, or reddit, or whatever, and that people valuing the karma rather than (or even in addition to) the human interaction, or the satisfaction of helping others, are somehow doing it wrong - for them, the gamified aspect is an unnecessary and fake veneer over the intrinsic rewards of the site's core function. which i can definitely sympathise with, and there are absolutely venues in which i too opt out of gamification, or simply ignore that entire aspect of things, but i do not extend that to sneering at the people who do participate.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#477

Post by ssaturn »

will4274 wrote: post #464
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…

> Conde Nast managed not to destroy Reddit after buying it. I would have said the exact opposite. The Reddit community was destroyed. People no longer recommend Reddit for interesting discussions or speak excitedly about its communities. Conde Nast monetized and changed Reddit, recouping their investment, and now it's hard to find people who have good things to say about it. Consider e.g. /r/darknetplan or similar to…

Where can I find links to these discord invites?

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#478

Post by pavel_lishin »

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.

fwiw, I use a third party app, and can't really imagine using the web-based interface or their official app.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#479

Post by polynomial »

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?

1. He originally submitted the question using his real name before quickly changing his user name to "frosty." Oops, too late.

2. Forensic testimony in the complaint asserted Silk Road used this method and in fact used code identical to that in the answer.

3. Silk Road server encryption was signed with Frosty@Frosty.

#2 and #3 were evidentiary, but #1 is what tied everything to a real person's name.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#480

Post by tootie »

couchdb_ouchdb wrote: post #46
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…

Same for me. Day 1. I'm user 25 on the site as I listened to the podcast about them making it. Just for answering a few questions early I'm in the top 0.76% overall. https://stackoverflow.com/users/25/codingwithoutcomments

I joined maybe within the first year or so and answered one fundamental javascript question which has earned me dividends for many years. I'm top 11% without having even looked at my profile in at least 5 years. Best part is that my answer was slightly wrong and had to be corrected by a comment.
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