Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B • Hacker News Board

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#51

Post by Goronmon » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 4:20 PM UTC

dt3ft wrote: post #23

gerikson wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, you knew that going in, right? Aren't all answers CC0?

Of course, I never expected anything in return, but when you see that a small number of people get 1.8 Billion by essentially selling contributions from users, you start to wonder how much each accepted answer is worth :)

The way I see it as a user is that while I may invest time in a community like Stackoverflow, my actual responsibilities are practically non-existent and my direct monetary investment is literally zero.

Whereas the company maintaining the site as a whole has to invest a whole lot of time and money into keeping the site running, and have a huge responsibility in continuing to do so if they want to site to even stay in existence, let alone grow and succeed.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#52

Post by systemvoltage » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 4:20 PM UTC

numair wrote: post #28

This is absolutely phenomenal. Naspers/Prosus are some of the savviest and most forward-thinking players in tech investment — would you have been smart enough to give Tencent all that money, way back when? And remember, they were a bunch of nobodies based out of South Africa when that happened. This is much more interesting than a monopolist like Microsoft buying SO, and I’d be keen to see what the growth strategy is…

I don't see how giving money to Tencent has anything to do with the ability to steer SO.

The best thing would have been the status quo. SO has been running on its feet for many years. This consolidation, while disputably better than Microsoft acquisition, is no worse than large companies buying out small ones usually guaranteing their demise.

If anything else, Microsoft has left Github untouched so far.

I am not convinced that this is "absolutely phenomenal".

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#53

Post by softwaredoug » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

A bit odd there’s no announcement on stack overflows site? There is just this meta question: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/408138/what-will-ha...

Has anyone seen anything?

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#54

Post by tnolet » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

geonic wrote: post #26

Is there really so much money in SO to justify $1.8B? AFAIK they just run some some ads and show relevant job offers.

It's in the top 50 websites of the world. Probably worth something. https://www.alexa.com/topsites

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#55

Post by marcodiego » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

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

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#56

Post by incanus77 » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

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…

Similarly, I answered a few hundred questions some years back when I was running mobile at Mapbox and they were growing, and now I’m in the top 8% despite not doing much the past five years. Interesting.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#57

Post by rambambram » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 4:22 PM UTC

geonic wrote: post #26

Is there really so much money in SO to justify $1.8B? AFAIK they just run some some ads and show relevant job offers.

Just wait till you have to pay big time for your programming answers. 1,800,000,000.- is a lot of benjamins to earn back.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#58

Post by topper-123 » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 4:22 PM UTC

> sold a small portion of its equity stake in Tencent in April for $14.6 billion.

Personally I would never use “small” to describe anything worth 15B…

Anyway, Tencent is worth 850B and these guys own approx. 200B of that, so they’re quite large.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#59

Post by the_local_host » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 4:23 PM UTC

gerikson wrote: post #17

dt3ft wrote: post #6

How much am I going to get for all the answers I posted? :) (Hint: not a dime)

Uh, you knew that going in, right? Aren't all answers CC0?

I believe the answers are CC-SA.

But the parent to your response has a point - knowing that the answers are CC licensed and knowing that the owners might have a ten-figure exit are different things. If the community were more aware of the latter, they might have been more canny about donating their efforts.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#60

Post by digianarchist » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 4:24 PM UTC

armchairhacker wrote: post #21

Has 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…

I actually find myself landing on a Github issue after a Google search to diagnosing an problem these days.

>But now the quality of the questions and answers is worse

I see a lot of new users digging up 10 year old questions and cloning answers. They've really hit a spam problem that's difficult to solve.