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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

#501

Post by skinnymuch »

xkjkls wrote: post #468
jacobajit wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most of what I read previously about this has to do with a lot of uncertainty about how the Nasper's stake in Tencent will eventually be taxed or how the value will be extracted, and a lot of uncertainty about South African business in general. Note that Prosus, which is a subsidiary almost completely owned by Nasper (they have a small amount of public float), is worth close to $180 billion, which is much closer to t…

They are trying things. I read an article recently where they’re going to try lowering Naspers impact in South Africa as such a giant part of the market and other lower valuation issues for both companies by exchanging or buying one anothers shares so both companies will own sizeable portions of each other. Versus right now it only goes one way.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#502

Post by gm3dmo »

joelbluminator wrote: post #366
travisjungroth wrote: post #284

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). This is a weakness of SO and really the whole knowledge base business model (Q&A or not). You think you're building up this n…

> Since my loyalty to SO is approximately zero That's you though. It's not about loyalty, it's about Stackoverflow almost becoming a verb like Google. Many many people are used to using it, it's brand is very powerful. I don't see some competing tool stealing lots of mind share. Btw the thing about talking to maintainers directly is already done on small communities on discuss pages (ElixirForum for instance), on Dis…

TomTom and BlackBerry had great brands, marketing and great software stacks. I still correct the google maps voice when it tells me to take the third exit on the roundabout. It’s “roundabound”. The people who ran those companies didn’t see anybody stealing their businesses either. Yet they are well and truly gone.

https://youtu.be/ATulnxruvhQ

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#504

Post by swyx »

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…

can you substantiate more here.. it reads like they made one good bet on Tencent and you suddently regard them as "the savviest and most forward-thinking players in tech investment ". have you looked at their other bets?

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#505

Post by UweSchmidt »

teen wrote: post #466
couchdb_ouchdb wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ha, I'm user 26! So funny: https://stackoverflow.com/users/26/shawn

What's the story about the XSS vulnerability? If this is the right time for that...

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#506

Post by swiley »

jakub_g wrote: post #402
chairmanwow1 wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Plus the constant nag to install the app on mobile, and sometimes even downright blocking access and "see in the app". (For now there's still "old." subdomain which works if you enable desktop emulation on mobile, but it can shut down any day).

The fact that "old." still works is a pretty strong indication that the new redesign is to ensure new users will tolerate manipulation while retaining a large portion of the old users. Looking at the ratio of old/new site users is probably a very powerful analytics tool for predicting ad revenue for a given subreddit.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#507

Post by jq-r »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #382
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. 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.

They should ask slashdot how the redesign worked out...

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#508

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#509

Post by nickysielicki »

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).

I'm with you. I've never had an active account on StackOverflow. I created an account once or twice after coming across a question where the "accepted" answer was incorrect, or where it was badly missing something about the big-picture, and I was appalled to find that they don't let new accounts answer questions -- you have to comment or upvote (or something?) before you gain the right to answer a question.

Fuck that. I'm not going to waste my time farming karma for the privilege of answer questions for complete strangers that I happen to know the answer to. The moderation on stackoverflow is a complete mess -- it reminds me of the powertripping that you see on Wikipedia, but maybe even worse because there's far less room for interpretation when most of the questions are technical in nature.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#510

Post by anticensor »

gus_massa wrote: post #301
the_local_host wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The whole idea was that if they become evil, or sell the site to someone evil, all the content was CC-SA, so it was possible to anyone to make a clone and continue from there. I guess most of the posters understand that they may sell the site, but the content was safe because of the license.

Yep, simply start something like https://nullptr.com and continue on.
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