Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

Post by bhandziuk » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 8:43 PM UTC

nickysielicki wrote: post #522

bhandziuk wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For what? I've already built up the internal momentum to go out of my way to fix someone being wrong about something trivial on the internet, and now you're telling me I need to invest my time on even more trivial pedantic bullshit (like editing wording on an accepted answer) just to gain the privilege to make a top level answer? You'd think that with such strict rules, StackOverflow would have very high quality ques…

Post by robertlagrant » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 8:43 PM UTC

tharne wrote: post #405

irrational wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically I was one of the first ones too but never really participated since I didn’t think the site would actually have lasting power. Never ask me to pick the winning horse. Same thing with Bitcoin. I knew about it from the first day, but never mined any since it was such a dumb idea. Face palm.

Don't be too hard on yourself, it's next to impossible to guess which things are going to be transformational and which aren't. Look at some of the early early emails from Linus Torvalds on linux. In his mind the original linux kernel was just a cool toy that other devs could play around with. He invented linux and even he never saw it becoming the OS of practically the entire internet.

Post by softblush » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 8:47 PM UTC

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

Post by sulam » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 8:53 PM UTC

spurgu wrote: post #412

skeeter2020 wrote: post #347

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>> 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."

Naive indeed. I flew to meet a company we had just acquired and I personally promised them that nothing would change. Even though I believed it at the time of course it didn't pan out that way and to this day I regret saying that.

Post by nickysielicki » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 8:56 PM UTC

bhandziuk wrote: post #531

nickysielicki wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what? I've already built up the internal momentum to go out of my way to fix someone being wrong about something trivial on the internet, and now you're telling me I need to invest my time on even more trivial pedantic bullshit (like editing wording on an accepted answer) just to gain the privilege to make a top level answer? You'd think that with such strict rules, StackOverflow would have very high quality ques…

You'll notice that anyone can write an answer (or ask a a question) with zero interference. There is no rep barrier to contributing an answer. If you want to participate in other ways without answering or asking questions then there are still ways to do that.