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

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#551

Post by rurp » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 9:08 PM UTC

xenadu02 wrote: post #530

skeeter2020 wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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."

While somewhat rare there are holding companies like Jonas Software that buy lots of smaller software companies in various markets then effectively let each subsidiary run without too much interference. Their philosophy seems to be own most or all of the competitors in a vertical market, sell the software for a reasonable (read: non-Oracle) price with ongoing maintenance, and collect the cash. I only know about them…

Thanks for the context. It's crazy that this sounds like a radical investing approach these days. Prosus seems more promising than most potential buyers, so hopefully this isn't the beginning of the end for SO.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#552

Post by MangoCoffee » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 9:10 PM UTC

papito wrote: post #442

Recent discussion about their tech stack: https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/03/30/roberta-arcoverde-stac... Summary: simple as possible, maintainable, no micro-service hell - just a bunch of boxes serving with the cache and highly optimized SQL queries. Know your storage engine. This is yet another example that not getting bogged down in cargo cults, micro-services, and instead solving problems you have will result in…

thank for the link. its really interesting. my boss want to use micro services and all the latest buzz but i'm like we only have two programmers and we don't create any app. all the code that we have is to integrate our on premise software with third party SaaS. we are a mid size company.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#553

Post by narag » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 9:11 PM UTC

bhandziuk wrote: post #431

johnchristopher wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The threshold is very low.

Well, not low enough for me. After a few attempts to answer some questions early on, I gave up. Read only for me. I don't even remember what the problem was.

Why making contributing difficult and consuming easy? I guess it worked for them. Counterintuitive, but nice jackpot.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#554

Post by nanis » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 9:11 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…

Hmmmm ... Waited almost the gestation period of a human baby before I joined, mostly to raise the quality and quantity of Perl answers. Haven't been very active recently.

As user 100,754, I am ranked in the top 0.12%, current #830 based on 2,139 answers and 33 questions

https://stackoverflow.com/users/100754

Some of my useful answers get no upvotes: https://stackoverflow.com/a/18162345/100754

And some just keep accumulating :-)

https://stackoverflow.com/a/1763683/100754

Now, if you look on the ranking pages, you'll see the following table:

    Total Rep*       Users
    -----------------------
    100,000+   |      1,007
     50,000+   |      2,879
     25,000+   |      7,533
     10,000+   |     23,325
      5,000+   |     50,374
      3,000+   |     85,384
      2,000+   |    125,638
      1,000+   |    229,491
        500+   |    398,573
        200+   |    675,767
          1+   | 14,875,253

So, the site has 14+ million users with no real activity and the percentile ranking is based on users with 200+ points.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#555

Post by DistressedDrone » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 9:13 PM UTC

jq-r wrote: post #507

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.

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

And Digg.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#556

Post by rurp » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 9:13 PM UTC

Aditya_Garg wrote: post #496

bhandziuk wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SO being SO has increased it's value year over year. There's no need to change anything, just ride those coat tails to profit.

If the total accumulation of year to year profits was higher than 1.8B, then the current owners of Stack Overflow would've never sold.

Maybe they wanted the cash in hand rather than a high variance company valuation. Or just wanted to transition their money and attention to something else. There are plenty of reasons to want to sell a company in a way that both sides come out ahead.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#557

Post by sys_64738 » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 9:13 PM UTC

ddingus wrote: post #318

While I'm happy for the people who made a lot of money in this transaction, I always read these announcements with a bit of angst. From a user point of view, I expect this to go like Reddit has, for example. Everyone building that value saw high use value, returns on their investment in the form of information they need, lean, easy to find, high signal to noise. Now there is a debt to be paid. The new owner needs to…

Subs, ads or something else to monetize. You can't spend $1.8b and expect things to stay the same.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#558

Post by z3t4 » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 9:14 PM UTC

wwweston wrote: post #334

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.

The dynamic makes sense: the more popular the question, the more likely it is to get asked early on. That means early answerers will reap benefits from the popularity of the questions down the road. There's definitely an "interest" dynamic to it, but there's also something like consuming the solutions with a good effort-to-reward ratio inside a search space early and then subsequent solutions get harder (kindof like…

High reward for joining early is a good growth strategy.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#559

Post by rkagerer » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 9:14 PM UTC

What a steal.

I personally think StackOverflow is worth more than some of the other tech companies that got acquired recently at higher valuations.

They really nailed the model for building high-quality content. Unlike Reddit, Facebook Groups and others, they're one of few modern social sites that I actually find more useful than more conventional niche forums.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#560

Post by lupire » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 9:15 PM UTC

Dah00n wrote: post #543

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. That.... is a very positive view of Reddit. I'd say everything on Reddit is way worse now and going downhill fast.

That was after Conde Nast sold.