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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

#571

Post by bhandziuk »

narag wrote: post #553
bhandziuk wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As far as I can remember it's always been this way: very low barrier to entry. All you have to do is make an account to ask and answer questions.

I don't know why you had a hard time posting. Maybe you're thinking of commenting?

The counter is ExpertsExchange: very difficult to do both.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#572

Post by bhandziuk »

dorgo wrote: post #561
bhandziuk wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm someone with 15+ facebook accounts and who knows how many stackoverflow accounts. I don't really care. And if I try to comment and don't have the 15 points then I just leave.

Do you just forget your passwords? Why would you make so many SO accounts?

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#573

Post by joe463369 »

narag wrote: post #553
bhandziuk wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As helpful as you no doubt would be, until you interact with SO in some way you're indistinguishable from a misleading moron.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#575

Post by callamdelaney »

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…

They already make money by having a job board (probably one of the best around for hiring devs, so probably costs a bomb) and they sell an internal version of SO for enterprise customers.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#576

Post by dorgo »

nanis wrote: post #554
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 accum…

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

Maybe there more people like me who create an account just to do one thing. And the next time they create a new account?

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#577

Post by fleddr »

caymanjim wrote: post #248
zwieback wrote: post #12

The consensus seems to be that SO has peaked some time ago although I still get a lot of value out of it. Why then does nobody seems to think there's an upside to the acquisition? Maybe they can fix some of the problems.

I'm not sure what problems you're hoping they'll solve. I think the biggest problem with Stack Overflow is the endless stream of low-quality questions. It's hard to find interesting, helpful-to-others questions among all the "do my homework for me" type questions, repeats, poorly-worded unresearched posts, etc. That only gets worse as more people use it. I used to moderate, and got sick of it because it's not rewardi…

Well said. Especially during the early years, I always found the signal/noise ratio of SO to be head and shoulders above anything on the web.

In part, due to a lot of their subtle UI and reputation choices. Really well designed.

Massive scale may at one point break that, but another cause may be found in the change of tone by the team behind SO. They're on the "inclusive" train now.

Don't get me wrong, being inclusive is good, but there's a difference between somebody being a beginner or not proficient in English, and somebody being plain lazy.

This "softening" I do not consider a good development. I prefer the tough love approach that weeds out garbage from good stuff. If that mechanism is compromised, its unique value is lost.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#579

Post by stjohnswarts »

bhandziuk wrote: post #446
izgzhen wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Why buying a company if you don’t want to make any change? Investment firms make profits by buying low and selling high, and it is hard to sell higher than the purchase price if things are kept the way it is.

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.

Or you can pump it, promise lots of new technology and "synergies" and profits and then dump it for a huge sum to VC or Big 10 company while it's still promising but you're pretty sure it's time to dump.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#580

Post by AbrahamParangi »

pishpash wrote: post #422
AbrahamParangi wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stack overflow is probably responsible for increasing global developer productivity by maybe ~1000x the acquisition price. In a sense it’s a tragedy of the commons.

Why should they capture all of that value, most of which was generated by the community itself? They should get paid for the generated efficiency but should not be paid for the gross value passing through the network.

I'm estimating that the marginal value add of SO is order of magnitude 1T, on no particular basis.
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