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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

#591

Post by astrojams »

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…

I asked a question on math.stackexchange 8 years ago and that question got really popular and now I'm in the top 34% ranking of folks on the Math site. I don't really know a lot about math but people really like the TREE(3) function.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#592

Post by stjohnswarts »

Old_Thrashbarg wrote: post #497
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…

I'll just be happy if they keep their Creative Commons licensing.

I think this will not happen immediately because people would panic and run. It will be more subtle and over a couple years, but it will fade away in time.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#593

Post by sneilan1 »

What about all the people who contributed over the years to Stack Overflow? All the people that took time out of their day for years to answer people's questions and keep the site organized. Stack Overflow would be worthless without its contributors.

It seems like Stack Overflow is a company that has figured out a way to profit of the Hacker Ethos of helping people. I guess if you concentrate enough naive volunteers in one space, you can sell their time to someone else.

This is happening a lot lately in Open Source and Tech. Just two examples: Wikimedia's endowment is reaching over 100 million dollars. AWS is making a huge amount of revenue of Redis.

Is there a point when the hacker ethos needs to become more broad? At the very least, we should be considering where we spend our time and for who.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#594

Post by marcosdumay »

philote wrote: post #463
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).

I can't downvote your comment here on HN, presumably because I don't have enough reputation. And HN doesn't even tell me.

You can comment without any problem. Downvoting is not the main usage of HN, like answering questions is on SO (or commenting, it's a wonder that they still allow any kind of activity for people without karma, too bad the only allowed activity is making questions, that will be incorrectly marked and downvoted most of the time).

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#595

Post by manigandham »

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.

Because contributing has no value unless your contribution is actually good, and often there's a lot of crap that's negative value because it's wrong or off-topic or spam.

Having a barrier greatly helps overall quality.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#596

Post by fredsmith42 »

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

How much of the billion dollars will you get?

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#597

Post by rossdavidh »

Macha wrote: post #385
rossdavidh wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree that it is annoying whenever one reads something put out by the actual SO people, I notice that (thus far) if I simply ignore that and go there to look up the answers to questions (and very occasionally ask or answer them), it still works fine. As long as the new owner doesn't make it "pay to see", I can probably ignore them. There is, of course, no guarantee in this. But, while I find what I hear about…

Was github worse, prior to the microsoft purchase? It's still relatively recent and only a small chapter in the history of the company. I'm not sure you can say at this stage that it's better than if Github had remained independent.

Sure, no claim that it's better, just that it's not (yet?) screwed up so as to be markedly worse.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#598

Post by stjohnswarts »

mitchdoogle wrote: post #146
meh99 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had access to their business network, data analysis, and knew in the end it wasn’t my money, society will just bail us out, sure why not make that choice? You’re making it sound like they had real skin in the game. If it fails they walk away with enough to retire on anyway. Let’s not make celebrities of the biggest grifters out there, emotionally coloring them in as possessed of magical insights. They’re people…

It's crazy the kind of hero worship towards anyone who makes a ton of money. When you account for all the smart people hustling trying to make their startup work, you realize it boils down to luck. Which, of course, is not a great comfort to most people since we all want to believe we can achieve anything if we only work hard enough.

Luck doesn't matter a whit if your product is crap. Sure connections and right place, right time matter as well but it's not everything.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#599

Post by khuey »

ThomasRedstone wrote: post #583
xchaotic wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also why crypto is having a run. Basically a Ponzi scheme that rewards early adopters

That isn't how a Ponzi scheme works, a Ponzi scheme directly uses fees taken from new members to pay out older ones, lying and saying it's from actual business activity. Crypto doesn't behave any differently than the stock market (except the fundamentals are a little shakier, okay, a lot shakier).

Cryptocurrency doesn't have dividends or share buybacks which are what make stocks have inherent value.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#600

Post by the_other »

sneilan1 wrote: post #593

What about all the people who contributed over the years to Stack Overflow? All the people that took time out of their day for years to answer people's questions and keep the site organized. Stack Overflow would be worthless without its contributors. It seems like Stack Overflow is a company that has figured out a way to profit of the Hacker Ethos of helping people. I guess if you concentrate enough naive volunteers…

> Wikimedia's endowment is reaching over 100 million dollars

When can they buy Mozilla?

That's the kind of consolidation I'd like to see.

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