Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just like regular Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is usually much more presentable, in my experience.
Depends on the topic. Stuff like political topics are a mess.
Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
611–620 of 881 posts
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#612Top 3%er here and I rarely use Stack Overflow anymore. I got so tired of the snarky answers to questions (both mine and others) and peoples' ability to downvote you without giving any justification. I've been there for 12 years but fortunately, in that time, I've become a good enough developer that I can generally figure out my own problems. And if I get stuck, I'll go to the relevant Google group or to a sub Reddit.…
Google groups is killing off whole groups that are decades old for little more than a couple bad posters rather than filtering them. I bet it won't last 3-4 more years before they close it and any archives.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#613While 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 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…
> Stack Overflow is so good, and its fate is now entirely in the hands of the purchaser.
I wonder how much of it is Google making it look good by providing laser-precise results for the vaguest search queries.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#614I hope Jon Skeet gets something out of it.
One article said they were making 61 new millionaires so if he's a significant SO stock holder he's doing quite well.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#615Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's in the top 50 websites of the world. Probably worth something. https://www.alexa.com/topsites
This is the only correct answer, IMO. all the other pundits miss that if the deal was for existing source of revenue, it would have been priced as modestly as those are.
So you think there will be 4-5x as many ads and "click tiny [x] to actually see the contents" ads ? I don't see how else they can leverage the platform to make significant cash.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#616Earlier quoted context omitted.
Something about how mean people are with voting keeps it this way. It's just very hard to get a vote at all. I happened to get a gold badge today for 10k views on an old question. Of those 10k people 17 decided to upvote.
I suspect it's because so many people use SO for work. When I'm at work I'm not thinking about being a good SO user and upvoting a good question or answer, I'm focused on getting my answer and getting back into the flow of my work. On the other hand if I'm casually browsing twitter or instagram I'll gladly like posts that are interesting and there's no cost because it's recreation time.
This person has freely put in the effort to provide a solution to a problem you have at work, and you can't even be bothered to click the upvote button?
Also, maybe this is just because I'm just a forgetful idiot, but on numerous occasions upvoting has proven beneficial to me. I'll be searching for the solution to a problem and I find that I've already upvoted a question which relates to my issue - then if there's an answer I've upvoted, that's probably going to be the best one.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#617Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Wow, yeah, never say that. Even if you believe it's true, saying nothing will change is sort of like waving a red flag in front of the bull. Of course things will change over time, they always do!
Its like fixing the wifi router for your parents and then having them call you to complain that their emails now have a signature at the bottom... "I didnt do that", "Well, you were the last one to touch the internet"
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#618This 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…
> would you have been smart enough to give Tencent all that money, way back when?
Investing in China at the time seems like it would have been a valid strategy. They’re just incredibly lucky with the scale of their success.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#619I 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'm top 4% and I haven't posted on the site in over 2 years. Every time I log back in though I see I have 100s of new points or whatever they call it.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#620Everyone is saying how 1.8B is a ton, but I’m kinda surprised that it’s “barely” more than the Depop acquisition today at 1.6B.
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.
> Stack overflow is probably responsible for increasing global developer productivity by maybe ~1000x the acquisition price.
And almost every single bit of it is due to community work, not the people inside company. (That is not to say the company is irrelevant - but seeing how consequently stackexchange dropped bricks on everybody's feet two years ago and the community still carried on gives you some perspective on what is keeping the site alive).