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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

#621

Post by LegitShady »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #331
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 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…

>most important part of this announcement is that Stack Overflow will continue to operate independently, with the exact same team in place that has been operating it, according to the exact same plan and the exact same business practices

...at least until this purchase news died down a bit, and then we can get some managers in there to make new priorities and get some of the old ones out...

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#622

Post by polynomial »

deepfriedrice wrote: post #524
polynomial wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. He originally submitted the question using his real name before quickly changing his user name to "frosty." Oops, too late. 2. Forensic testimony in the complaint asserted Silk Road used this method and in fact used code identical to that in the answer. 3. Silk Road server encryption was signed with Frosty@Frosty. #2 and #3 were evidentiary, but #1 is what tied everything to a real person's name.

How did they find out he originally posted under his real name? They must have known that was his profile, and then SO handed over the data proving it?

it's a good question, and i could only speculate what sleuthing led them to ask SO for information about that account, but yes, they sent an info request to SO, who complied.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#623

Post by LegitShady »

sjclemmy wrote: post #346

Fun fact and one of my dinner party anecdotes; I have the accepted answer for one of Ross Ulbricht’s (Silk Road’s Dread Pirate Roberts) SO questions that got him busted. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9563675/destroying-a-spe...

Not exactly on topic but I click on this link and it's been a long time since I went on SO...it popped up the cookies choice thing...except it remembered my choices from last time so there was no reason to...I think it was just hoping i'd mistakenly hit 'accept all'.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#624

Post by [deleted] »

tclancy wrote: post #282
numair wrote: post #28

This 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…

Anything beyond leaving SO alone is going to go poorly. Your prediction is this, my prediction is this is going to push SO toward expertsexchange.com, pre-hyphen.

[deleted]

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#625

Post by shanebrunette »

khuey wrote: post #599
ThomasRedstone wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a counterpoint, YFI literally buys back it's token from fees earned from users using their automated yield farming strategy. There are plenty of duds around, but that doesn't make everything a dud.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#626

Post by MauranKilom »

This reporting is so strange...

> Based in New York, closely held Stack Overflow operates a question-and-answer website used by software developers and other types of workers such as financial professionals and marketers who increasingly need coding skills. It attracts more than 100 million visitors monthly, the company says.

I'm not sure I could sell SO any worse if I tried. It spends more time describing a niche audience than the actual product ("a website used by developers"). Wow. Contrast with how they word the description of Prosus:

> Prosus, one of Europe’s most valuable tech companies, is best known as the largest shareholder in Chinese internet and videogaming giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. Listed in Amsterdam, Prosus signaled its appetite for deal making when it sold a small portion of its equity stake in Tencent in April for $14.6 billion. The Stack Overflow deal ranks among Prosus’ biggest acquisitions.

There's several superlatives you could use for SO, but it's more important to have a hedged form of "most valuable" for the investor I guess.

Or is the reporter just simply uninformed? I don't get it.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#628

Post by buu700 »

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

Interesting. I've barely posted/commented — in particular I've only made seven posts since 2012 (and zero since 2018) — but I guess because signed up in 2010 I'm in the top 17% of users.

Nothing to brag about, but it's definitely higher than I would've expected. The required mental model is different from what I'm used to HN/reddit — rather than posts going stale and/or getting archived, Stack Exchange and Quora are more like social wikis. Writing a popular early answer that happens to remain relevant over time is like writing a high-profile Wikipedia article and then collecting karma on it indefinitely.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#629

Post by CRConrad »

manigandham wrote: post #595
narag wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So downvote the contributions, then -- but you can't do that if they can't be made in the first place! Read-only site for me too.

Then again, same stupid "earn points before you can post" system here on HN too.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#630

Post by CRConrad »

bhandziuk wrote: post #572
dorgo wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why would they -- SX, that is -- need so many different sites?
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