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

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#631

Post by phist_mcgee » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 10:54 PM UTC

skunkworker wrote: post #337

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 also owns Ars Technica, which personally is my favorite tech-news site and has high and consistent quality.

If you ever want to see thee Ars community dogpile on a certain topic, read any article on cryptocurrencies. You will get the following comments at the top of the heap:

Crypto means I can't buy a graphics card

Crypto is a ponzi scheme and should be banned

It is immoral to own Bitcoin, and governments should punish people who do

Would you like to buy my new XCoin ha ha ha.

Elon Musk is amazing, but this crypto thing makes me a little unhappy with him.

Ad nauseum. I have been visiting that site less and less, because I think the audience has become an echo chamber.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#632

Post by narag » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 10:55 PM UTC

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.

Having a barrier helps manageability of the site, so from a business' perspective it's been good, indeed.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#633

Post by YeBanKo » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 11:06 PM UTC

$1.8B seems low, no? WhatsApp was sold for 19B. I understand that they are aren’t exactly comparable, but SO has a B2B offering with clear mark value and a very strong brand. I know at least few medium-to-large companies that has subscriptions with SO. I think they can expand into other areas more, such as recruiting and tools for hiring.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#634

Post by CRConrad » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 11:07 PM UTC

JadeNB wrote: post #179

benschulz wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In spite of this, I am in the top 7% of accounts on the site, which is a nice reminder on the power of compound interest! I'm also in the top 7%. That's down from 12% or so from five years ago. However, I haven't gained many points during the same interval. That leads me to believe it's not about compound interest but new users joining.

> I'm also in the top 7%. That's down from 12% or so from five years ago. Isn't being in the top 7% up , not down , from being only in the top 12%?

Up in standing, but 7 is less than 12, so numerically down.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#635

Post by ant6n » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 11:08 PM UTC

armchairhacker wrote: post #21

Has anyone found any other Q/A sites similar to Stack overflow or what it used to be? My experience with Stack overflow from early 2010s to now, is that it used to be an amazing, "must-have" site. Always the #1 result on Google. I used it for basic web and iOS dev (remember Objective-C) and it had better documentation than most of the official docs. But now the quality of the questions and answers is worse, official…

I find Stackoverflow has gotten much worse, you don't get any answers either (i.e. I guess the good people have moved on?), but also Google has gotten worse, and documentation sites aren't helping either. Coding has just gotten harder when you rely on some complicated technology. The internet simply doesn't work as well as it did 5-10 years ago...

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#636

Post by gafferongames » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 11:10 PM UTC

It was not worth $1.8B

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#637

Post by Qem » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 11:12 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…

*power of compound interest + first mover advantage. If you're the first to ask a silly question that is a common stumbling block for beginners, you're bound to get a steady stream of reputation for life. There's diminishing returns for those arriving later, as low hanging fruit are depleted. For example, see https://stackoverflow.com/q/927358

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#638

Post by TchoBeer » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 11:12 PM UTC

selfhoster11 wrote: post #240

croes wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now?

How so? As far as I know, it's _the_ de-facto dumping ground for tech questions and answers. The only alternatives around are Quora and Reddit, the latter of which is full of nonsense.

The former of which as well

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#639

Post by zerocrates » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 11:16 PM UTC

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…

The compression of the top end of the ranking among active/once-active users is pretty extreme (or rather, I guess it's probably more a factor of just how many people are at the low end of the scale): I have around 1/4 your reputation but that's still good for "top 0.91% overall".

I have a similar experience though, I haven't been active for many years, and have a handful of very simple answers to common problems that still make the reputation graph pretty linear.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#640

Post by CRConrad » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 11:17 PM UTC

saalweachter wrote: post #265

dystroy wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt it. I'm in the top 0.07% with 300k+. Even such an account is worth nothing. Almost never did a recruiter pay attention to this. My low-rate GitHub account has a much bigger impact.

Do you feel like a digital sharecropper[0] now that the company has sold, or are you happy what you got out of contributing? [0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/are-you-a-digital-sharecropper...

> The last thing I want to do is exploit Stack Overflow users for corporate gain, even accidentally. That's horrible.

Not horrible enough to stand in the way of $1.8 Bn, though.