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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

#671

Post by jimueller »

LegitShady wrote: post #623
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'.

Yeah, that’s getting really old. Especially since it’s each site in the family.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#672

Post by fastball »

pookeh wrote: post #134

I for one would have fully loved to have Stack Overflow be bought by Github/Microsoft, and just replace Github discussions. Of course there are topics that fall outside of the scope of repos but ... fully contextualized communities belonging to repos all in one place would have been very powerful.

What's wrong with GH discussions?

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#673

Post by whatshisface »

1270018080 wrote: post #434
chairmanwow1 wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their app is 2x slower than their mobile site and their new mobile site is 4x slower than their old site. Why do these brands feel the need to make everything a fucking SPA.

The entire field of front-end engineering needs to take a step back and think about the user instead of overengineering every problem and constantly changing things just to justify their job existing.

If you look at the past 30 years of frontend, I don't think you'd find a place where you would want to pause the change. The IE 6 era? The Flash era? The jQuery era?

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#674

Post by thamer »

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?

> then SO handed over the data proving it?

Yes, something like that.

The very first mention of the Silk Road online was from a user named "altoid" on Shroomery – the post is actually still up: https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/1386099...

altoid was also the name of the account that had originally posted another question on SO, not the one about sessions, but one about Tor services: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15445285/how-can-i-conne...

The SO account was later changed from altoid to frosty. The email address used to register the SO account was rossulbricht@gmail.com.

Also when the FBI imaged the Silk Road server, the username was "frosty". There were just so many links going back to him :-/

There have been long articles about the Silk Road and its demise, the Wired ones have a lot of details including what I mentioned above. Part 1 is here: https://www.wired.com/2015/04/silk-road-1/

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#675

Post by diss »

chairmanwow1 wrote: post #395
pavel_lishin wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Conde Nast managed not to destroy Reddit after buying it. Their current plan seems to be a race to the bottom; a new re-design for the default landing page that rewards infinite scroll over in-depth content. Meanwhile, the moderation tools are still garbage.

Their app is 2x slower than their mobile site and their new mobile site is 4x slower than their old site. Why do these brands feel the need to make everything a fucking SPA.

I don't think a SPA is the problem, in fact a well-made (end to end) SPA should be faster after an initial, cacheable load. It's the fact that it isn't well-made and it's bloated with god knows what.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#676

Post by frakkingcylons »

MauranKilom wrote: post #626

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 au…

> Stack Overflow operates a question-and-answer website used by software developers

That's spot on in my opinion, though I guess a bit dry. I suppose they could've included the traffic numbers or Alexa ranking to highlight how much it's used? I don't really see how this is an example of uninformed reporting, that description seems right on the money.

EDIT: The article actually does include traffic numbers.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#677

Post by jfoster »

narag wrote: post #632
manigandham wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't forget that a site being able to be managed & stay in business is also good for users.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#678

Post by renewiltord »

will4274 wrote: post #464
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 managed not to destroy Reddit after buying it. I would have said the exact opposite. The Reddit community was destroyed. People no longer recommend Reddit for interesting discussions or speak excitedly about its communities. Conde Nast monetized and changed Reddit, recouping their investment, and now it's hard to find people who have good things to say about it. Consider e.g. /r/darknetplan or similar to…

Reddit itself didn't exist in the early 2000s wtf is this

/r/darknetplan itself is from late 2010

You're just bullshitting wtf

These are verifiable facts (go to /r/darknetplan and cmd-f for "community for" and then select that text).

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#679

Post by astrange »

ekianjo wrote: post #643
khuey wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not all stocks have dividends.

The ones that don’t are valued on the assumption that they will in the future.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#680

Post by tbrownaw »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #347
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…

>> The entire company is staying in place: we just have different owners now. I've been a part of a couple of these. This statement is somewhere on the spectrum of absolutely naive to willfully disingenuous. "Someone just paid 2 billion dollars to buy us, but they're not going to change anything, exert any influence or expect payback beyond what we've already been doing."

My employer is owned by private equity companies. Every few years there's a sale and we get told nothing will change... and every time I've seen (which is I think 2-3, over ~13 years) nothing noticeable has changed.
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