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

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#691

Post by shagie » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 1:52 AM UTC

nickysielicki wrote: post #567

bhandziuk wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, since the very start. I'm 95% sure. That's been the big selling point from what I can remember: there is a very low barrier to entry (make an account)

Then I must be misremembering, but I'm unsure how. I'm sure that I've had the experience of wanting to contribute to SO to correct bad information and being unable to do so due to low karma, and that was enough to keep me off the site.

A lot of people want to treat SO as a forum and instead of contributing an answer with the right information try to comment on a post.

Many times, people try answering questions in comments when they're unsure of an answer rather than trying to say "this is the answer" and create an answer of their own that is sufficiently in depth to be helpful to others.

Other times, new users try to ask questions on the comments of "I'm having this problem too, do you have a solution yet?" or, while they do try to ask for clarification on the question - do so on questions that are stale.

Lastly, comments were often (in the days of 0 rep comment permissions) targets of spam that could go undiscovered.

The way that SO decided to solve these problems was to add a bit of friction to leaving a comment. This meant that users who were trying to contribute answers were directed to answers; users who were trying to ask questions on stale content would... get frustrated and go to a question where there is sufficient information; and automated spam would be that much harder (requiring an investment of time from the spammer).

It's not an ideal solution, but from the standpoint of a site with volunteers curating and moderating the content, creates fewer problems for the people who invest the time than other solutions do. Burning out those people who invest the time is one of the things that has concerned people in the company concerned about the existing community - losing them would have SO devolve into something that more closely resembled the software development section of Yahoo answers... or https://www.answers.com/t/computer-programming

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#692

Post by mark-r » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 1:59 AM UTC

tbrownaw wrote: post #680

skeeter2020 wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

I used to think the same, until the last layoff wave took me out.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#693

Post by mraza007 » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 2:08 AM UTC

I'm just curious Do we have any alternatives to StackOver Flow

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#694

Post by DavidSJ » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 2:10 AM UTC

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

By contrast, I have the 639th Reddit account and I don’t seem to be anywhere close to the top percentile in karma.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#695

Post by nine_k » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 2:14 AM UTC

xenadu02 wrote: post #530

skeeter2020 wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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."

While somewhat rare there are holding companies like Jonas Software that buy lots of smaller software companies in various markets then effectively let each subsidiary run without too much interference. Their philosophy seems to be own most or all of the competitors in a vertical market, sell the software for a reasonable (read: non-Oracle) price with ongoing maintenance, and collect the cash. I only know about them…

Berkshire Hathaway has an exactly the same approach: an acquired company keeps operating in the way which made it successful.

I won't say this approach turned out bad for Berkshire or Mr. Buffett personally.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#696

Post by xur17 » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 2:15 AM UTC

Retric wrote: post #669

xur17 wrote: post #660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it does. Proof of stake networks (Ethereum, Tezos, etc) pay dividends + transaction fees to stakers, decentralized exchanges pay a cut of fees to token holders (with decent P/E ratios), and the list goes on. This is an out of date view that does not match the current reality.

As a thought exercise, suppose a proof is stake currency was only used by one person. How exactly does do it’s dividends create value? In short “crypto dividends” don’t actually create any value it’s purely incrementing an arbitrary number rather than creating an income stream. The same is true if N people use the currency without any new money coming in they can’t cash out. Therefore it’s not an actual dividend. Thi…

For proof of stake, I agree - I think it's useful to instead focus on net issuance. For ETH2 this could very well could be negative since the base transaction fee will be burned, and transaction fees currently are greater than miner rewards a decent percentage of the time.

Proof of stake coins that don't have much usage and mostly pay out rewards from new issuance have an interesting piece.. - they are inflating the base supply to pay out dividends that holders pay taxes on. Effectively moving normal gains from the capital gains bracket to regular income, which is sub-optimal.

For DeX's, the image is a lot better - the biggest issue here is - are fees arbitrarily high, and will they go down over time. My gut says the percentage fee will go down, but the volume increase will more than make up for this loss.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#697

Post by ddingus » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 2:16 AM UTC

stjohnswarts wrote: post #579

bhandziuk wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SO being SO has increased it's value year over year. There's no need to change anything, just ride those coat tails to profit.

Or you can pump it, promise lots of new technology and "synergies" and profits and then dump it for a huge sum to VC or Big 10 company while it's still promising but you're pretty sure it's time to dump.

Which leaves bigger debt for users to overcome and work past to continue to see even the original value prior to all of this financial activity.

If the burden gets too big, people won't believe it's worth it, and the whole thing dies.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#698

Post by caf » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 2:17 AM UTC

owl57 wrote: post #684

caf wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've looked at the 'people reached' metric and wondered: does this mean that, objectively speaking, the greatest impact I'll have on the world will turn out to have been a few stackoverflow answers?

Also, if these answers contained any code, it might end up the most used code you've ever written.

Out of curiosity I've done code searches on identifying substrings and found code from my stackoverflow answers all over the place, though of course the hits tend to be in that long tail of seldom used code out there. Pretty sure my most used code would be in deliberate open source contributions.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#699

Post by monsieurbanana » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 2:26 AM UTC

GenerocUsername wrote: post #617

sulam wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Except that in this situation, you really did put the signature on those emails.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#700

Post by Shorel » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 2:27 AM UTC

travisjungroth wrote: post #284

throwaway894345 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, GH lags SO considerably on the size of the knowledge base, but I don't think that's very important since, due to the rapid pace of tech, content rapidly loses value with age (consider all of the jquery or flash content, or content pertaining to old versions of libraries or frameworks). What matters more is the rate at which content is generated, and I think GH has a pretty competitive story considering that peo…

> Sure, GH lags SO considerably on the size of the knowledge base, but I don't think that's very important since, due to the rapid pace of tech, content rapidly loses value with age (consider all of the jquery or flash content, or content pertaining to old versions of libraries or frameworks). This is a weakness of SO and really the whole knowledge base business model (Q&A or not). You think you're building up this n…

> But, knowledge goes stale. "How do you X in JS?" is different than it was 10 years ago. People don't want a historical archive of how it was 10 years ago, they want to know today!

I want both! With commentary!

And SO is particularly hostile to this, with their "duplicated question" giving canonical status to obsolete answers.