There goes the neighborhood
Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
711–720 of 881 posts
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#712Earlier 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). 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.
Good point. When I wrote that comment I was imagining the value of something like Datomic, which could let you see the result of a query at any point in time. In 2014, how did someone answer this question?
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#713Earlier quoted context omitted.
It looks like GitHub Discussions is sort of filling a similar niche--I'm guessing they're banking on being able to build that out for less than $1B--since they already have GitHub, they don't benefit as much from the StackOverflow user network / brand. I think that makes sense.
Easy to build out the platform, difficult to build out the knowledge base (especially since so many areas have already been covered on SO)
In my experience probability of getting a useful answer, especially for a question about a specific library, is much higher on Github Discussions.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#714Earlier 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…
>Reddit seems like an example of a successful acquisition For whom? For people who uses it since the beginning it isn’t even the same place anymore. It’s UX (and I’m not talking about the aesthetics of the new design, I don’t mind those) is legitimately the worst I’ve ever experienced and the quality of discussion has went down the drain. Even if you find a tightly controlled community dedicated to a topic you’re int…
old.reddit.com it's the only way to browse Reddit. Not sure for how long, but it's there. That way you don't have to deal with any of the new nonsense that has become Reddit.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#715Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Can't upvote on SO without spending ??? hours farming karma. People start answers with "don't have enough reputation to comment, but in response to the other answer [...]". Left the only answer on several questions, probably averaging 0.2 upvotes per answer.
My high priority work questions: mostly no answers, even years later. I wrote a self answer, years later one or zero upvotes.
I ask a question with an example, the only answer "solves" the example and ignores the question, I self answer correctly when I figure it out on my own, years later no upvotes.
Several questions I arrive from Google are closed without an answer, or duplicate to a completely offtopic question. Or it's an XY question where I still need an answer for X but I don't have the secret question Y.
If you're not actively gaming SO for karma, it can be kind of a wasteland for anything but read only.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#716"Prosus, one of Europe’s most valuable tech companies"
What do they actually do? It seems they hold a lot in Tencent, and ... that's about it?
They seem to have a web of corporate subsidiaries around the world, but... what do they do?
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#717I 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…
(this is not compound interest.. )
compound interest is interest proportional to how much you already have. This is like fixed absolute interest. Not sure why I was downvoted.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#718Reading the headline " selling for $bn" is become an increasingly common occurrence for me
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#719Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I loved listening to the Stack Overflow podcast with Jeff and Joel. It was kinda crazy that they were doing a podcast like that while they (Jeff mostly) were building it and coming up with the name, etc. Still have all the mp3's somewhere. Edit: I'm in the top 2%. Most of my rep. comes from interest earned on questions/answers I posted very early on.
Agreed. Having Jeff and Joel on the podcast was great and the hosts really complimented each other. However, once Jeff left, that was pretty much for me though and I tuned out after a few episodes. Just wasn't the same without Jeff.
Personally, I was a latecomer to the podcast and was about a year behind the launch of SO but still in top 13 today.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#720Earlier quoted context omitted.
I loved listening to the Stack Overflow podcast with Jeff and Joel. It was kinda crazy that they were doing a podcast like that while they (Jeff mostly) were building it and coming up with the name, etc. Still have all the mp3's somewhere. Edit: I'm in the top 2%. Most of my rep. comes from interest earned on questions/answers I posted very early on.
The dynamic makes sense: the more popular the question, the more likely it is to get asked early on. That means early answerers will reap benefits from the popularity of the questions down the road. There's definitely an "interest" dynamic to it, but there's also something like consuming the solutions with a good effort-to-reward ratio inside a search space early and then subsequent solutions get harder (kindof like…
One of my funniest work experiences comes from a coworker who had a question about an obscure RHEL 5 thing long after RHEL5 should have been abolished, him googling it, and finding an answer I had posted about a decade before when RHEL5 was in beta and I had experienced and answered the same issue.
Through the “asking and searching” phase, he was sitting next to me on a rooftop at a really stressful job, we were drinking daily on the job, and I had no idea why he suddenly started smacking my left arm and laughing to the point he couldn’t speak. He finally turned his laptop towards me and I just saw my StackOverflow profile with the icon I use at work and on GitHub and everywhere else, the picture of my first dog. He could have just spoken up (but I’d probably forgotten the answer) … he googled instead and got the answer of the person he was sitting next to.
When occasionally I have worked at big companies, now people know my dog’s face more than they know me as a person.