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Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

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Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#761

Post by ajdegol »

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 This is an out of date view that does not match the current reality.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…

US dollars wouldn’t be worth very much either if you were the only one using them.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#762

Post by journey_16162 »

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…

I'm a little bit active as in asking questions and sometimes answering questions I google and find the solution to. Yet, 50% of my rank points comes from one answer I made soon after I created the account.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#763

Post by andy_ppp »

giansegato wrote: post #750
andy_ppp wrote: post #747

I do wonder about some sort of partnership with the people using your platform might be good. What if the top 10,000 people got a proportional share of this cash towards their contributions. Stack overflow wasn’t made just by those who have shares in it...

As far as I understand it, that's the key idea behind DAOs

I still want a payday (and because of that incentive this is why decentralised almost always fails vs a centralised focused startup) but if one of my users writes 50,000 stack overflow answers (or whatever) they deserve a piece of the pie IMO.

I keep thinking of ways to encourage this. I guess treat your customers/users like employees - have a vesting schedule based on number of winning answers or some other relevant metric for your app.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#764

Post by johnchristopher »

CRConrad wrote: post #662
bhandziuk wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting you use a different account per SX site?

No, I don't, but I'm suggesting that the UI could well be (or especially, earlier have been?) confusing enough for a lot of people not to realise they could use the same one on them all. Just, say, google some programming question, get directed to SO, create an ID and post your question. Some time later, google an OS -- or maths, literature, whatever -- question, get directed to a different SX site, and repeat the pr…

> No, I don't, but I'm suggesting that the UI could well be (or especially, earlier have been?) confusing enough for a lot of people not to realise they could use the same one on them all.

There was a time when SO used their own openId server/backend.

It was confusing because you had one openId stackexchange account to sign-in into something but still had to create an account on each stack and you could login from any stack but not with your email but with the openId account... for which you used your email to login... so the URL jumping around was confusing. Add one forced logging out when cookies expire or something and it was frustrating just to log in because you could be logged in into SO but not into SU for instance (despite using the same login but with a different identity).

I could log in with another openId providers but the details are fuzzy.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#765

Post by einpoklum »

kbenson wrote: post #423
einpoklum wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the reputation model is nowhere near representative of the significance of your contribution. Just try not to take it overly seriously... I got my reputation asking > 1,000 questions and answering > 1,200 , and I can't say whether I should be higher up than people with 10x less reputation than me or 2x more than me.

You're exactly where you should be. Reputation isn't an assessment of skill or knowledge, it's how useful you are/were to the site (as you state, contribution), and the site needs questions as well as answers. The person with 1000 reputation purely from asking questions is no less deserving of that score than the person that got the same score purely for answering some. It's probably better to think of the points as…

> it's how useful you are/were to the site

One person asks a single naive question once: "How do I undo the most recent local commit with GIT", gets 200,000 reputation.

Another person answers 100 complex, delicate questions useful to high-performance computation underlying widely-available cloud services; gets an average score of 5, has 5000 reputation.

Another person occasionally asks and answers a few questions, reaching 2000 reputation, but does a lot of editing work, triages new posts, fixes up tag pages etc.

Who has been more useful to the site?

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#766

Post by barelyusable »

pan69 wrote: post #97
couchdb_ouchdb wrote: post #46

Earlier 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.

I'm a fan of Spolsky's writing. I haven't heard of that podcast before. I see joelonsoftware.com has some expired links. Where can I listen to this archived podcast ?

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#767

Post by dep_b »

Most answers I've asked there I've answered myself and some did get quite a bit of upvotes over time, but the most popular answer is of course one I've copied over from someone else in a Github issue, nothing I've done with my own sweat and tears.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#768

Post by iSnow »

mark-r wrote: post #685
iSnow wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There really should be some karma decay system to prevent early users hogging 5-figure reputation. I didn't do much there in the last 5y but I am still way up in reputation.

I don't see how you can call it "hogging". Having a high reputation doesn't prevent anyone else from getting a high reputation too. For me the reputation points are a proxy for how helpful I've been to other people overall. I like being helpful. Suddenly seeing that score go down for absolutely no reason would be very disincentivizing for me.

SO had quite some toxic moderators who came in early and dominated everything because of their 5-fig karma. It drove me away from helping out there.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#769

Post by whatatita »

wraptile wrote: post #743
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…

StackOverflow was successfully expanding their service even before this purchase. I'd imagine stackoverflow jobs is a valuable area - sure it's not linkedin but it's still really good. SO also has really strong community following so there's always room for easy expanding. It's not about the QA area but other areas that surround it. There are a lot of ways to integrate products to QA part of the web - you already see…

I'd imagine Stackoverflow for Teams will be a big part of it too. We use it a t work and I'm sure lots of big enterprises would be happy to pay good money to build in-house QA and knowledge sharing.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#770

Post by [deleted] »

ajdegol wrote: post #761
Retric wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

US dollars wouldn’t be worth very much either if you were the only one using them.

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