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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

#771

Post by wokwokwok »

edgyquant wrote: post #705
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…

>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…

> For whom?

Well, most people right?

Power users are by almost by definition an insignificant (but over represented in discussions and noise making) cohort right?

If the platform keeps quality content, gets more users over time and maintains both a good DAU and RPU, then, well, what objective metric of success do you want to measure?

Number of happy power users?

I really think most people don't care about that metric.

With SO it remains to be seen...; the power users there are the mods, and they contribute tangible value to the platform... but... you know, the writing is already on the wall. Whether this does it, or it was coming anyway, it's hard to say.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#772

Post by jakub_g »

andreareina wrote: post #742
jakub_g wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus the constant nag to install the app on mobile, and sometimes even downright blocking access and "see in the app". (For now there's still "old." subdomain which works if you enable desktop emulation on mobile, but it can shut down any day).

i.reddit.com is mobile-optimized while still having the old.reddit.com sensibilities.

TIL!

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#773

Post by joelbluminator »

catblast01 wrote: post #758
joelbluminator wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure TomTom had as dominant a brand for navigation as Stackoverflow has for Q&A. Stackoverflow is pretty much alone in this space still which is pretty amazing when you think about it.

Quora?

Ah no I meant technical/developer Q&A of course

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#774

Post by A-Train »

potamic wrote: post #470
papito wrote: post #442

Recent discussion about their tech stack: https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/03/30/roberta-arcoverde-stac... Summary: simple as possible, maintainable, no micro-service hell - just a bunch of boxes serving with the cache and highly optimized SQL queries. Know your storage engine. This is yet another example that not getting bogged down in cargo cults, micro-services, and instead solving problems you have will result in…

You can bet your ass if one of these obscenely funded startup takes on the same problem, you are going to see all of that microservices, event sourcing, reactive patterns, service mesh jazz all over the place when they are dealing with like 100k users. And throw in the obligatory machine learning for intelligent ranking or some shit like that.

What is wrong with event sourcing? We also built our app without any microservices but event based processing is actually quite good pattern. Basically the state of the application can be replayed with the events.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#776

Post by 21bits »

einpoklum wrote: post #765
kbenson wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, re…

The person who asked the naive question that a million other new git users will have at some time or another.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#778

Post by nelsonlok »

chadlavi wrote: post #458
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…

"You've read 3 of your 5 free answers this month"

All StackOverflow answers are Creative Commons by now. That won't be possible.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#779

Post by ComodoHacker »

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…

On the other hand, it could lead to a decline of infamous "SO programming style" which is not that bad.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#780

Post by lbriner »

Not really related to the sale but it might be an opportunity to completely rebase the score system. You can ask a dumb question that lots of other people upvote, like "What is a null reference exception" and end up with a score of 5000. On the other hand, you can answer lots of complex questions that are more niche and harder to answer and still be only double-digit score.

I'm not sure that it can be deliberate but maybe it is, otherwise they would have changed it?

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