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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

#781

Post by [deleted] »

buu700 wrote: post #628
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

Interesting. I've barely posted/commented — in particular I've only made seven posts since 2012 (and zero since 2018) — but I guess because signed up in 2010 I'm in the top 17% of users. Nothing to brag about, but it's definitely higher than I would've expected. The required mental model is different from what I'm used to HN/reddit — rather than posts going stale and/or getting archived, Stack Exchange and Quora are…

[deleted]

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#782

Post by habosa »

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…

Owning both GitHub and StackOverflow would be one hell of a combo for Microsoft. They'd really have almost the entire worldwide developer community in their hands.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#783

Post by legooolas »

karlkatzke wrote: post #720
wwweston wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 drin…

I've had the same experience of looking up and finding an old answer from someone I knew, but one that I made _myself_ for the exact same problem I've just hit again years later... :D

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#784

Post by thaumasiotes »

izgzhen wrote: post #427
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."

I agree. Why buying a company if you don’t want to make any change? Investment firms make profits by buying low and selling high, and it is hard to sell higher than the purchase price if things are kept the way it is.

> Why buying a company if you don’t want to make any change?

To collect its revenue.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#785

Post by one2three4 »

sneilan1 wrote: post #593

What about all the people who contributed over the years to Stack Overflow? All the people that took time out of their day for years to answer people's questions and keep the site organized. Stack Overflow would be worthless without its contributors. It seems like Stack Overflow is a company that has figured out a way to profit of the Hacker Ethos of helping people. I guess if you concentrate enough naive volunteers…

I think it's similar to all the super-liberal OS licenses that permit any usage of OS SW without warranting any kind of compensation for the original devs. Licenses that the devs themselves are putting in their OS SW. Why they do so I honestly don't know.

Which leads to a number of weird situations like maintainers begging for compensation from simple users while behemoths make tons of money out of their SW or pretty basic SW being undermaintained (I vaguely remember a case pertaining to a security related library a few years ago where everyone was waiting on an overwhelmed and unpaid maintainer to provide a security fix).

Dunno. Some things just don't make sense to me. FWIW as far as my projects go I license under GPL. If it's free for you let it be free for all. I'd hate to be in the shoes of Redis contributors. To me, if your work is being used you must be compensated. Anything else is just plain wrong.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#786

Post by rightbyte »

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"

Well to be fair that is how my coworkers (and I) think too. The one with the latest commit get a ping when the top break.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#787

Post by vijucat »

karlkatzke wrote: post #720
wwweston wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 drin…

Hilarious and heart-warming (minus the drinking daily on the job part, of course)!

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#788

Post by Aachen »

marcodiego wrote: post #55

I'd love to see SO be replaced by some collaborative ad-free solution like wikipedia.

As if Wikipedia never shoves banners in your face. I'd rather have the stackoverflow model than the Wikipedia one. As for collaborative, try the edit button on any question or answer. It's already a wiki. If you have enough karma, you can put your words in anyone's mouth; if not, it gets into a review queue. I'm one of the people with enough karma to process that queue, there is very very little abuse actually. You can even submit anonymously, on Wikipedia your IP is then published but on SO I just see "anonymous user". Again, stackoverflow already has the better model. Finally I'd like to add one point to the two comparison points you already mentioned: the Wikipedia syntax is one of a kind, weird and you need to learn it specifically for Wikipedia (and other MediaWikis, but they're not that common that everyone already knows it). Stackoverflow just uses markdown, which as a developer is not something you won't already partially know. Let's not turn it into Wikipedia.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#790

Post by glaucon »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #745
chadlavi wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

SO is CC at the moment IIRC - time to download it all and stick the historic stuff on a static site

Seems to be the case of now https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing .

One of the more recent features added to SO was a timeline of activity and within the timeline you can see which license each the question is under. Here's an example for a random question https://stackoverflow.com/posts/49083680/timeline .

It's kind of weird that while the questions have a license declared the answer don't ... not sure what that's all about.

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