Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 881 posts

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#81

Post by rossdavidh »

armchairhacker wrote: post #21

Has anyone found any other Q/A sites similar to Stack overflow or what it used to be? My experience with Stack overflow from early 2010s to now, is that it used to be an amazing, "must-have" site. Always the #1 result on Google. I used it for basic web and iOS dev (remember Objective-C) and it had better documentation than most of the official docs. But now the quality of the questions and answers is worse, official…

There are very few official docs for software that I find to be as useful as SO. If there's another site that is as good, I'm not aware of it.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#83

Post by booleandilemma »

romanovcode wrote: post #66

Let's just hope there will be no "Pay to see the answer" thing happening like this one website experts exchange or whatever it was called.

Wasn’t that the one where if you just kept scrolling down far enough you’d end up seeing the answer at the bottom? lol

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#85

Post by lurkerasdfh8 »

zwieback wrote: post #12

The consensus seems to be that SO has peaked some time ago although I still get a lot of value out of it. Why then does nobody seems to think there's an upside to the acquisition? Maybe they can fix some of the problems.

because common sense says that acquisitions result in attrition of key people, damaging layoffs, forced integrations, etc.

nothing that helps the product/user base.

Acquisition that improves things are extremely out of the norm.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#87

Post by eric_b »

rossdavidh wrote: post #75
eric_b wrote: post #64

I find parallels between Stack Overflow and Mozilla. Both started with fairly focused products that were best in class. The user base grew and the network effect multiplied. Both were started and largely staffed by engineers. Then both companies started focusing on "bigger", more ambiguous goals. Their about pages are riddled with the latest marketing-speak: Authentically empowering dignity, community, and inclusivit…

While I agree that it is annoying whenever one reads something put out by the actual SO people, I notice that (thus far) if I simply ignore that and go there to look up the answers to questions (and very occasionally ask or answer them), it still works fine. As long as the new owner doesn't make it "pay to see", I can probably ignore them. There is, of course, no guarantee in this. But, while I find what I hear about…

I will admit the Prosus people seem more forward-looking (based on some wiki reading) than your usual run-of-the-mill PE acquirer. So perhaps they can steer the ship competently.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#88

Post by [deleted] »

benschulz wrote: post #47
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…

> In spite of this, I am in the top 7% of accounts on the site, which is a nice reminder on the power of compound interest! I'm also in the top 7%. That's down from 12% or so from five years ago. However, I haven't gained many points during the same interval. That leads me to believe it's not about compound interest but new users joining.

[deleted]

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#89

Post by armchairhacker »

nickserv wrote: post #74
armchairhacker wrote: post #21

Has anyone found any other Q/A sites similar to Stack overflow or what it used to be? My experience with Stack overflow from early 2010s to now, is that it used to be an amazing, "must-have" site. Always the #1 result on Google. I used it for basic web and iOS dev (remember Objective-C) and it had better documentation than most of the official docs. But now the quality of the questions and answers is worse, official…

The problem for me is that generally the highest ranked answers are the oldest, and in a fast moving tech stack this leads to really outdated advice. I do a lot of Python programming and some of the answers only work in 2.7 for example. Same as you, these days I'll just look at the official docs.

Yeah I see that too.

Back when python 2.7 was out, the top-rated answer was a really great, python 2.7-specific solution. Now that python 3.9 is out, the top-rated answer is still a really great, python 2.7-specific solution.

Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

#90

Post by amackera »

cheschire wrote: post #76
romanovcode wrote: post #66

Let's just hope there will be no "Pay to see the answer" thing happening like this one website experts exchange or whatever it was called.

For the first couple months I couldn’t shake this feeling I was looking at a shady site. Then one day it dawned on me I had been subconsciously reading “expert sex change” the whole time. Terrible domain choice.

I mean, the domain is experts-exchange.com. There's a dash there to prevent this mistake from happening.
Post reply on HN