It's time to provide a monetization strategy like GitHub with a "Sponsor" feature (:
Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
841–850 of 881 posts
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#842Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
SO being SO has increased it's value year over year. There's no need to change anything, just ride those coat tails to profit.
When they do a valuation of a company they also take into account future profits. So all of it should be included in the price.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#843Has 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…
While its less useful for future people with problems, I have better luck on discord communities when they're available. As an infrequent stack overflow user, I find the platform very user hostile, especially to new users. If you write a question that's not great, it's just locked, and you're not really told what to do, often with a vague suggestion like "lack of clarity or detail" which are orthogonal concepts. Are…
> you're not really told what to do,
I know, right, every stack exchange site should really write down a comprehensive how-to-ask page, and they should have a dedicated section just for what used to be called "MCVE" but has since been renamed to "Minimal, Reproducible Example" ... err I mean one day when they write up these guidelines they will eventually rename it
Then people wouldn't have all those "it don't work, what do" questions closed and instead moderators can put in just as much effort as the asker did
In seriousness, I believe some of the miscommunication stems from the difference between "I had my question closed for not following the published site guidelines" versus an actively hostile "get bent, n00b" interaction
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#844Earlier quoted context omitted.
Berkshire Hathaway has an exactly the same approach: an acquired company keeps operating in the way which made it successful. I won't say this approach turned out bad for Berkshire or Mr. Buffett personally.
This approach requires 1. a _huge_ amount of trust and respect for the acquired team to not meddle/interfere, and 2. a huge amount of restraint to not force the acquired team into conforming to whatever standards and norms are present in the acquiring team. Both of these are exceedingly rare.
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Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#845Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes and no. Article comment can be toxic downvote brigades to anyone who does not adhere to the hive's opinion and Ars is a mala fide Apple boot licker to the bone. Ars forums have gone to hell in this regard.
If you don't like downvotes then make your own subreddit and attract like opinions. I personally don't think posts should be voted more negative than -1.
That's really mature, bravo.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#846I 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…
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
Do top contributors get compensated financially ?
This is a question that is burning me out of curiosity...
Do not get me wrong, I understand the whole point of giving back to a community, selfishly helping others and all that. But lets get a simple example: For example the famous Jon Skeet. https://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet
Based on the account statistics this user is a member as of today, for 12 years and 8 months. So a total of 152 months. Again according to the site statistics, Jon Skeet provided so far 35,254 answers.
Making some assumptions of continuous linear work, :-) this user in the last almost 13 years, provided an average of 232 answers PER MONTH,non-stop for the last 13 years.
That is an average of almost 8 answers PER DAY non stop, 13 years in row, while having a job at Google ( per the site account details ...) maybe a family, side interests ? etc ...
Assuming the mythical Jon Skeet, is not a team of 200 engineers at Google :-) I want to understand how a person who provides EIGHT well researched developer related answers PER DAY, non stop, for 13 years, feels about the site founders making 2 Billion while this user ( again...presumably...) gets a pat in the back and "reputation " ?
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#847Earlier quoted context omitted.
The threshold is very low. Well, not low enough for me. After a few attempts to answer some questions early on, I gave up. Read only for me. I don't even remember what the problem was. Why making contributing difficult and consuming easy? I guess it worked for them. Counterintuitive, but nice jackpot.
If you want, I'll give you some points by making a bounty on some old question and giving it to you. You have to answer it though.
Thank you, but this was never something that I wanted to do for my own interest.
I just saw someone with an unsolved problem and found out that I'd had to go through loops to help, so I gave up.
Actually it seems that owners became rich and it's now a popular site without my help, so I guess it can still survive without me :)
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#848Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having a barrier helps manageability of the site, so from a business' perspective it's been good, indeed.
Don't forget that a site being able to be managed & stay in business is also good for users.
It wasn't good for the users whose questions I wasn't allowed to answer, but you have a point.
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#849My favorite quip about Stack Overflow:
Boss: Where did you get this code?
Dev: Stack Overflow.
Boss: From the questions or the answers?
Re: Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
#850Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I addressed the fact that there is little to no quality content on Reddit anymore with the exception of a few niche subs (and they tend tend to be quality for long.). This was actually the main point I made.
Objective metrics (like user engagement and active users per day) are probably more relevant than your opinion of “quality” content.