[HN Gopher] Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
___________________________________________________________________
Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
Author : DavidWilkinson
Score : 1450 points
Date : 2021-06-02 15:44 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| samstave wrote:
| Did Prosus read the documentation first before just coming to SO
| and asking questions about acquisitions?
| [deleted]
| macando wrote:
| Since switching almost completely to JavaScript, Node.js and
| React I noticed that my time spent on Stack Overflow dropped
| significantly. I found my answers in API docs and GitHub issues
| most of the time.
|
| I never created an account. Once I had listed most recent Redux
| and React questions, had an answer to one that was pretty tricky
| within one minute since posting and while I was typing out the
| answer in my editor somebody already had their answer posted and
| accepted. With code formatting and everything.
|
| What's left is the unanswered questions that look like really
| specific, obscure, and unpaid debugging sessions to me.
| MikeKusold wrote:
| > I found my answers in API docs and GitHub issues most of the
| time.
|
| I noticed this a few years ago and I think it is more about
| experience than language. As a beginner, your code doesn't work
| and you aren't sure why. As an experienced engineer, your code
| doesn't work, you tracked it to a specific section, that
| section calls into X framework so you go to those API docs to
| learn how it works.
| Macha wrote:
| Github issues have also replaced most of my stack overflow
| usage. Part of it is that I'm now more experienced, so most of
| my questions are about edge cases or potential bugs and not
| "How do I call system()?". But it also feels like stackoverflow
| took off because it was lower friction than mailing lists and
| experts exchange, but has been overshadowed as projects
| migrated to github and most developers already having a github
| account, rendering it lower effort. This changed things by (a)
| having stuff in google results from other sites and (b)
| encouraging developers to write better docs to reduce the rate
| of support requests in github issues.
| macando wrote:
| > _(a) having stuff in google results from other sites_
|
| Yeah. Programmers now give really nice answers to basic
| questions about the up and coming tech on their
| personal/company blogs.
|
| Also, SO benefited from having a decent code formatting in a
| time where code blocks looked horrible pretty much everywhere
| else. They lost that edge.
| vultour wrote:
| JavaScript is consistently in the #1 spot on their yearly
| developer survey, and remains as one of the most common tags on
| questions, so your experience certainly doesn't translate to
| the average JS developer.
| tootie wrote:
| I think it's a virtuous cycle of modern development that
| popular SO questions make their into the official documents.
| And things people find super annoying just get fixed and
| disappear. I had some issues with a popular framework a few
| years back and got answered by the creator directly.
| bjourne wrote:
| One one hand, I'm glad that Stackoverflow is profitable. That
| someone is making money on it. On the other, I'm peeved that
| someone made two billion on all free content I and others created
| for no other gain than imaginary internet points. Without our
| work, SO wouldn't have been worth much. None of us can
| objectively claim to have been take advantage of... but still...
| hinkley wrote:
| That's how crowdsourcing works. I think I'm more concerned over
| the fact that stackoverflow now needs to earn $2 billion in
| revenue over the next 10 years in order for this purchase to
| have been worth making, and we're going to probably be the ones
| to pay for that.
| efficax wrote:
| Either the rest of the private equity world is insanely
| overvalued or this is a really small price for such an important
| part of the software engineering community
| iKevinShah wrote:
| I agree with this sentiment as a technical person but no matter
| how we put it, stack overflow's primary market will be
| technical people no matter the various *.stackexchange.com
| sites. That leads to a limit in reach / monetization / RoI
| which leads to lower price (IMO)
| erjjones wrote:
| You know Prosus will get all their money back and then some .
| time to build a new one [thinking face...]
| dboreham wrote:
| Not bad for one NT machine.
| yaitsyaboi wrote:
| Everyone is saying how 1.8B is a ton, but I'm kinda surprised
| that it's "barely" more than the Depop acquisition today at 1.6B.
| addicted wrote:
| The biggest problem for SO in terms of monetization is how
| freely available their data is.
|
| For example, if you simply want an answer, Google itself will
| extract the top 1-3 answers and present them to you without
| ever opening SO.
|
| Further, SO has explicitly avoided the most intrusive
| advertising, further limiting their monetization potential.
|
| The one area where I think SO could have done a lot better was
| building a better social network out of their website.
| berkes wrote:
| Such valuations are most based on future revenue.
|
| Depop already makes solid revenue and showed growth of 100%
| last year. Stackoverflow is still struggling with revenue.
|
| It is not about how many users you have, or how much value you
| offer to those users. But all about how much money you make off
| them.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| Stack overflow is probably responsible for increasing global
| developer productivity by maybe ~1000x the acquisition price.
| In a sense it's a tragedy of the commons.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| > Stack overflow is probably responsible for increasing
| global developer productivity by maybe ~1000x the acquisition
| price.
|
| And almost every single bit of it is due to community work,
| not the people inside company. (That is not to say the
| company is irrelevant - but seeing how consequently
| stackexchange dropped bricks on everybody's feet two years
| ago and the community still carried on gives you some
| perspective on what is keeping the site alive).
| toyg wrote:
| Why must it be a tragedy? The owners were well-compensated.
| Shouldn't we celebrate instead the amazing result/effort
| ratio one can achieve these days with a basic website...? SO
| was notoriously and pragmatically simple.
| [deleted]
| pishpash wrote:
| Why should they capture all of that value, most of which was
| generated by the community itself? They _should_ get paid for
| the generated efficiency but _should not_ be paid for the
| gross value passing through the network.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| I'm estimating that the _marginal_ value add of SO is order
| of magnitude 1T, on no particular basis.
| switz wrote:
| You'll never capture all of the value you create.
|
| But in the case of StackOverflow it really must be a large
| schism. SO really did help the world. Count me++.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Stack overflow's users, please.
| herogreen wrote:
| Or less than Minecraft (2B)
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| Jeff said it minted 61 new millionaires. Not bad.
| wg0 wrote:
| Napster has a track record of buying companies, squeezing every
| single penny out of it and then toss them around to someone else
| to do the same.
|
| We might see aggressive monitization and closures of sub sites
| with cost saving concerns.
|
| This will fast become the Yahoo Answers of technical Q&A
| probably.
|
| Also, it is smart on the part of former owners of stackoverflow
| to sell it off as the product is past its prime time. A downfall
| was inevitable.
| rkagerer wrote:
| What a steal.
|
| I personally think StackOverflow is worth more than some of the
| other tech companies that got acquired recently at higher
| valuations.
|
| They really nailed the model for building high-quality content.
| Unlike Reddit, Facebook Groups and others, they're one of few
| modern social sites that I actually find more useful than more
| conventional niche forums.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| They don't use your standards of $$ value. For VC it is
| strictly based on current and anticipated future value and
| amount of profit to be had. It has nothing to do with
| usefulness to society or actual importance in the human
| experience.
| lupire wrote:
| Value is different from price.
| dt3ft wrote:
| How much am I going to get for all the answers I posted? :)
| (Hint: not a dime)
| gerikson wrote:
| Uh, you knew that going in, right? Aren't all answers CC0?
| the_local_host wrote:
| I believe the answers are CC-SA.
|
| But the parent to your response has a point - knowing that
| the answers are CC licensed and knowing that the owners might
| have a ten-figure exit are different things. If the community
| were more aware of the latter, they might have been more
| canny about donating their efforts.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| That's rather callous
| gus_massa wrote:
| The whole idea was that if they become evil, or sell the
| site to someone evil, all the content was CC-SA, so it was
| possible to anyone to make a clone and continue from there.
|
| I guess most of the posters understand that they may sell
| the site, but the content was safe because of the license.
| anticensor wrote:
| Yep, simply start something like https://nullptr.com and
| continue on.
| josefx wrote:
| I think they use CC BY-SA 4.0. There was some criticism when
| they moved from CC BY-SA 3.0 even when it was considered an
| improvement since it wasn't clear if stackoverflow needed
| additional consent to change the license for already existing
| content.
| dt3ft wrote:
| Of course, I never expected anything in return, but when you
| see that a small number of people get 1.8 Billion by
| essentially selling contributions from users, you start to
| wonder how much each accepted answer is worth :)
| Goronmon wrote:
| The way I see it as a user is that while I may invest time
| in a community like Stackoverflow, my actual
| responsibilities are practically non-existent and my direct
| monetary investment is literally zero.
|
| Whereas the company maintaining the site as a whole has to
| invest a whole lot of time and money into keeping the site
| running, and have a huge responsibility in continuing to do
| so if they want to site to even stay in existence, let
| alone grow and succeed.
| ehnto wrote:
| But your answers clearly had value, otherwise they
| couldn't have sold the site as it would have nothing on
| it.
| passivate wrote:
| IMO, That is a bit of an odd position to take. The terms
| of the deal were very clear going in.
|
| I don't owe Donald Knuth anything more than the $100
| (placeholder) for his books, even if they helped me get a
| 6 figure job right out of college.
|
| Yes, his books had a lot more "value" than $100, but
| those were the terms of the deal.
| ehnto wrote:
| I don't expect any monetary recuperation, you're right in
| that the deal was clear to begin with. Just like I don't
| expect a cut of ad-revenue from a forum or what-have-you.
|
| I just don't feel it's correct to say that the
| contributions actually had no monetary value, they
| definitely did, it's just that we handed it to Stack
| Overflow for free in exchange for participating in the
| platform.
|
| I don't think it's unreasonable to feel a little bit
| jaded about it either. I'm not, I didn't contribute
| nearly enough to feel entitled to squat. But I get it.
| passivate wrote:
| I think we would largely agree on the meat and potatoes -
| we just have a small disagreement of opinion, no biggie
| :)
|
| >I just don't feel it's correct to say that the
| contributions actually had no monetary value, they
| definitely did, it's just that we handed it to Stack
| Overflow for free in exchange for participating in the
| platform.
|
| How did you know the answer had value when you typed it
| up? The value is not solely determined by you or me -
| It's by the large number of visitors/viewers actually
| benefiting from the answer. And you need both, the
| platform attracting tons of readers, and the high-quality
| answer.
|
| Certainly, there is lots that can be said here to expand
| on that and add more nuance, but not in a comment box.
| arp242 wrote:
| Stack Overflow the company does more than you think. Aside
| from building and running the software, there's a lot going
| on behind the scenes to stop abuse and the like.
|
| Stack Overflow wouldn't be a success without its users, but
| its users also wouldn't be a success without Stack
| Overflow.
| robjan wrote:
| They are selling the community, not the content. Similarly,
| when Instagram got bought by Facebook the users didn't get
| cash and stock
| Graffur wrote:
| I guess it's the same as if a busy pub was sold. The
| customers making it busy (and profitable) don't get
| anything.
| the_local_host wrote:
| Your analogy only holds if the customers to that pub were
| also supplying the drinks, the food, and handling the
| orders.
| dt3ft wrote:
| This is exactly what I was trying to say.
|
| Imagine, in some distant future, where users who
| contributed were also rewarded for their contributions
| when their community "gets sold". One of the comments
| above mentioned that their investment into the site is 0,
| that may be true for them, but I most definitely invested
| dozens of hours of my time in order to write a well
| informed and solid answers (as was demanded by their
| community guidelines, mind you).
|
| I am not the best example either, I know people who have
| written thousands of high quality answers and god knows
| how many hours of their time into writing these.
|
| My gut tells me that it would be fair, and make the world
| a better place, if such users were rewarded as well.
| 8note wrote:
| They're certainly providing the ambiance and the
| conversation.
|
| Also stickers and writing on the walls
| Ekaros wrote:
| You already have your Internet-points, what more do you want?
|
| As really, SO really was all about gamification, at least I
| think I remember them talking about it...
| yewenjie wrote:
| Oh no :(
|
| I hope there is a public archiving effort in case the posts get
| paywalled or something in future.
| YesThatTom2 wrote:
| https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19579/where-are-the...
|
| For pete's sake don't scrape what Stack provides for you in an
| easy to parse format.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Time to donate to archive.org I think. Ok. Gave them $5.
|
| https://archive.org/donate/
| nly wrote:
| I though it was already paywalled?
| minimaxir wrote:
| Stack Overflow releases archives every 3 months.
| caution wrote:
| Prosus's Acquisition of Stack Overflow: Our Exciting Next
| Chapter:
|
| https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/06/02/prosuss-acquires-stack...
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| "our incredible journey"
| munificent wrote:
| https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| I don't know why you are downvoted, this is hilarious :)
| rho4 wrote:
| Wow, I just wish there was some real competition from a site
| owned by some independent foundation.
|
| Also, what is Jeff Atwood's and Joel Spolsky's net worth now?
| pbiggar wrote:
| > Also, what is Jeff Atwood's and Joel Spolsky's net worth now?
|
| This is a fun game.
|
| Some assumptions: both founders own equally. Early funding
| rounds take 20%, late funding rounds take 10%, all rounds make
| a new option pool (I used 15% to account for the Option Pool
| Shuffle). There were 5 rounds AFAICT.
|
| So each founder would get: $1.8B *
| 0.5 # initial * 0.8 * 0.85 # series A * 0.8 *
| 0.85 # Series B * 0.9 * 0.85 # Series C * 0.9 *
| 0.85 # Series D * 0.9 * 0.85 # Series E = $186M
|
| The numbers usually skew worse than this ideal version,, and it
| also depends how much of the deal was cash for ownership, vs
| incentives to keep the existing team (which is often included
| in the headline number but doesn't cash out owners). So I'd
| round down to maybe $100M. (They might also have had a few
| sweetheart rounds, so it could also go better).
|
| Joel also has his sale of Trello (probably >$120M), and his
| ownership of Glitch (formerly Fogcreek - private) and Hash
| (private).
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Well, there's Codidact (Community Interest Company):
| https://codidact.com/
|
| And TopAnswers, which isn't yet a charity:
| https://topanswers.xyz/
| softwaredoug wrote:
| A bit odd there's no announcement on stack overflows site? There
| is just this meta question:
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/408138/what-will-ha...
|
| Has anyone seen anything?
| erk__ wrote:
| This have come now
| https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/06/02/prosuss-acquires-stack...
| brown9-2 wrote:
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2021/06/02/kinda-a-big-announ...
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| Interesting that he seems to still believe that part of the
| value of StackOverflow was the software recommendation
| questions.
|
| > almost anyone I talk to is too young to imagine The Days
| Before Stack Overflow, when the bookstore had an entire wall
| of Java and the way you picked a Rich Text Editor was going
| to Barnes and Noble and browsing through printed books for an
| hour, in the Rich Text Editor Component shelf.
|
| The site provided me more value back when opinions were
| allowed.
| nikolay wrote:
| Compare this real-world valuation to some grossly inflated other
| startups and iFart app equivalents. Stack Overflow did so much to
| so many of us and beyond, yet, it sold below $2B!
| wpaladin wrote:
| I hadn't heard of Prosus or Naspers before this. Apparently
| Naspers owns 31.2% of Tencent. Time to revisit my assumptions
| with respect to how companies are owned.
| aixi wrote:
| >Time to revisit my assumptions with respect to how companies
| are owned.
|
| And what would those be? I'm curious
| skinnymuch wrote:
| Possibly how weird it is to think of the ownership of
| ownerships and stakes. Nested
|
| Say there is a large [activist] investor ->
|
| who owns 5% of Naspers ->
|
| which has a sizeable stake in Prosus ->
|
| which has a sizeable stake in Tencent ->
|
| which has a sizeable stake in Epic Games (40%+)
|
| OR
|
| a majority stake in Tencent Music ->
|
| which has a respectable stake in Spotify (7.5%). Not to
| mention Tencent's own stake in Spotify (1-3%)
| est wrote:
| Reminds me of "Tencent owns reddit" threads on reddit then
| someone points out that Naspers owns Tencent. Hilarity ensures.
| jedberg wrote:
| Which was extra funny given Tencent's tiny ownership share in
| reddit.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| In the business world it doesn't take much to exert a big
| influence on a company.
| ak217 wrote:
| Tencent also owns almost half of Epic.
| jacobajit wrote:
| Naspers' market cap is 98B, yet they own 31% of Tencent which
| is worth 775B - am I missing something? I'm aware of
| conglomerate discounts but I suspect there's something else
| going on here.
| xkjkls wrote:
| Most of what I read previously about this has to do with a
| lot of uncertainty about how the Nasper's stake in Tencent
| will eventually be taxed or how the value will be extracted,
| and a lot of uncertainty about South African business in
| general.
|
| Note that Prosus, which is a subsidiary almost completely
| owned by Nasper (they have a small amount of public float),
| is worth close to $180 billion, which is much closer to the
| Tencent holding value. This reflects that people are much
| more confident of Dutch business than of South African
| business, and there probably is every right to be.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| They are trying things. I read an article recently where
| they're going to try lowering Naspers impact in South
| Africa as such a giant part of the market and other lower
| valuation issues for both companies by exchanging or buying
| one anothers shares so both companies will own sizeable
| portions of each other. Versus right now it only goes one
| way.
| adrianb wrote:
| The same was true of Yahoo in its last days as an independent
| company. Their holdings in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan (an
| independent, successful company) were worth more than Yahoo's
| market cap.
|
| Selling Yahoo to Verizon meant splitting the web properties
| out from the company, leaving it as a shell for its holdings.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| If you read up a bit on Naspers and Prosus. They have been
| trying to solve the discount problem. That's the reason for
| Prosus being listed in Europe. Naspers is too big for South
| Africa's stock market. It still is a bit too big.
|
| Share buy backs and one or two other strategies are their
| next options along with the recent sale of some of Tencent to
| diversify. Like one strategy is for the two companies to
| exchange their stocks to own one another more. Own one
| another more.
|
| SoftBank has a similar massive discount. I believe SoftBank
| is worth around as much as their Alibaba stake. While they
| also have stakes in T-Mobile US of around 8% (Tmobile market
| cap is $175B so that's $14B) and 50% of Z Holdings (Yahoo
| Japan + LINE) which has a $30B market cap
|
| One caveat to the T-Mobile stake is that U believe Deutsche
| Telekom is currently and can in the future buy back a
| considerable amount of Softbank's shares. Perhaps at a
| discount. Nonetheless their stake is still going to be very
| sizeable.
|
| So SoftBank is like Naspers and Prosus in that their market
| values and claim to fame and money rested on one moonshot.
| Now their valuations are awful.
|
| SoftBank of course has other issues possibly with the founder
| and CEO and their vision fund but it was undervalued even
| five years ago.
|
| --
|
| Another issue is what is the final value of those stakes. How
| would they get taxed etc. It is rare for big companies to
| have the majority (or even say 50%) of their value come from
| a stake in an unrelated company. I don't think there are any
| other examples of this.
|
| For related stakes. I think Deutsche Telekom is not worth
| much more than their T-Mobile US stake and they do more than
| just that.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| >In 2001, Naspers made an early, successful investment of
| US$32 million, in Tencent. As of 2018, Naspers had
| approximately a 31 percent stake in Tencent, becoming its
| largest shareholder
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naspers
|
| its probably because of their early investment in Tencent.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| The issue OP is bringing up is how their market cap is so
| small. 18% of $775B is more than $100B. It also means
| everything else they own is worth negative technically.
| tpmx wrote:
| Indeed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naspers is a fascinating
| read.
| marcodiego wrote:
| I'd love to see SO be replaced by some collaborative ad-free
| solution like wikipedia.
| lurkerasdfh8 wrote:
| SO will never be wikipedia and that is OK.
|
| What we miss the the middle ground. And that is open for the
| taking! (hint)
|
| SO is transient and disposable. It is about the error message
| of the day and by chance hits the language/pattern of the year.
| Wikipedia is about stablished knowledge already accepted and
| published. The open spot in the middle is about accepted
| techniques for the pattern of the recent years. Those are
| filled currently by random blogs, posts and news aggregators.
| asadlionpk wrote:
| How would that work? A site to collect common code snippets?
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Arguably, SO is already a Wikipedia for techie matters. It's
| just very poorly maintained and quirky.
| pwdisswordfish8 wrote:
| Just like regular Wikipedia.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Wikipedia is usually much more presentable, in my
| experience.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Depends on the topic. Stuff like political topics are a
| mess.
| cjpearson wrote:
| It's debatable whether they achieved it, but at one time
| Stack Overflow explicitly stated that their goal was to be a
| middle ground between a transient Q&A site and a wiki. That
| philosophy is why they allow everyone (even those without an
| account) to edit posts and why they close duplicate
| questions.
| flerchin wrote:
| $1.8B seems like a lot for a website that doesn't even have a
| homepage.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/IYMAm
| dested wrote:
| 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 top 7% of accounts on the site,
| which is a nice reminder on the power of compound interest!
| nanis wrote:
| Hmmmm ... Waited almost the gestation period of a human baby
| before I joined, mostly to raise the quality and quantity of
| Perl answers. Haven't been very active recently.
|
| As user 100,754, I am ranked in the top 0.12%, current #830
| based on 2,139 answers and 33 questions
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/users/100754
|
| Some of my useful answers get no upvotes:
| https://stackoverflow.com/a/18162345/100754
|
| And some just keep accumulating :-)
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/a/1763683/100754
|
| Now, if you look on the ranking pages, you'll see the following
| table: Total Rep* Users
| ----------------------- 100,000+ | 1,007
| 50,000+ | 2,879 25,000+ | 7,533
| 10,000+ | 23,325 5,000+ | 50,374
| 3,000+ | 85,384 2,000+ | 125,638
| 1,000+ | 229,491 500+ | 398,573
| 200+ | 675,767 1+ | 14,875,253
|
| So, the site has 14+ million users with no real activity and
| the percentile ranking is based on users with 200+ points.
| dorgo wrote:
| >So, the site has 14+ million users with no real activity and
| the percentile ranking is based on users with 200+ points.
|
| Maybe there more people like me who create an account just to
| do one thing. And the next time they create a new account?
| couchdb_ouchdb wrote:
| 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
| softblush wrote:
| I was active for maybe 1 year on SO. Account is dormant ever
| since. Your answer prompted me to check. Still in the top
| 0.02%
| teen wrote:
| Ha, I'm user 26! So funny:
| https://stackoverflow.com/users/26/shawn
| UweSchmidt wrote:
| What's the story about the XSS vulnerability? If this is
| the right time for that...
| pan69 wrote:
| 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.
| dstick wrote:
| I think most of it is really down to the quality of the
| answers you've given combined with the vast amount of users
| on SO.
|
| I'm user 537XXXX with an account that can't be more than 8
| years old but I did spend a solid 6 months actively posting
| detailed solutions to problems I ran into - ~50 in total.
| And some more general answers. Which has amounted to ~4.900
| points. Which isn't _that_ much. Just 490 upvotes. Or 10
| per answer on average. Still - that puts me in the top 8%.
|
| My guess is that the high percentage is more due to the
| sheer volume ;-)
| einpoklum wrote:
| 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.
| kbenson wrote:
| 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 something
| akin to money paid out by mechanical turk for doing
| things the site needs, including cleanup and formatting
| in some cases. At that point, your contribution and what
| it means is fairly clear.
| bhandziuk wrote:
| I like their approximate people reached metric. I've
| answered at lot of VBA questions which get a lot of views
| but not necessarily from developers who might have an
| account. I suspect they are mostly anonymous users and
| thus the answers get a lot of views but relatively few
| votes.
| caf wrote:
| I've looked at the 'people reached' metric and wondered:
| does this mean that, objectively speaking, the greatest
| impact I'll have on the world will turn out to have been
| a few stackoverflow answers?
| int_19h wrote:
| It's also very much about timing. If you happen to write
| a popular answer at the time when interest in some
| particular tech is high for whatever reason, that gets a
| lot of views and upvotes early on. And once it has those
| upvotes, people looking for related answers later are
| more likely to stumble onto it.
|
| I still get a steady rep trickle from a generic answer
| about WinRT back when Win8 was the hot new thing (or
| mess, depending on your outlook):
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7416826/how-does-
| windows... - but most upvotes there are from back when it
| was posted, and I doubt it would get anywhere as many if
| that answer was written today.
|
| And sometimes, it's the tongue-in-cheek answers that
| score massive upvotes, like the famous one about using
| regex to parse HTML.
| haakon wrote:
| After all these years, I still remember exact locations I
| walked while listening to that. Funny thing, memory.
| lylo wrote:
| That's funny, so do I!
| dotancohen wrote:
| Interesting. I'm also in the top 2%, but I'm far from being
| an early adopter on that site, with a userId in the
| hundreds of thousands:
| https://stackoverflow.com/users/343302/dotancohen
|
| I was never even very active. I can only suppose that only
| 1 out of every 50 signups ever accrues any real significant
| amount of rep.
| int_19h wrote:
| There's definitely a strong compounding effect over time.
| I have a 6-digit UID there, but haven't been active for
| years now. However, I'm still in the top 0.16%, largely
| thanks to a steady trickle of rep from all those old
| answers that are still relevant.
|
| But any such "interest" does apply to the magnitude of
| the initial contribution, so merely being around for long
| is not enough - you had to have a sufficiently productive
| period of activity to capitalize on.
| wwweston wrote:
| 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 a
| cryptocurrency?)
|
| Niche questions do present an interesting opportunity,
| though. My highest-ranked answer was about rolling your own
| setInterval / setTimeout function for JavaScript
| implementations running on the JVM that didn't have them.
| Not a hot topic, but apparently a few dozen other people
| cared about this over the years.
| z3t4 wrote:
| High reward for joining early is a good growth strategy.
| xchaotic wrote:
| It is also why crypto is having a run. Basically a Ponzi
| scheme that rewards early adopters
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Yep like the stock market and the idea of money.
| ThomasRedstone wrote:
| That isn't how a Ponzi scheme works, a Ponzi scheme
| directly uses fees taken from new members to pay out
| older ones, lying and saying it's from actual business
| activity.
|
| Crypto doesn't behave any differently than the stock
| market (except the fundamentals are a little shakier,
| okay, a lot shakier).
| khuey wrote:
| Cryptocurrency doesn't have dividends or share buybacks
| which are what make stocks have inherent value.
| shanebrunette wrote:
| As a counterpoint, YFI literally buys back it's token
| from fees earned from users using their automated yield
| farming strategy. There are plenty of duds around, but
| that doesn't make everything a dud.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| It's always interesting to see what SO posts I
| participated in - either as an asker or answerer - that
| became popular over time.
| swivelmaster wrote:
| I used to listen to every episode of that while taking
| walks around Berkeley. I totally forgot about it until I
| saw this comment!
| thefourthchime wrote:
| Came here to share this! What a weird and innocent time
| that was.
| mrweasel wrote:
| It is still one of the most interesting podcasts I've
| listened to. Jeff and Joel completely chanced how I view
| hardware. So far they've been right in that scaling out
| isn't something most of us need to worry about for a LONG
| time. Modern computers are insanely fast and capable of
| much more than we think.
| sitkack wrote:
| Most sites could run on a single mid range machine. Top
| 500 sites could run on a small cluster of less than 10
| machines. You have to balance work to external egress to
| intracluster bandwidth while accounting for your total
| random IOP budget.
|
| A well tuned monolith is a beautiful thing.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| a CDN wouldn't go amiss either, or at least some sort of
| geographic mirroring
| city41 wrote:
| I'm in the top 0.35%. For a while around 2010ish I was
| answering a lot of questions. I've barely even logged in in
| many years. I don't think the percentile is very useful. SO
| always tried so hard to find a way to assess devs and
| hopefully use that to spin up the jobs board side of the
| business, but I feel like despite a lot of effort it just
| never quite happened.
| lylo wrote:
| I loved this podcast. It came about when we were a year into
| our first startup (freeagent.com if you wondered) and it was
| really influential. I loved Spolsky and he was a major
| influence, and we ended up colocating our infra on our own
| hardware for 10 years and I can attribute a lot of my faith
| in that strategy to some of these early discussions! Worked
| out very well indeed.
|
| We're now on AWS, go figure ;-)
| tootie wrote:
| I joined maybe within the first year or so and answered one
| fundamental javascript question which has earned me dividends
| for many years. I'm top 11% without having even looked at my
| profile in at least 5 years. Best part is that my answer was
| slightly wrong and had to be corrected by a comment.
| buu700 wrote:
| 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
| more like social wikis. Writing a popular early answer that
| happens to remain relevant over time is like writing a high-
| profile Wikipedia article and then collecting karma on it
| indefinitely.
| yawn wrote:
| I miss that podcast. The 2 of them disagreed on some
| technical things, which made it more interesting. Listening
| to them all the way to success was pretty cool.
|
| Is there anything else out there like it?
|
| EDIT: People mentioning that they could remember where they
| were when they listened to the podcast makes me remember
| where I was when they had Jason Calacanis on the show who
| informed them that they were sitting on a gold mine.
| fredsmith42 wrote:
| How much of the billion dollars will you get?
| benschulz wrote:
| > 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.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > I'm also in the top 7%. That's down from 12% or so from
| five years ago.
|
| Isn't being in the top 7% _up_ , not _down_ , from being only
| in the top 12%?
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| His point stands nonetheless.
|
| The "top n-%" contribution would also improve if the lurker
| userbase increases. No need for continuous up-votes of old
| answers
| lordnacho wrote:
| Same here, also 7%. But I benefited from a recalc of the
| question vs answer points. You might have as well?
| [deleted]
| irrational wrote:
| Ironically I was one of the first ones too but never really
| participated since I didn't think the site would actually have
| lasting power. Never ask me to pick the winning horse.
|
| Same thing with Bitcoin. I knew about it from the first day,
| but never mined any since it was such a dumb idea. Face palm.
| soperj wrote:
| What are some esoteric things that you think are stupid right
| now? Asking for a friend.
| tharne wrote:
| Don't be too hard on yourself, it's next to impossible to
| guess which things are going to be transformational and which
| aren't. Look at some of the early early emails from Linus
| Torvalds on linux. In his mind the original linux kernel was
| just a cool toy that other devs could play around with. He
| invented linux and even he never saw it becoming the OS of
| practically the entire internet.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I don't think many people who do something big and
| attribute the success to their own foresight are being
| truthful.
| Loveaway wrote:
| Mined about 100 on some old Radeon. Sold them at $30, because
| I thought they peaked. Trying not to think about that too
| much:)
| joelbluminator wrote:
| Wow...crazy
| ryanSrich wrote:
| I'm top 4% and I haven't posted on the site in over 2 years.
| Every time I log back in though I see I have 100s of new points
| or whatever they call it.
| [deleted]
| incanus77 wrote:
| Similarly, I answered a few hundred questions some years back
| when I was running mobile at Mapbox and they were growing, and
| now I'm in the top 8% despite not doing much the past five
| years. Interesting.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| > 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!
|
| That's how I'm in the top 5%.
|
| My old posts that are still relevant get votes. Every time I
| log in there is a new notification about how many more points I
| have.
| Macha wrote:
| Yeah, top 3% for stuff like being the first person to ask
| about terminal colour codes and explain typedef.
|
| Hard to see that many new questions with such broad appeal
| that weren't already asked or answered for any new users to
| get their rep as easily
| surfearth wrote:
| In 2013, I asked a question that I then answered myself. It
| turned out to be a fairly common question and my response now
| has more than 101k views.
|
| It's remarkable as perhaps the lowest effort/highest benefit
| to others online action in my life.
| make3 wrote:
| (this is not compound interest.. )
| [deleted]
| lilyball wrote:
| I don't remember how I joined but my profile is apparently
| older than the official launch date according to Wikipedia?
| Anyway, I used it heavily for a few years, then pretty much
| stopped entirely in 2012. And like you I've continued to rack
| up karma, such that I'm still in the top 0.06% somehow. It's
| kind of nuts.
| TylerH wrote:
| The vast majority of users never post an answer or a question,
| and most of those that post only once or twice never get
| upvoted (or get downvoted more than upvoted), so their
| reputation stays at 1.
|
| I think they said a couple years ago that over 50 or 60% of
| registered users have 1 reputation.
| usrusr wrote:
| After all those years of being merely a reader I felt like
| transitioning from reader to contributor recently and the
| amount of roadblocks you get at reputation one is simply too
| much. There's an answer you think could become more useful
| with your comment warning of a pitfall to be aware of? Sorry
| kid, no can do, you need to grind away with top level answers
| before you can spread you finite wisdom in the small print.
| This level of gamification puts the subset of contributing
| users through a heavy self-selection filter and I would
| expect that the subset that makes through would turn out far
| worse (spammy, eager to game the system) than what we see.
| Have the thresholds always been this high or did the walls
| grow higher over time?
| bhandziuk wrote:
| Just positively edit a few questions. You'll get rep for
| that.
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges
|
| Questions by new users usually need a lot of editing so
| there is no shortage of things which need editing. You'll
| get 15 rep after 7 approved edits. Things will accelerate
| from there.
| nickysielicki wrote:
| For what? I've already built up the internal momentum to
| go out of my way to fix someone being wrong about
| something trivial on the internet, and now you're telling
| me I need to invest my time on _even more_ trivial
| pedantic bullshit (like editing wording on an accepted
| answer) just to gain the privilege to make a top level
| answer?
|
| You'd think that with such strict rules, StackOverflow
| would have very high quality questions and very high
| quality answers. But it actually doesn't. One aspect of
| being a good developer is catching a stackoverflow answer
| in a mistake and being capable of rejudging the rest of
| the answer section as a result (ie: scrolling further
| down and finding the _correct_ answer that has zero
| upvotes).
| bhandziuk wrote:
| You'll notice that anyone can write an answer (or ask a a
| question) with zero interference. There is no rep barrier
| to contributing an answer.
|
| If you want to participate in other ways without
| answering or asking questions then there are still ways
| to do that.
| nickysielicki wrote:
| Was it always this way? It's been a few years since I
| last gave it a shot.
| bhandziuk wrote:
| Yes, since the very start. I'm 95% sure. That's been the
| big selling point from what I can remember: there is a
| very low barrier to entry (make an account)
| nickysielicki wrote:
| Then I must be misremembering, but I'm unsure how. I'm
| sure that I've had the experience of wanting to
| contribute to SO to correct bad information and being
| unable to do so due to low karma, and that was enough to
| keep me off the site.
| tamrix wrote:
| Except no pay out for you. Maybe the next big site should be
| backed by crypto or something with token rewards so you make
| something by building the sure with content?
| astrojams wrote:
| I asked a question on math.stackexchange 8 years ago and that
| question got really popular and now I'm in the top 34% ranking
| of folks on the Math site. I don't really know a lot about math
| but people really like the TREE(3) function.
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _I always thought Microsoft would be a natural buyer given the
| tech stack and Microsoft 's support for developers._
|
| The heyday of SO is long over and all the serious Q+A takes
| place on GitHub, which MS already owns.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Many repo owners close discussion that ain't bugs or feature
| request because of moderation workload.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Top 7% as well, but most of that came from shitty questions
| (both by my own standards now and SO standards) that happened
| to get a little traction so I don't put much stock in the
| score.
| tootie wrote:
| Microsoft or Salesforce. Most of the value over the past few
| years has shifted from general programming topics to platform-
| specific StackExchange communities.
| skohan wrote:
| I'm actually glad MS would not also own SO. Github has been
| basically fine under MS ownership so far, but it seems like
| we're headed into a period of massive corporate consolidation,
| and I'd be happy if not _all_ the developer tools are
| controlled by one interested party
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| Top 3% for me, I guess on the strength of being early in the
| iOS ecosystem, inactive for a decade
|
| My questions seem lame and my top answer is my own question:
| https://stackoverflow.com/users/108512/andrew-johnson?tab=pr...
| halfdan wrote:
| You just made me check - "top 0.84% overall". Haven't posted
| in a long long time and it looks like my points keep growing
| pretty much linearly.
| iSnow wrote:
| It's relatively easy if you really take the time to answer
| questions.
|
| Around 2016, I wanted to get deeper into some tech and used the
| learning curve to answer SO questions. I basically stopped the
| same year, but I am still in the top 8%, used to be top 1% for
| a couple of months.
|
| Contribution rate must be an extremely uneven distribution.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| > Contribution rate must be an extremely uneven distribution.
|
| Probably another case of the 1% rule[0].
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
| k__ wrote:
| Microsoft has GitHub and I have to admit, I look more into OSS
| code than I search something on StackOverflow nowadays.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| It looks like GitHub Discussions is sort of filling a similar
| niche--I'm guessing they're banking on being able to build that
| out for less than $1B--since they already have GitHub, they
| don't benefit _as_ much from the StackOverflow user network /
| brand. I think that makes sense.
| zaptrem wrote:
| Easy to build out the platform, difficult to build out the
| knowledge base (especially since so many areas have already
| been covered on SO)
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Sure, GH lags SO considerably on the size of the knowledge
| base, but I don't think that's very important since, due to
| the rapid pace of tech, content rapidly loses value with
| age (consider all of the jquery or flash content, or
| content pertaining to old versions of libraries or
| frameworks).
|
| What matters more is the rate at which content is
| generated, and I think GH has a pretty competitive story
| considering that people naturally want to ask the project
| maintainers/community questions _directly_ (as evidenced by
| all of the GitHub Issues which are formulated as questions)
| and considering GitHub 's significant share of those
| maintainers/communities. I posit that new content will
| increasingly appear on GH Discussions.
|
| Please don't mistake this for some exaggerated "GH is going
| to kill SO" argument--SO will do fine, but there is a
| compelling story for why MS wouldn't spend $1bn on SO.
| palijer wrote:
| I'd say a lot of that stuff increases with value to an
| individual over time, but has less demand.
|
| Some of those SO discussions are the only references to
| ancient legacy code that is useful, when asking any
| questions about it today would not get any answers.
|
| So, depending on how we calculate value, if we ignore
| demand, it can be more valuable.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| > Sure, GH lags SO considerably on the size of the
| knowledge base, but I don't think that's very important
| since, due to the rapid pace of tech, content rapidly
| loses value with age (consider all of the jquery or flash
| content, or content pertaining to old versions of
| libraries or frameworks).
|
| This is a weakness of SO and really the whole knowledge
| base business model (Q&A or not). You think you're
| building up this network-effect moat. "We have the best
| question-askers, answer-givers and answered questions. So
| everyone comes here!"
|
| But, knowledge goes stale. "How do you X in JS?" is
| different than it was 10 years ago. People don't want a
| historical archive of how it was 10 years ago, they want
| to know today!
|
| Then, like you say, GitHub brings in a whole new weird
| angle. Why ask on some other site when I have a spot
| where the maintainers and users hang out? Since my
| loyalty to SO is approximately zero, I'm just as likely
| to click on the Google result that takes me to GitHub if
| it looks more promising.
| joelbluminator wrote:
| > Since my loyalty to SO is approximately zero
|
| That's you though. It's not about loyalty, it's about
| Stackoverflow almost becoming a verb like Google. Many
| many people are used to using it, it's brand is very
| powerful. I don't see some competing tool stealing lots
| of mind share. Btw the thing about talking to maintainers
| directly is already done on small communities on discuss
| pages (ElixirForum for instance), on Discord, IRC and
| many other channels. None of it actually hurt SO.
| gm3dmo wrote:
| TomTom and BlackBerry had great brands, marketing and
| great software stacks. I still correct the google maps
| voice when it tells me to take the third exit on the
| roundabout. It's "roundabound". The people who ran those
| companies didn't see anybody stealing their businesses
| either. Yet they are well and truly gone.
|
| https://youtu.be/ATulnxruvhQ
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| > I still correct the google maps voice when it tells me
| to take the third exit on the roundabout. It's
| "roundabound".
|
| If it's saying "roundabout," I hope you're not correcting
| it to "roundabound," because "roundabout" is the correct
| word.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundabout
| joelbluminator wrote:
| 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.
| bredren wrote:
| Brand is not a moat.
| joelbluminator wrote:
| How do you define a moat? For me it's anything that gives
| a company an advantage over it's competitors. It can be
| patents, tech, but also brands. Take Coca Cola for
| example. Now obviously it has a moat right? Where is this
| moat coming from then? If you think about it it's mostly
| the brand, not anything to do with taste. Same can be
| said about different beers or about Nike, Levi's, Apple
| (arguably) etc etc.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Good question. It might be a difference in degree rather
| than a difference in kind. Consider the social media
| space: if you want to build a Twitter clone, you could do
| so in a pretty short amount of time with a pretty small
| team. You could buy ads to get everyone to know your
| product's name. Those ads will bring in enterprising
| early adopters, but no matter your ad spend or the
| quality of your platform (you could even include an edit
| button for pete's sake--and for free at that!), you're
| very, very unlikely to unseat Twitter. The reason is that
| Twitter's product isn't its platform or even its brand--
| the product is the social network i.e., the network of
| users and the interactions between them. That's moat.
|
| > If you think about it it's mostly the brand, not
| anything to do with taste. Same can be said about
| different beers or about Nike, Levi's, Apple (arguably)
| etc etc.
|
| Brand is king in fashion (and to a lesser extent, low
| margin consumer products like cola or cereal) because
| fashion is largely about signaling status. I don't think
| this effect extrapolates to SO.
| joelbluminator wrote:
| I think Twitter is mostly about momentum, everybody is
| there and people dont want to start over again. A
| competitor will have the critical problem of having zero
| users. I am not sure the connections between users matter
| that much. Not all brands is about status. How can cereal
| be about status for instance? A lot of the crap we buy
| and services we use is just habit and acquired behavior.
| Sometimes status signaling is part of it and sometimes it
| isnt. Is capncrunch about status lol?
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I think it's perhaps a little clearer to frame it this
| way:
|
| SO has a network effect moat, not a corpus-size moat (I
| don't know that SO was ever thinking the size of its
| corpus would stave off competitors--they probably were
| correctly assuming that their user-base was their moat).
| The network-effect moat keeps the rate-of-change of the
| corpus higher than competitors, which is where the value
| is (not the size of the corpus). This moat has held up
| really well apart from (maybe) GH Discussions, which
| seems (to me) likely to succeed because GH has a
| similarly large network of experts.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| We agree on the corpus-size not being a moat, and maybe
| SO does themselves.
|
| More directly, I question StackOverflow's network effect.
| Compare it to Craigslist, IMO the best example of network
| effects ever. It is their sheer size that has entrenched
| them. They're also not vulnerable to groups moving to
| another platform (rise and fall of everything from AIM to
| Snapchat).
|
| I don't actually search StackOverflow. I end up there
| through Google. If Google starts pointing me somewhere
| else, or the search previews start looking better for
| somewhere else, I'm going there. It's not like if I try
| to sell a single bag of concrete on anywhere but
| craigslist, which would end in failure.
|
| I'm sure in the M&A docs there was some disclosure like
| "75% of our traffic comes through Google. If Google
| started directing people to other sites, that would have
| a material impact on our business."
| pishpash wrote:
| Is it just Stack Overflow or Stack Exchange over all? If
| the latter, that's a lot more content that doesn't expire
| that quickly.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| The latter. The initial wordings described multiple q and
| a sites in the article.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Right, but MS probably isn't interested in that content
| for its software dev portfolio.
| jacksonkmarley wrote:
| Anecdata incoming: a few years ago when I was doing stuff
| with c# it seemed like everything I needed was already on
| SO answered by some dude with like a million kudos or
| whatever.
|
| Recently I need some python + mariadb answers and most of
| the top ones are out-of-date enough that I can't even use
| them (deprecated packages). I was a bit surprised TBH.
|
| Also TIL GitHub Discussions is a thing.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| "Average technology has 3 answers a week" factoid actualy
| just statistical error. average technology has 0 answers
| a week. Jon Skeet, who lives in cave & answers over
| 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been
| counted
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Yeah, GHD has not been well-marketed, but I've used it a
| couple of times and it has been very useful. I have
| similar experiences where SO questions can be pretty
| dodgy based on age--for example, for Rust I rarely bother
| looking at answers from 2016 because so much has changed
| since then. Some technologies are more stable than
| others.
| joelbluminator wrote:
| Usually a highly voted answer that is no longer correct
| will be updated through time. I don't have any data to
| support this claim but it's what I see happening.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Probably, but that furthers my point: that "update" is
| new content. The original content is not especially
| valuable; the new content--the user activity--is where
| the value is.
| blt wrote:
| GH Discussions is great when the question is closely tied
| to a particular repo. I don't see how it competes with SO
| for things like design patterns, algorithms, programming
| language usage, etc.
|
| I wonder how much of SO fits in the "particular repo"
| category? Not so much for my interests, but I imagine the
| chunk for popular web frameworks is huge.
| gervwyk wrote:
| I must agree, their reach must be insane! Although my last
| question was like 3 years ago, I do visit it at least twice
| a week for quick answers.
|
| I feel like most "often asked" questions has been answered.
| I very seldomly find that creating a new question is
| necessary as most things is covered in past awnsers.
| However for package related problems, GitHub issues has
| become the go to.
| rhizome wrote:
| And that's why this line of concern is worthless: _SO
| already exists._ GHD can refer to that all day long without
| having to reinvent the Library of Alexandria (which in
| hindsight could have used a backup, but still).
|
| Unless..."Prosus" pulls a Google+DejaNews and obscures SO's
| availability or paywalls it or, or, or...
| crispyambulance wrote:
| SO is OK for very narrow questions that have concrete
| definitive answers. Unfortunately, SO's self-appointed
| police force will shut people down for any deviation from
| "the rules" (as they interpret them), or sometimes for no
| reason at all.
|
| Github issues, on the other hand, seems to be receptive to
| open-ended "why" questions which would be smacked down hard
| on SO. Github has a higher barrier to entry. You have to
| know where to go, but if you're in the right place it's a
| much nicer community with more classy and professional
| conduct. Also, it doesn't have a gamification aspect to it,
| unlike SO, and thus fewer irritating/persnickety types are
| attracted to Github because they can't really score points.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| One's about discussions; the other isn't.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Could they potentially integrate the existing StackExchange
| content, given that it's creative commons licensed?
| swiley wrote:
| >You must create a new Microsoft 365 hotlive account to reply
| to this message.
| caturopath wrote:
| I played Stack Overflow years ago and have a ~0.3% ranked
| account, despite not really posting in years. It's amazing how
| little the ranking seems to have changed in the last 10 years,
| wavering around in the top half percent whenever I've peeked. I
| don't know whether the number is dishonest, or whether the new
| stars and new signups just happen to hold it in status, never
| sending it to 0.03% or 3%.
| jrockway wrote:
| Same. I think what happened is that the early users answered
| all the most frequently occurring questions, and the
| questions honestly haven't changed much. I think my most
| popular answer is like how to diff with git. People are using
| git even more than they were when SO started, so it gets
| upvoted regularly.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Some of my oldest answers have hundreds of votes and
| required minimal effort to answer well... some of the newer
| answers have less than ten votes, since they're much more
| niche (even if they take 10x the effort to answer well).
|
| A lot of the early broad answers got those huge upvote
| counts and make the early users who answered them stay in
| the top percentiles.
| caturopath wrote:
| Yeah, the continued upvotes for the same old questions
| doesn't surprise me, doubly so given the nasty culture of
| trying your best to close all new questions. Today, if
| someone posts a question, it will be closed as a duplicate
| (whether or not it actually is), or as too broad or too
| narrow. My main SO contribution in the last several years
| has been votes to re-open, which don't tend to get enough
| to actually re-open.
|
| My real surprise isn't the continued flow of points, just
| the apparent stasis. I could imagine being at 0.003% by
| now, for instance, from this phenomenon.
| iSnow wrote:
| 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.
| jagger27 wrote:
| I think this idea combined with the "is this answer still
| relevant" flag that was recently added would work well. I
| see no reason to devalue old but still good answers.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Gradual 5 year drop-off for effective karma might do
| community good. As such any post older than that would
| have zero effective karma, but you could still show
| historic karma. Maybe this would make moderation better
| for new users as old hostile ones lose their power if
| they don't keep participating in the same pit as rest new
| userbase...
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Same. "Top N%" looks to just use score, and momentum on old
| answers is a big deal. I'm top 0.24%, with my score having
| increased by about 50% (25,000) in the last 31/2 years (as
| far as their little chart shows), overwhelmingly because of
| momentum on old answers from 2010-2015--for during that time
| I've only made a handful of edits, three question, and six
| answers, three of which were for my own three questions.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Something about how mean people are with voting keeps it this
| way. It's just very hard to get a vote at all. I happened to
| get a gold badge today for 10k views on an old question. Of
| those 10k people 17 decided to upvote.
| ritchiea wrote:
| I suspect it's because so many people use SO for work. When
| I'm at work I'm not thinking about being a good SO user and
| upvoting a good question or answer, I'm focused on getting my
| answer and getting back into the flow of my work.
|
| On the other hand if I'm casually browsing twitter or
| instagram I'll gladly like posts that are interesting and
| there's no cost because it's recreation time.
| mikeywazowski wrote:
| This person has freely put in the effort to provide a
| solution to a problem you have at work, and you can't even
| be bothered to click the upvote button?
|
| Also, maybe this is just because I'm just a forgetful
| idiot, but on numerous occasions upvoting has proven
| beneficial to me. I'll be searching for the solution to a
| problem and I find that I've already upvoted a question
| which relates to my issue - then if there's an answer I've
| upvoted, that's probably going to be the best one.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| Not completely true. I'm active on SO and other stack
| exchange sites as a consumer and bookmark tons of questions.
| They sync with https://Larder.io for me too. I can't upvote
| though.
| gk1 wrote:
| Possibly related: SO requires you reach some number of
| upvotes before you yourself can upvote. When I use SO and try
| to upvote a useful answer I'm always reminded that I don't
| have the privilege of upvoting.
| hinkley wrote:
| Didn't you also need a few upvotes on comments before it
| would let you post an answer?
| thomasahle wrote:
| The other way around. You can't comment without a bit of
| reputation. You can always ask and answer questions.
| rhizome wrote:
| This is (part of) why I upvote anything _even remotely_
| helpful, explaining that some command switch does (or doesn
| 't do) X, or syntax clarification, or even having the best
| formatted and/or written answer, asking a question I didn't
| know I had, and so on. I'm not a power SO'er, but I have
| some privileges and I do try to help the site be good.
|
| It's kind of like Craigslist for me in that random people
| like me are also the source of poor-quality and low-effort
| participation, one-sentence or obviously-homework
| questions. However, I do realize the structure of the site
| and the Ponzi-like nature of voting there makes the n00b
| experience difficult if you want points and privileges. But
| at the end of the day, question choice and moderation are
| the comb and brush of informative crowd-driven sites.
|
| That said, I assume there is plenty of action to be had if
| you're participating in cutting edge, new version, or new
| technology topics. Unfortunately that conflicts with the
| low-effort/homework population who I assume are constrained
| by their curriculum and so they have only C++ questions to
| ask. By that token I wonder how many questions even remain
| to be asked of common and popular topics like Java. It
| could just be that SO is "full" in certain topics.
|
| The way to grow an economy is to participate in the
| economy, but this acquistion is no doubt going to change
| things for me.
|
| I also speculate that there's a certain mindset that sees
| unmonetized ratings (or even points) as a market failure,
| which is what generated acquisition interest.
| thomasahle wrote:
| > This is (part of) why I upvote anything even remotely
| helpful, explaining that some command switch does (or
| doesn't do) X, or syntax clarification, or even having
| the best formatted and/or written answer, asking a
| question I didn't know I had, and so on.
|
| I recall listening to the stackoverflow podcast and Jeff
| was asked about his threshold for upvoting.
|
| I recall he said he upvoted something like all answers
| that were nor spam. Since, people are trying to help for
| no benefit to themselves, so why wouldn't you at least
| give them that?
| johnchristopher wrote:
| I have given up on participating on SO because more often
| than not I am told I don't have enough reputation to do
| something (I don't know if it's commenting or giving an
| answer or giving an upvote but there are some questions for
| which answers are wrong or need some updates and I can't
| participate. So I just don't by default. I think I can't
| upvote on some stack and I find this weird).
| bhandziuk wrote:
| The threshold is _very_ low.
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges
|
| You need 15 points to up vote which means you need to
| have received 2 up-votes yourself on either a question or
| answer or have edited 7 questions/answers and had those
| approved. It's quite easy to hit those numbers. Once you
| have 1000 points (I think) on any site and you join a new
| site you get 100 points by default which means you always
| have those base privileges wherever you are.
| narag wrote:
| _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.
| manigandham wrote:
| Because contributing has no value unless your
| contribution is actually good, and often there's a lot of
| crap that's negative value because it's wrong or off-
| topic or spam.
|
| Having a barrier greatly helps overall quality.
| CRConrad wrote:
| So downvote _the contributions,_ then -- but you can 't
| do that if they can't be made in the first place! Read-
| only site for me too.
|
| Then again, same stupid "earn points before you can post"
| system here on HN too.
| narag wrote:
| Having a barrier helps manageability of the site, so from
| a business' perspective it's been good, indeed.
| bhandziuk wrote:
| As far as I can remember it's always been this way: very
| low barrier to entry. All you have to do is make an
| account to ask and answer questions.
|
| I don't know why you had a hard time posting. Maybe
| you're thinking of commenting?
|
| The counter is ExpertsExchange: very difficult to do
| both.
| narag wrote:
| No idea, but I was just trying to answer some questions.
| I remember vaguely that I needed some points to help and
| I needed to help to get the points, so... I shrugged and
| let it be.
| joe463369 wrote:
| As helpful as you no doubt would be, until you interact
| with SO in some way you're indistinguishable from a
| misleading moron.
| narag wrote:
| That wasn't a problem in any of the other forums I've
| contributed to. Go figure!
| dorgo wrote:
| I'm someone with 15+ facebook accounts and who knows how
| many stackoverflow accounts. I don't really care. And if
| I try to comment and don't have the 15 points then I just
| leave.
| bhandziuk wrote:
| Do you just forget your passwords? Why would you make so
| many SO accounts?
| CRConrad wrote:
| Why would they -- SX, that is -- need so many different
| sites?
| nickysielicki wrote:
| I'm with you. I've never had an active account on
| StackOverflow. I created an account once or twice after
| coming across a question where the "accepted" answer was
| incorrect, or where it was badly missing something about
| the big-picture, and I was appalled to find that they
| don't let new accounts answer questions -- you have to
| comment or upvote (or something?) before you gain the
| right to answer a question.
|
| Fuck that. I'm not going to waste my time farming karma
| for the privilege of answer questions for complete
| strangers that I happen to know the answer to. The
| moderation on stackoverflow is a complete mess -- it
| reminds me of the powertripping that you see on
| Wikipedia, but maybe even worse because there's far less
| room for interpretation when most of the questions are
| technical in nature.
| lloda wrote:
| This has been my exact experience. So to me it's always
| been a read only site.
| philote wrote:
| I can't downvote your comment here on HN, presumably
| because I don't have enough reputation. And HN doesn't
| even tell me.
| r00fus wrote:
| It's a mitigation to the "bury brigade" problem digg used
| to have. I think a relatively low hurdle is a good
| balance.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| You can comment without any problem. Downvoting is not
| the main usage of HN, like answering questions is on SO
| (or commenting, it's a wonder that they still allow any
| kind of activity for people without karma, too bad the
| only allowed activity is making questions, that will be
| incorrectly marked and downvoted most of the time).
| stingraycharles wrote:
| I think you need 100 points in order to downvote. HN
| generally prefers to upvote good content rather than to
| downvote bad content.
| detaro wrote:
| you need >500 points
| gus_massa wrote:
| As a rule of thumb here in HN, the number of visits of a post
| is like upvotes*100+50. There are a lot of lurkers.
|
| [In particular, I don't have an account in SO.]
| bredren wrote:
| Is there public data behind this, or your estimate?
| munk-a wrote:
| It's surprising what sorts of things people will buy for
| prestige - that might be worth a good deal of money for resale
| when you're looking to retire.
| dystroy wrote:
| I doubt it. I'm in the top 0.07% with 300k+. Even such an
| account is worth nothing. Almost never did a recruiter pay
| attention to this. My low-rate GitHub account has a much
| bigger impact.
| klmr wrote:
| That's definitely not true. I'm getting contacted by
| recruiters (and occasionally directly by companies,
| including for my current job) because of my Stack Overflow
| profile.
|
| That said, my profile is very clearly linked to a real
| person, I don't see how resale would even work (not that
| I'd consider it).
| saalweachter wrote:
| Do you feel like a digital sharecropper[0] now that the
| company has sold, or are you happy what you got out of
| contributing?
|
| [0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/are-you-a-digital-
| sharecropper...
| dystroy wrote:
| Those questions, anybody having spent time answering
| thousands of questions had to think about it. When you
| realize an SO account isn't really worth much for your
| brand, you may realize other benefits of your
| participation: the rare pleasure of really helping
| somebody (sometimes, not when answering trivial
| questions), the enjoyment you get from a very fun game
| (if you're into it) and the knowledge you build for
| yourself (I forced myself to watch some tags just because
| they were about technologies I didn't knew and that I
| wanted to learn). IMO you have to stop when it becomes
| boring. I stopped participating for 3 or 4 years before I
| learnt Rust and felt the need to see what other people
| were asking about the language and the approaches other
| people had to solve problems.
| jononor wrote:
| One could try selling answers as Non Fungible Tokens,
| especially if you have some wierd ones. Lots of geeks have
| crypto to mess around with, and might want to pay for some
| bragging rights. Which is the only NFTs can really hope to be
| good for.
| ivanche wrote:
| Hahah, neat idea. I can't think of a more "NFT-able" answer
| than this one
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-
| open...
| mythz wrote:
| > In spite of this, I am in the top 7% of accounts on the site
|
| This isn't hard since the majority of people are just browsing
| the site instead of contributing to it, e.g. I'm in top 0.09%
| from just answering support questions for our product from a
| minority of users who prefer asking on StackOverflow instead of
| our Customer Forums.
| teen wrote:
| Me too! My user id is 26 :P
| OliverJones wrote:
| I sure hope this goes better after the sale to a private equity
| firm than FogBugz did.
|
| I'd hate to see my investment of time turn to smoke.
| zwieback wrote:
| 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.
| IshKebab wrote:
| > Maybe they can fix some of the problems.
|
| I don't think so. Most of their problems are things that they
| don't even think _are_ problems. They 've attracted a large
| community of moderators who think similarly.
|
| Once you get to that point it's too late. Any changes you make
| to fix things (e.g. allowing users to block nuisance users,
| making it harder to close questions, etc.) will just anger your
| mods who are a vocal minority that love closing questions and
| _are_ nuisance users.
|
| The only way is a new site.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I think very aggressive karma decay might work. Let's say
| your karma that is older than 1 year does not count for
| moderator powers. That means you need to be actually
| productive member of community to have the moderation powers.
| Macha wrote:
| I literally cannot name an acquisition of a useful but not
| maximally profitable product that I was a user of that has
| worked out better for me. So that's why my expecatations are
| low.
| caymanjim wrote:
| I'm not sure what problems you're hoping they'll solve. I think
| the biggest problem with Stack Overflow is the endless stream
| of low-quality questions. It's hard to find interesting,
| helpful-to-others questions among all the "do my homework for
| me" type questions, repeats, poorly-worded unresearched posts,
| etc. That only gets worse as more people use it. I used to
| moderate, and got sick of it because it's not rewarding to wade
| through all the garbage. I don't know how they're going to grow
| the business and improve the quality at the same time.
|
| My biggest concern is that they'll ruin it with ads.
| Historically, Stack Overflow has had some of the least-
| offensive advertising, to the point that I didn't even need an
| adblocker (although lately I do). They're going to want to
| monetize it for a return on their investment, and that can only
| lead to bad things.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > I'm not sure what problems you're hoping they'll solve.
|
| I can think of a few (not that this hasn't been discussed to
| death already):
|
| How to properly moderate a site like that.
|
| How to keep answers updated.
|
| How to keep answers updated without mods shutting things down
| due to duplication. A lot of html and JS questions are
| garbage in 2021 but there's no way to improve the situation
| without mods screaming "duplication".
|
| How to allow for answers that are more than just what you'd
| find in the documentation. A lot of the value of the site
| came in the first few years, when you were allowed to expand
| on your answers and provide useful information. The amount of
| new value created by SO is decreasing rapidly.
|
| One final one is that they need to stop worrying about low-
| quality questions. That's the only problem they've tried to
| solve in the last decade, and it's already solved by upvoting
| and search.
| fleddr wrote:
| Well said. Especially during the early years, I always found
| the signal/noise ratio of SO to be head and shoulders above
| anything on the web.
|
| In part, due to a lot of their subtle UI and reputation
| choices. Really well designed.
|
| Massive scale may at one point break that, but another cause
| may be found in the change of tone by the team behind SO.
| They're on the "inclusive" train now.
|
| Don't get me wrong, being inclusive is good, but there's a
| difference between somebody being a beginner or not
| proficient in English, and somebody being plain lazy.
|
| This "softening" I do not consider a good development. I
| prefer the tough love approach that weeds out garbage from
| good stuff. If that mechanism is compromised, its unique
| value is lost.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| This is why I keep going back. I'm afraid it will get worse
| with this but it may be just entropy of existence as a web
| service. It's inevitably doomed to mediocrity and
| replacement by a new hotness.
| zwieback wrote:
| The two biggest problems I'd like to see solved:
|
| 1) low-quality questions ("do my homework", etc.)
|
| 2) over-zealous moderators closing things they don't like
|
| With the vast data SO accumulated maybe some kind of deep
| network thing? I'm a DNN skeptic but would love to be proven
| wrong in this case. If someone could extract a quality metric
| and then add a bot that prompts users to improve the question
| we'd be a long way towards getting higher quality content.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| > Why then does nobody seems to think there's an upside to the
| acquisition?
|
| The examples are endless. Keybase, Winamp, Trello (to a lesser
| extent), MySQL/OpenOffice, the recent drama surrounding the
| addition of telemetry into Audacity, anything folded into the
| core product of some tech giant two years after the acquisition
| when the core stakeholders from the original team left.
|
| In short, it's rare for an acquisition to work out well in the
| long term, so it's understandable to be very sceptical of them.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| What would an upside even look like? We expect SO to be free,
| which it is, always online, which it is, and have decent enough
| moderation to weed out the nonsense posts, which is generally
| the case. So the best thing that can come out of an acquisition
| like this is that nothing changes, so there just isn't really
| anything to get worked up about one way or another.
|
| There don't appear to be downsides in this acquisition, but
| acquisitions usually destroy the thing that gets acquired
| (because they either get overhauled, regardless of whether it
| needed it, or they get folded into a different product,
| destroying its identity if the old product is even kept around
| at all), so the _expectation_ for an announcement like this is
| that the acquired thing is now living on borrowed time.
|
| We'll see what happens.
| praptak wrote:
| Maybe. They definitely want a return on the investment. So
| either they have a plan where SO complements some of their
| other assets or they just want to milk it for money.
| lurkerasdfh8 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| fabian2k wrote:
| This is the official announcement from Stack Overflow:
|
| https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/06/02/prosuss-acquires-stack...
|
| As you may have seen in the news this morning, Prosus (PROSY) has
| announced its intention to acquire Stack Overflow for 1.8 billion
| dollars. This is tremendously exciting news for our employees,
| our customers, our community members, and for our shareholders,
| and I will share a bit more about what it all means in this post.
|
| Prosus is one of the world's leading technology investors with
| stakes in companies such as Tencent, Brainly, BYJU's, Codecademy,
| OLX, PayU, Remitly and Udemy. Their massive scale and reach
| improves the lives of around a fifth of the world's population.
| Prosus's mission is to build leading companies that empower and
| enrich communities, as demonstrated by the many community-focused
| and EdTech companies they work with. This makes Prosus the
| perfect company to acquire Stack Overflow, and Stack Overflow the
| ideal investment in their focus on the future of workplace
| learning and collaboration. It allows us to continue to operate
| as an independent company with our current team and with the
| backing of a global technology powerhouse.
|
| Once this acquisition is complete, we will have more resources
| and support to grow our public platform and paid products, and we
| can accelerate our global impact tremendously. This might look
| like more rapid and robust international expansion, M&A
| opportunities, and deeper partnerships both on Stack Overflow and
| within Stack Overflow for Teams. Our intention is for our public
| platform to be an invaluable resource for developers and
| technologists everywhere and for our SaaS collaboration and
| knowledge management platform, Stack Overflow for Teams, to reach
| thousands more global enterprises, allowing them to accelerate
| product innovation and increase productivity by unlocking
| institutional knowledge.
|
| Prosus is a long-term investor and loves what our company and
| community have built over these last 13+ years. They are
| impressed by the SaaS transformation the company has been on
| since the launch of Stack Overflow for Teams and especially over
| the last two years. Prosus recognizes our platform's tremendous
| potential for impact and they are excited to launch and
| accelerate our next phase of growth.
|
| How you use our site and our products will not change in the
| coming weeks or months, just as our company's goals and strategic
| priorities remain the same. As the acquisition is finalized, and
| we continue to partner with Prosus, I will keep you all posted
| through my regular quarterly blog posts and Teresa Dietrich, our
| Chief Product and Technology Officer, will do the same in her
| quarterly community blog posts.
|
| I want to conclude by thanking all of you for your contributions
| over the years. Whether you asked or answered a question on our
| site or simply copy and pasted code, whether you once found a job
| on Stack Overflow or you're one of the hundreds of thousands of
| users of Stack Overflow for Teams. We could not have achieved
| this milestone without you.
|
| This milestone is just the beginning. Since 2008, our public
| platform has helped developers and technologists over 50 billion
| times. That's just us getting started, and I can't wait to
| continue to update you on what's next.
| ravenstine wrote:
| I hope they dismantle it and start over. So many outdated answers
| on there that I don't find it worth using anymore, whereas it
| used to be a staple of my software development.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| That depends on what stack you're using. Anything based on
| Linux and Java will be fairly applicable even years later. Even
| if it's not applicable, it's often possible to tell this from
| the answer and the date of the question.
|
| IMO, two things would improve matters greatly. One, add a
| mechanism to mark questions as "potentially obsolete" based on
| thresholds that can vary per-topic, or per StackExchange site
| (so e.g. Java has an 8 year shelf-life, general Linux has a
| 10-year shelf life, Ubuntu in particular has a 4 year shelf
| life, etc). Two, allow moderators to override an accepted
| answer after some time passes. I've seen posters not bothering
| to mark a superior answer later on, or not knowing how to do
| it. If the community is unanimous about which other answer
| should go to the top, choose that instead of the original
| poster's selection.
| ravenstine wrote:
| That's the disappointing thing. They seemed more interested
| in implementing cute little badges and stuff than working on
| features that benefit the core function of the site.
|
| If you're doing web development, IMO SO is doing a disservice
| to people at this point. It's either totally useless if
| you're a seasoned dev or very misleading and harmful to
| beginners.
|
| Unfortunately, I'm not sure they have the incentive to really
| fix things because all the obsolete answers probably still
| bring in a ton of traffic. The only way to fix it might be to
| tell people to stop using it.
| topper-123 wrote:
| > sold a small portion of its equity stake in Tencent in April
| for $14.6 billion.
|
| Personally I would never use "small" to describe anything worth
| 15B...
|
| Anyway, Tencent is worth 850B and these guys own approx. 200B of
| that, so they're quite large.
| bidirectional wrote:
| If they own 200bn then 15bn is a small portion. It's relative.
| macspoofing wrote:
| Looks like Joel Spolsky is cashing out. Fogbugz, Trello, and now
| Stack Overflow.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| He is getting up there in years, might be time to cut bait and
| go pull a Tom and become a citizen of the world with his
| family.
| gadders wrote:
| Out of interest, I wonder how much of the company Joel and Jeff
| own? I hope it's a bunch and they've done well out of the sale.
| croes wrote:
| "The group's expansion into internet platforms began in the
| 1990s' spanning online consumer services, including:
|
| E-commerce - including its subsidiary, OLX (100%)
|
| Takealot.com (96%) Fintech - including its subsidiary, PayU
| (98.8%)
|
| Food delivery - including its subsidiary and associates, iFood
| (54.8%), Delivery Hero (22.3%) and Swiggy (38.8%)
|
| Etail - including its subsidiary, eMag (80.1%)
|
| Travel - including its associate, Ctrip (6%)
|
| Mobility - Bykea
|
| It is also the largest shareholder of social Internet platforms:
|
| Tencent (28.9%)
|
| Mail.ru Group (28% in 2019)"
|
| Doesn't sound to good for me.
| jiofih wrote:
| Most of these are very successful businesses, just not as
| fashionable as the SV ones you know. If this is their complete
| list of investments their hit rate is insane.
| rudnevr wrote:
| Mail.ru Group, btw, is a nasty Russian trash internet holding
| with interests everywhere, including food delivery
| barreira wrote:
| OLX is the most popular Craigslist-type website at least in
| Portugal (and maybe in more places in Europe as well?)
| mhitza wrote:
| In Romania as well. Also PayU is a common payment processing
| gateway around here as well.
| Tade0 wrote:
| Popular in Poland as well.
| hezag wrote:
| In Brazil too. And iFood is the largest "food-tech" company
| in Latin America.
| cobby wrote:
| Same for Ukraine
| nitins wrote:
| Popular in India also
| mssundaram wrote:
| Interesting. I've hardly heard of any of those companies - are
| they mostly non-US?
| iSnow wrote:
| Delivery hero is pretty big in Germany and other EU
| countries.
| TheCapeGreek wrote:
| Takealot Group (subdivided into Takealot, Superbalist, and
| MrD) is basically a trinity of Amazon, [insert fashion
| e-tailer here], and UberEats, for South Africa.
| klohto wrote:
| Definitely eastern europe / asia focused
| manojlds wrote:
| Swiggy is the most popular food delivery company in India
| gv123 wrote:
| Olx and Swiggy are huge in India.
| actuator wrote:
| If anyone is aware about the numbers, how are their ecommerce
| and fintech ones doing in their markets? That space is quite
| competitive and a lot of well funded players.
|
| Also, are the food ones profitable or loss making like most
| other food delivery startups?
| bbarnett wrote:
| And now, they can compete with Linkedin!
|
| First, buy a site with 14 million+ accounts, all guaranteed to
| be developers of some sort. It even has a job board apparently,
| already!
|
| Next, bring in synergy. Mine the data to find out who does
| what. Make a "better linkedin".
|
| Doh.
|
| (They clearly want to "monetize" it somehow, so... how I
| wonder? The above?)
| hughrr wrote:
| That's a hell of a lot of money for all those dead topics on
| obsolete knowledge moderated into uselessness.
|
| Stackoverflow is where I go when I don't want an answer.
| papito wrote:
| 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 a smaller, more agile team, leaner infrastructure
| bill and burn rate, and a higher chance of a successful exit.
| potamic wrote:
| 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.
| papito wrote:
| Correct. Because the whole system is filled with anti-
| incentives. You can't attract money by demonstrating that you
| can be frugal. It's absurd.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Except the occasional $1.8B
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| thank for the link. its really interesting. my boss want to use
| micro services and all the latest buzz but i'm like we only
| have two programmers and we don't create any app. all the code
| that we have is to integrate our on premise software with third
| party SaaS. we are a mid size company.
| auntienomen wrote:
| Huh, I wonder what will happen to MathOverflow.net. IIRC, they
| negotiated an escape hatch when they integrated into the
| stackexchange network.
|
| I don't imagine Prosus or SE cares very much.
| davidhyde wrote:
| Apparently Stack Overflow already owns a majority stake in
| Prosus. This is going to get interesting ;)
| eric_b wrote:
| 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
| inclusivity etc etc.
|
| Now their products are withering. Dying a slow death.
|
| I see these things as correlated. Many on HN will disagree. The
| honeyed words of social justice are more important than great,
| well executed products, apparently. It was a good run Stack
| Overflow.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| Since when is stack overflow dying?
| wyldfire wrote:
| Stack Overflow suffers from a mismatch in expectations. The
| community is seen from the outside as "a place to find
| answers" so many people go there to ask questions. But in
| order for your question to be eligible to be answered (and
| not closed/on hold) it must be: (1) objectively answerable
| (no opinions!), (2) completely specified (reproducible
| problems).
|
| #1: lots of people want answers to subjective issues. "Should
| I do it like this or like that?" "What's the best way to ..."
|
| #2: many of the people who ask the questions just don't know
| the right way to ask their questions in order to get answers.
| Also, taking all the steps to make something reproducible can
| often make the problem apparent, eliminating the need to post
| the question.
|
| SO has these rules so that they can be a canonical place for
| people to be pointed by people who go to search engines
| looking for answers. But I think it's a big turnoff that they
| close so many. They might have been better served if they had
| created roles to prune questions that they don't want indexed
| or shuffle them to a sister site. Pruning them without
| telling the user they're "closed" or "on hold" would be a
| much more friendly experience.
| croes wrote:
| Now?
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| How so? As far as I know, it's _the_ de-facto dumping
| ground for tech questions and answers. The only
| alternatives around are Quora and Reddit, the latter of
| which is full of nonsense.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| It's not. This person doesn't like someone's political
| beliefs, so they're trying to denigrate them on a seemingly
| "objective" basis, which doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Sounds like it is merely a dialect of "suit-speak" for the
| 2020s, aka "lip-service."
|
| While suit-speak often marks the decline of a business, it is
| not clear lefty-politics makes that much difference in regards
| to the decline.
| polynomial wrote:
| TBF, the notion of community at least started off as more than
| marketing speak or social justice trend chasing. Arguably, it
| is a substantive basis of our inter-networked connectedness,
| even if it was later assimilated by the same marketing
| machinery that also spits outs empty (but apparently effective)
| buzzwords.
| polynomial wrote:
| will somebody smarter than me please explain why this was
| downvoted? tia
| [deleted]
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Since when is Stack Overflow dying, or focused on social
| justice? That's not my experience at all. The purpose of the
| site (as well as the many, many sister sites) is to succinctly
| ask and succinctly answer questions. It does so admirably.
|
| Occasional drama is just what happens when you become the
| effective Wikipedia of everything that is possible to ask about
| any technical topic. The actual Wikipedia is also not free of
| drama or political struggles in the background. But, much like
| Stack Overflow, it's also far from dead and continues to be a
| priceless resource to all of humanity.
| coliveira wrote:
| One annoying reality of the business world is that to prevail
| there you need to drink the full BS cool aid. You have to start
| talking business lingo (growth, empowering, success) to even
| get access to the financial support to grow the business and
| hire others. If you're down to earth and don't stand the whole
| BS, your chances in that area are very slim.
| zoomablemind wrote:
| > Now their products are withering. Dying a slow death.
|
| What is SO business model? Is it ads-based?
|
| Just hope it won't devolve into news-sites free-article quota
| with account points mixed in for some throttling. IMO, the most
| attractive part of SO is that low friction to contribute an
| answer, oftentimes seeing a relevant topic to suggest an answer
| in passing or when looking for answers myself.
|
| Also SO's value is tied to the intensive community moderation
| effort, hope this would not be discounted in any future roadmap
| (wonder if there's anysuch).
| lupire wrote:
| SO sells ads to recruiters.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| It has nothing to do with social justice; Stack Overflow and
| Mozilla had a user base that scaled with network effects, but
| both in markets with low switching costs. They're constantly
| vulnerable unless they can come up with products that are
| harder to dislodge. Thus the mission statements that are vague
| because they're trying to find a way out of the corner they've
| painted themselves in.
| jsterSC wrote:
| >The honeyed words of social justice are more important than
| great, well executed products, apparently.
|
| I like how all the other comments are pointing out that the
| forces behind an acquisition are never good for 'focused
| products' and then there's this comment that shows us the
| truth, it's those damn kids and their social justice that ruins
| the products.
| eric_b wrote:
| Well, since you're being deliberately obtuse - I'll expound.
|
| My point is that these companies are moving focus away from
| the products that got them to where they are, to a set of
| vague handwavy concepts that are completely unquantifiable.
| And, in my experience anyways, this usually comes at a cost
| to the existing products.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| Corporate branding efforts to be more "woke" are cheap. It
| doesn't cost Raytheon much to paint their logo as a rainbow
| and do an "employee story" about how they have also have
| LGBTQ employees (building missiles). But don't get under
| the impression that Raytheon still isn't focused on
| building missiles. It's just an easy corporate branding win
| for most of them, so they just do it.
|
| I don't think social justice messages on a website or
| social media are necessarily a sign of losing focus. It's
| just some branding stuff. If the company is "losing focus"
| is likely due to many more factors.
| vp8989 wrote:
| Hah, bingo. I suspect all the people who left Basecamp
| will soon realize this when they finish their paid
| sabbaticals and move on to other companies.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| 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 Mozilla's internal politics obnoxious, I am
| also able to just use Firefox and ignore all that, thus far.
|
| Plenty of examples of a purchase being the beginning of the
| end, but it's not inevitable. Microsoft owns Github. Google
| owns Youtube. So far, both are still functional, if compared to
| other real-world products rather than some theoretical ideal.
| Now, you could put hundreds of counterexamples on the other
| side of that, but at least it is possible for the buyer not to
| completely screw things up.
| Macha wrote:
| Was github worse, prior to the microsoft purchase? It's still
| relatively recent and only a small chapter in the history of
| the company. I'm not sure you can say at this stage that it's
| better than if Github had remained independent.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Sure, no claim that it's better, just that it's not (yet?)
| screwed up so as to be markedly worse.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _As long as the new owner doesn 't make it "pay to see", I
| can probably ignore them._
|
| There was a very similar site about a decade ago, that would
| absolutely dominate in the Google search results - but of
| course, the answers were behind a paywall. Today, I don't
| even remember what their domain was called.
| bbarnett wrote:
| The parallel is more striking than your post suggests.
|
| Experts Exchange had no paywall for years. Endless people
| built the site up, provided help, then suddenly?
|
| All their posts, content, and more were one day monetized,
| and locked away. Same thing happened with IMDB too, at the
| start. It was all, all of it, user contributed.
|
| Then one day, they locked it all up. Of course, IMDB has
| grown a lot since then, and allows you to download the
| database if you wish regardless...
|
| But point is, this sort of thing happens all the time...
| lupire wrote:
| Actually the answers were obfuscated by html/css. Dev tools
| could expose the answers.
| pestaa wrote:
| Experts Exchange
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| Unrelated, but does anyone know of a site specializing in
| procedures for changing one's sex, as done by an advanced
| professional (an expert, even)?
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| I believe they were called Expert Sexchange Experts
| Exchange.
| eric_b wrote:
| 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.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Holy cow. I did not see this coming. Hopefully the service stays
| free.
| dystroy wrote:
| It will. Or it would disappear and they know it.
| ipaddr wrote:
| SO should allow repeated questions at least within ca calendar
| year. That would ensure fresh answers to evolving questiins.
| Macha wrote:
| I'd almost prefer the opposite, put a statue of limitations on
| duplicates so that a new answer can keep up with changes in
| technology. "How do I move to a different screen in my android
| app?" is one example of a question with a different "correct"
| answer every 3-5 years.
| romanovcode wrote:
| 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.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Way back in 2008, Google had a feature called SearchWiki that
| let you X-out or upvote search results. It was little used, but
| apparently the most frequent usage was to delete
| ExpertsExchange results. IIRC we ended up making some changes
| to webspam that resulted in ExpertsExchange links falling off
| the front page, and then SearchWiki was unlaunched because it
| was no longer necessary.
| tomp wrote:
| I'm dying to have that feature again.
|
| I just want to downvote/remove W3Cschools and upvote MDN.
| abhijat wrote:
| Yes, I want to remove quora from my results. I vaguely
| remember you could block websites forever in google a long
| time ago, but I may be misremembering it.
| actuator wrote:
| Well, this still works.
|
| `my_search_phrase -quora.com`
| bronson wrote:
| You'd probably also downvote all the pay-for-placement
| results on Google's search page now. That would lead to
| some difficult questions.
| actuator wrote:
| You mean ads? I don't think search results themselves are
| altered based on payments.
| rchaud wrote:
| What's your beef with W3schools? IMO the code examples
| work, and the explanations are relatively short and to the
| point. MDN is harder to read for new learners as everything
| is documented like an API.
| mikestew wrote:
| _What 's your beef with W3schools?_
|
| Probably a ten-year-old beef. W3Schools used to spam
| search results with questionable-at-best information. I
| forget whether they got bought, or just cleaned up their
| act, but the current version is vastly improved over what
| it was. Still, I have muscle memory that hesitates to
| click one of their links despite knowing that W3Schools
| sucks much, much less than they used to.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| W3Schools is also nice because, though MDN are more
| comprehensive and have a higher quality appearance, their
| examples are more on point and they've a playground
| functionality where you can test any of them on an online
| editor with a complete code rather than just change the
| property on a limited demo.
| conradfr wrote:
| That's exactly the kind of site Stack Overflow replaced, namely
| ExpertSexchange.
| thepete2 wrote:
| They certainly have bought a lot of very useful "user-generated
| data", would be a shame if they restricted access to it now or
| in the future.
| robjan wrote:
| The user generated content is under a fairly liberal license
| so if they restricted access someone could just create a
| mirror.
| thepete2 wrote:
| in that case I've jumped to conclusions, that's great
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Not that they give a shit, they retroactively relicensed
| all submitted content and all previous data dumps, without
| rights to do that, and all they suffered was downvotes on
| their announcement.
|
| https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-
| exchan...
| cheschire wrote:
| 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.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| This comment reminds me of those kids in middle school who
| would tell you to write, "pen 15" on a piece of paper and
| then laugh like crazy when you did because it resembles the
| word "penis".
| wayoutthere wrote:
| I always had the same issue with Microsoft Exchange which was
| frequently abbreviated as MS Exchange, which translates to
| msexchange if you want to use it in DNS.
|
| Anyway after years of dealing with that I went ahead and got
| the sex change and everything is good now. ;)
| amackera wrote:
| I mean, the domain is experts-exchange.com. There's a dash
| there to prevent this mistake from happening.
| ectopod wrote:
| They changed it.
| Natfan wrote:
| I can assure you that they have not.
|
| The landing page for expertsexchange.com just says
| "Coming soon.", and if you view it with redirects turned
| on, you're sent to a page offering to sell it, owned by
| Venture.com. # curl expertsexchange.com
| <html><head><title>expertsexchange.com</title></head><bod
| y><h1>expertsexchange.com</h1><p>Coming
| soon.</p></body></html> # dig +short
| expertsexchange.com | head -3 | paste -sd,
| 96.126.123.244,45.79.19.196,45.33.2.79 # dig
| +short experts-exchange.com | head -3 | paste -sd,
| 104.22.5.165,104.22.4.165,172.67.36.241 #
| whois experts-exchange.com | grep Registrar
| Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.networksolutions.com
| # whois expertsexchange.com | grep Registrar
| Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.uniregistrar.com
|
| Oh and apparently, if you don't have adblock then you get
| a whole bunch of ads[0] that I'm presuming are based on
| this particular crawler's browsing habits?
|
| [0]: https://archive.ph/bJKtW
| ectopod wrote:
| According to DNS expertsexchange.com was registered in
| 2005. However, it definitely existed earlier:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/19990429180417/http://www.exp
| ert...
|
| Edited to add: so the domain lapsed and then was
| reregistered later. If you click on any of the links in
| that archived page they are redirections to experts-
| exchange.com.
| plorkyeran wrote:
| The domain was experts-exchange.com from the very
| beginning. Archive.org even has the 1997 version of the
| site: https://web.archive.org/web/19970421013342/https://
| www.exper...
| jnosCo wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20000302050619/http://www.exp
| ert...
| 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote:
| "Pay to be marked off topic" would be a great idea.
| [deleted]
| frogpelt wrote:
| A lot of times if you just kept scrolling past the paywall the
| answer was at the bottom.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| 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
| MauranKilom wrote:
| This reporting is so strange...
|
| > Based in New York, closely held Stack Overflow operates a
| question-and-answer website used by software developers and other
| types of workers such as financial professionals and marketers
| who increasingly need coding skills. It attracts more than 100
| million visitors monthly, the company says.
|
| I'm not sure I could sell SO any worse if I tried. It spends more
| time describing a niche audience than the actual product ("a
| website used by developers"). Wow. Contrast with how they word
| the description of Prosus:
|
| > Prosus, one of Europe's most valuable tech companies, is best
| known as the largest shareholder in Chinese internet and
| videogaming giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. Listed in Amsterdam,
| Prosus signaled its appetite for deal making when it sold a small
| portion of its equity stake in Tencent in April for $14.6
| billion. The Stack Overflow deal ranks among Prosus' biggest
| acquisitions.
|
| There's several superlatives you could use for SO, but it's more
| important to have a hedged form of "most valuable" for the
| investor I guess.
|
| Or is the reporter just simply uninformed? I don't get it.
| ejb999 wrote:
| Top 0.5% SO'er here, but the funniest thing that I have had
| happen to me - and it has happened more than once - is I google
| for an answer to a programming problem I am having, get brought
| to stack overflow, and find the accepted answer to the question
| is one i myself wrote years before.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Do you also use Arch?
| tigger0jk wrote:
| Smaller contributor here, so when I googled for a specific
| flash log location it was my own EDIT to an existing answer
| that I needed.
| burlesona wrote:
| Yeah this has happened to me at least a few times as well, it
| always makes me laugh :)
| amelius wrote:
| From their website:
|
| > Operating and investing globally in markets with long-term
| growth potential, Prosus builds leading consumer internet
| companies that empower people and enrich communities.
|
| Builds -> buys
| armchairhacker wrote:
| 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 docs are usually much better (at least in my
| experience), and there are a lot more random sites, so you can
| Google most programming issues without checking SO. SO is still a
| great resource for its archived content, but not for anything
| new, and it's no longer a "must-have".
|
| But even with better documentation and more sites, old SO hasn't
| been completely replaced.
| bena wrote:
| The problem with StackOverflow or any "community-driven" effort
| is that every single community is driven by those who dedicate
| the most time to driving the community.
|
| In the beginning, this isn't largely a problem because the
| owners of the site can manage the load. Then as the site gets
| marginally bigger, you can trust on volunteers who have
| demonstrated expertise or something.
|
| But eventually, skilled people will get busy. Owners/developers
| will need to manage the business/code of the thing. Your expert
| volunteers will have jobs and obligations to fulfill. Between
| them, there won't be enough manhours to manage the community.
|
| The worst thing to do is to put it in the hands of those who
| have dedicated the most time to the community. Why? Because
| there's a reason they have all that time to dedicate to the
| community. And hardly any of them are good. But that's what
| most places do. And then they essentially become places of
| pointless bickering and mindless politicking. Basically digital
| HOAs (to reference a recent article posted here).
|
| The people responsible for managing the community need to be
| compensated for doing exactly that and they need to be either
| trained or vetted to do so. Self-selection in this regard is
| probably one of the worst ways to go about it.
| oezi wrote:
| I think this is an incorrect assessment. The value doesn't
| come from those that dedicate most of their time. The value
| comes from the sites ability to integrate the long tail both
| for answers and questions. Certainly it is valuable to have
| the super star posters with a million reputation. But the
| site was build by random people answering random questions.
|
| I also don't believe in the value of "community management"
| at SO. Moderation is just senseless busywork which
| discourages people to participate. Closing questions as if
| there is any value in this instead of letting people play the
| game of asking and answering questions which matter to them
| and let Google do the filtering.
| bena wrote:
| Who are the most capable of answering random questions?
| Those who have the most time to do so.
|
| Who are the the most likely to answer random questions?
| Those who have the most time to do so.
|
| Who doesn't mind providing free "senseless busywork"? Those
| whose time has little to no value because they have so much
| of it.
|
| My account on SO is 12 years and 9 months old and even
| though I haven't asked or answered a question since 2009,
| I'm still in the top 10% of reputation. Because in those
| early months/years, it wasn't difficult to garner
| reputation.
|
| I just don't have the time to troll questions to answer on
| SO. As for asking, either the answer already exists, or I
| can find out by reading the documentation. And deity-forbid
| I'd pull the answer-my-own-question-to-document-the-
| solution that used to be the recommended way of just
| getting content on the site.
| DharmaPolice wrote:
| The first time I posted on SO someone edited my question
| within a few minutes. I was initially annoyed/embarrassed
| (on other forums, a mod only edited your post if you had
| broken some rule) but I realised they were just improving
| my formatting as I had some dodgy markup in my question.
| That kind of thing is definitely busy work but it probably
| does contribute to the overall quality of the site more
| than you might realise.
|
| The question closing thing though I agree is annoying.
| digianarchist wrote:
| I actually find myself landing on a Github issue after a Google
| search to diagnosing an problem these days.
|
| >But now the quality of the questions and answers is worse
|
| I see a lot of new users digging up 10 year old questions and
| cloning answers. They've really hit a spam problem that's
| difficult to solve.
| nosianu wrote:
| Well, you make it a game - people start playing. The
| disadvantage of gamification.
|
| I'm not sure that people giving good answers and help are
| well matched by a system designed for people who like
| "leveling up". I think that system pulls in a mismatched
| crowd over time, too focused on the game goal.
|
| The solution creating a match is supposed to be what you get
| the points for leveling up for. However, that does not really
| remove the mismatch, it just covers it up a bit. You _will_
| get, at least for a time, a lot of people who focus on
| quality to get ahead. Over time you will get more and more
| people focusing on just the points and the levels for their
| own sake though, who start cheating the system. I think
| gamification might, over time, slowly erode the target it
| wanted to achieve, even if/when it starts out doing well.
|
| Of course, all of it happens in a context. Why are there so
| many people chasing after such fake "power" and "fame" in the
| first place? Are so many at least somewhat qualified people
| (on the Internet and with more than basic programming
| knowledge) that bored and dissatisfied with their local
| situation to chase purely virtual achievements?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Leveling up is OK. Fake Internet points may drive some
| people to weird behavior, but it's manageable at this
| level.
|
| They shouldn't have entered the job search space. The
| moment they offered to help their users find work, suddenly
| those fake Internet points (and activity behind them)
| started to carry a real (if probabilistic) monetary value.
| zem wrote:
| they aren't "purely virtual achievements", they're, as you
| say, points in a game. i can (and have) spent hours at a
| time playing scrabble or civilisations, and they aren't for
| "fake scrabble points" or "fake civ points"; similarly
| here, for the people who _do_ get more into the gamified
| aspect of stackoverflow, they aren 't chasing fake internet
| points, they're accumulating real stackoverflow points.
| nosianu wrote:
| If you shift the coordinate system to within the virtual
| system nothing is fake any more. I left the context that
| I used for the words "virtual" and "fake" outside and
| with their actual real life at the center. My reddit or
| HN or SO points don't have any influence there. That it
| means something right on those sites - does that have to
| be said?
|
| You get to keep everything that you achieve in your own
| head, like "having fun" or whatever satisfaction you
| derive from what you do on those sites. You don't get to
| take out anything you manage to "create" their though,
| like your level and points. So except for what you manage
| to do in your own head it's much-input-no-output, a black
| hole box that swallows all your efforts and keeps them
| without giving back. Again, speaking about the "game",
| not about your own satisfaction e.g. for helping others.
|
| The game is used to pretend to you the rewards are
| higher, but in order realize that promise you have to
| stay in the game world because the rewards you earn
| cannot be taken out.
|
| So yes, within the context of those sites it is "real".
| zem wrote:
| yes, but people only seem to toss around terms like
| "imaginary internet points" or "fake points" when it
| comes to gamification of things that are inherently not
| games.
|
| the point i'm making is that to the people playing them
| as games, the rewards _are_ the points, there 's nothing
| to take out. no one says i'm playing a video game for
| "imaginary videogame points" that cannot be taken out
| into the real world, they understand that the score is
| part of the intrinsic nature of the game.
|
| i think people feel there is some intrinsic reward to
| participating in stackoverflow, or reddit, or whatever,
| and that people valuing the karma rather than (or even in
| addition to) the human interaction, or the satisfaction
| of helping others, are somehow doing it wrong - for them,
| the gamified aspect is an unnecessary and fake veneer
| over the intrinsic rewards of the site's core function.
| which i can definitely sympathise with, and there are
| absolutely venues in which i too opt out of gamification,
| or simply ignore that entire aspect of things, but i do
| not extend that to sneering at the people who do
| participate.
| blisterpeanuts wrote:
| For me, SO has been an outstanding resource; I probably use it
| 2-3 times a day during the working week, and often on weekends
| for experimenting/self-learning/crunch time.
|
| It's amazing how many people have asked the exact question I am
| asking, and the responses and comments are usually high
| quality.
|
| W3schools has also been helpful. I hear dismissive comments
| about it; maybe it's weak and dated for "advanced" full-stack
| types, but when I need to remember something about style
| sheets, javascript, HTML, etc., it's just very quick and easy,
| especially with the "try it" interactive widget.
|
| Back in the day, usenet comp.lang.* and comp.os.* were like
| this -- terse, to the point, contributed by seasoned
| professionals. It's like a crowd-sourced interactive user
| manual. I just hope this acquisition doesn't mess it up :)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| For many years, SO has been an invaluable resource for me.
|
| At one time, I used it daily.
|
| I have about twice as many questions as I have answers. Been on
| the site for a long time; maybe close to ten years.
|
| I've learned to ask very good questions, but lately, I've
| mostly been answering my own questions. I visit it maybe once a
| week (or less), these days. It used to be multiple times per
| day.
|
| I would hope that this will help SO to have a renaissance.
| We'll see.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| 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 supposed to
| just leave a comment in a dead question thread and hope that
| someone responds? You're mostly just left for dead.
| nickserv wrote:
| 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.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Just take the extra 20 seconds and read through all the
| positive answers and commentary. Its not like you need to
| only look at the top ranked answer.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Git is the poster child for this. Ignore any accepted answer
| to a Git question on Stack Overflow if it is older than two
| years old.
|
| This may also be a testament to Git's terrific development,
| or to Git's obtuse early versions.
| codegeek wrote:
| That depends. If it is a popular answer, people sometimes
| edit with latest version answer. For example, I answered
| something about Python/Flask many years ago which became a
| very popular answer at the time (simple stuff). Now in
| Flask's latest version, you don't need to do it that way
| necessarily and the answer was edited accordingly.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| 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.
| LanceH wrote:
| The painful thing is there seems to be a large body of
| people on SO who are trying their hardest to fit any
| question into the scope of a previously asked question and
| then marking it duplicate/downvoting it. Some tags are
| worse than others on this about this, but I have one or two
| which are painfully policed by people who seem to want no
| question to be answered at all, ever.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| _there are a lot more random sites, so you can Google most
| programming issues without checking SO_
|
| That's because programming has exploded in popularity in the
| past decade, there's now a myriad of ways to host a blog, and a
| lot of people find blogging about their issues a way to
| solidify understanding and to help others. Doesn't mean SO is
| declining in quality.
| yreg wrote:
| >iOS dev
|
| >official docs are usually much better
|
| What docs are you talking about? I'm a Swift/SwiftUI novice and
| my experience is that random SO answers always document the
| APIs in a much more usable way than Apple's documentation.
|
| Granted, one needs to scroll to the "[CURRENT YEAR] WORKING
| SOLUTION" answer first.
|
| -----
|
| Also:
|
| >SO is still a great resource for its archived content, but not
| for anything new
|
| In the miniscule amount of iOS dev I did I quickly learned to
| always filter results to "past year". So for me "modern" SO in
| this area is much better than the "archive". (Not SO's fault,
| obviously.)
| jonahx wrote:
| Codidact is a community-controlled, open-source alternative to
| SO:
|
| https://meta.codidact.com/policy/codidact-faq
| rossdavidh wrote:
| 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.
| neves wrote:
| Am I too pessimist, or it'll really ruin one of the greatest
| internet creations. They will have to take back their billion
| dollars investment. Soon a new Expert-Exchange near you.
|
| The collective knowledge accumulated is SO is fantastic. You
| children that don't remember the savage world before SO.
| gnzoidberg wrote:
| Good for Joel and Jeff. They made a good product that produced
| value and people loved. They finally made the big bucks they
| deserve.
| janacm wrote:
| I wonder what Tencent will do with all of the data
| Black101 wrote:
| Just when you started to think Stack Overflow was bad.... it's
| about to get a lot worst.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Also insane side note that Prosus's warchest of ~200B came from
| this investment.
|
| From the article:
|
| " Prosus invests globally across a range of online platforms
| focused on areas such as food delivery, classifieds and fintech.
| It also maintains a more than $200 billion holding in Tencent.
| Prosus' parent company, Naspers Ltd. , acquired the Tencent stake
| in 2001 for $34 million."
| geonic wrote:
| Is there really so much money in SO to justify $1.8B? AFAIK they
| just run some some ads and show relevant job offers.
| tnolet wrote:
| It's in the top 50 websites of the world. Probably worth
| something. https://www.alexa.com/topsites
| lurkerasdfh8 wrote:
| This is the only correct answer, IMO.
|
| all the other pundits miss that if the deal was for existing
| source of revenue, it would have been priced as modestly as
| those are.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| So you think there will be 4-5x as many ads and "click tiny
| [x] to actually see the contents" ads ? I don't see how
| else they can leverage the platform to make significant
| cash.
| LunaSea wrote:
| Is it though? Genuinely curious.
|
| It has been show time and time again that users of free
| websites likes this won't pay and ads are only worth so much.
| [deleted]
| rambambram wrote:
| Just wait till you have to pay big time for your programming
| answers. 1,800,000,000.- is a lot of benjamins to earn back.
| digianarchist wrote:
| https://archive.org/details/stackexchange
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| search any programming related on google always have some
| stockoverflow links. stockoverflow rank pretty well with search
| engine. i think that alone is already worth a billion.
| mikeryan wrote:
| The jobs feature is pretty valuable and brings in significant
| revenue, it's not something to scoff at. Being able to target
| and screen developers is a great HR tool.
|
| There are likely a lot of companies with lower revenues and
| higher valuations.
| GarethX wrote:
| It's because of their Teams product -
| https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/17/stack-overflow-adds-a-free...
| [deleted]
| sneilan1 wrote:
| 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 in one space, you can
| sell their time to someone else.
|
| This is happening a lot lately in Open Source and Tech. Just two
| examples: Wikimedia's endowment is reaching over 100 million
| dollars. AWS is making a huge amount of revenue of Redis.
|
| Is there a point when the hacker ethos needs to become more
| broad? At the very least, we should be considering where we spend
| our time and for who.
| crazygringo wrote:
| It's not an either/or.
|
| People contribute to the site because they get value from it
| and want to give back. And for some people it's a kind of
| reputation. That's enough on its own, or else the content
| wouldn't even exist in the first place.
|
| Totally orthogonal is Stack Overflow as a business. People need
| to write and maintain the code, run the servers, moderate the
| community, determine new features, and so on. They're the ones
| being rewarded by the sale, and they deserve it because SO is a
| _whole_ lot more than just the user-generated content.
|
| I don't think there's any moral or even social or "decency"
| expectation that people who have written questions and answers
| over the years would share in the business rewards. That was
| never an expectation going in.
|
| Now, if Stack Overflow's founders want to find ways to "give
| back" to the community from their personal proceeds, then
| that's wonderful too. But they have no _obligation_ to.
| the_other wrote:
| > Wikimedia's endowment is reaching over 100 million dollars
|
| When can they buy Mozilla?
|
| That's the kind of consolidation I'd like to see.
| pookeh wrote:
| I for one would have fully loved to have Stack Overflow be bought
| by Github/Microsoft, and just replace Github discussions. Of
| course there are topics that fall outside of the scope of repos
| but ... fully contextualized communities belonging to repos all
| in one place would have been very powerful.
| numair wrote:
| This is absolutely phenomenal. Naspers/Prosus are some of the
| savviest and most forward-thinking players in tech investment --
| would _you_ have been smart enough to give Tencent all that
| money, way back when? And remember, they were a bunch of nobodies
| based out of South Africa when that happened.
|
| This is much more interesting than a monopolist like Microsoft
| buying SO, and I'd be keen to see what the growth strategy is
| here. This might very well be one component of a larger suite
| they will assemble to create something very interesting and
| valuable for the developer community. They've got the money and
| the brainpower to put it together.
| tclancy wrote:
| Anything beyond leaving SO alone is going to go poorly. Your
| prediction is this, my prediction is this is going to push SO
| toward expertsexchange.com, pre-hyphen.
| [deleted]
| Aeolun wrote:
| > would you have been smart enough to give Tencent all that
| money, way back when?
|
| Investing in China at the time seems like it would have been a
| valid strategy. They're just incredibly lucky with the scale of
| their success.
| swyx wrote:
| can you substantiate more here.. it reads like they made one
| good bet on Tencent and you suddently regard them as "the
| savviest and most forward-thinking players in tech investment
| ". have you looked at their other bets?
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| They invested in takealot.com which is the goto online site
| for non-food in South Africa.
|
| Revenue in 2020 was US$238-million up by 41% the previous
| year no doubt due to the lockdown.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I don't see how giving money to Tencent has anything to do with
| the ability to steer SO.
|
| The best thing would have been the status quo. SO has been
| running on its feet for many years. This consolidation, while
| disputably better than Microsoft acquisition, is no worse than
| large companies buying out small ones usually guaranteing their
| demise.
|
| If anything else, Microsoft has left Github untouched so far.
|
| I am not convinced that this is "absolutely phenomenal".
| teh_klev wrote:
| > The best thing would have been the status quo. SO has been
| running on its feet for many years
|
| You forgot that there's a bunch of VC's who now want their
| investment back plus interest.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| That's it, the VC money is strictly for a limited time -
| when the fund time ends, there must an "exit" - either IPO
| or sale.
|
| (In case of success, of course; failures are just written
| off, the losses hopefully paid by the successful exits.)
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| To me, it seems that Github has become more proactive (or
| hair-trigger) in pulling down content via DMCA in the recent
| years. This could be down to companies finally figuring out
| that you can DMCA code repos, but I can't help thinking that
| the Microsoft acquisition was a factor.
| arp242 wrote:
| > If anything else, Microsoft has left Github untouched so
| far.
|
| Actually, I think it has gotten better. I don't like the
| consolidation of independents like GitHub to big corporations
| like Microsoft, but I can't deny that thus far, it actually
| worked out pretty well.
|
| Stack Overflow is a difficult company/website to manage
| though; it's not "just a website with a SaaS product" and
| really requires a good understanding of the social dynamics
| and such to run well, much more than e.g. GitHub.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| That's a good point. I wonder why SO is so political? As an
| outsider it is just like a bunch of people asking questions
| and getting answers.
| arp242 wrote:
| What do you mean with "so political"?
|
| The hard part is getting the social dynamics right.
| Askers want to ask any question, answerers want to answer
| interesting questions. Keeping both groups happy is a
| hard task.
|
| People complain about questions being closed
| (technically: "on hold") and marked as duplicated, but it
| serves a real purpose as no one wants to answer the same
| question over and over again. _How_ you do it matters a
| lot though.
|
| I have a number of gripes with Stack Overflow, and there
| are quite a few things I would do different. But I see a
| lot of people complaining about it who probably don't
| realize just how hard of a problem it is.
| b3morales wrote:
| And this is complicated even more by all the "soft" topic
| sites, each of which has its own culture.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| It's just a very rigid structure, you have to put your
| square block in their square hole or you will be ripped a
| new one and tossed when asking a question. Also mods need
| to be in a good mood that day.
| meh99 wrote:
| If I had access to their business network, data analysis, and
| knew in the end it wasn't my money, society will just bail us
| out, sure why not make that choice?
|
| You're making it sound like they had real skin in the game. If
| it fails they walk away with enough to retire on anyway.
|
| Let's not make celebrities of the biggest grifters out there,
| emotionally coloring them in as possessed of magical insights.
| They're people playing a game where the deck is stacked in
| their favor by that sort of fawning.
|
| It's an unverifiable claim to suggest they were uniquely
| gifted. Uniquely positioned is not the same thing.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| It's crazy the kind of hero worship towards anyone who makes
| a ton of money. When you account for all the smart people
| hustling trying to make their startup work, you realize it
| boils down to luck. Which, of course, is not a great comfort
| to most people since we all want to believe we can achieve
| anything if we only work hard enough.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I think of hard work as being more of a necessary but not
| sufficient condition for most of these outcomes, so to some
| extent: "The harder I work, the luckier I get..."
|
| You can't control your luck, but you can control how hard
| you work. Some will read that sentence and conclude that
| working hard is a fool's errand. Others will read it and
| conclude the opposite. Neither is entirely wrong.
| craftinator wrote:
| If you really want to be rich, don't work hard; either
| inherit, or get other people to do hard work. Working
| hard is easy, hundreds of millions of people do it, the
| trick is getting the hard workers to give you a
| percentage of what they earn, and scale that model up.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Luck doesn't matter a whit if your product is crap. Sure
| connections and right place, right time matter as well but
| it's not everything.
| actuator wrote:
| Naspers might have made smart bets in past but I am not sure
| how this means they will run the community well.
|
| I would have been more happy with a Microsoft acquisition
| (although that ends up making them even more powerful) as it
| ties into Microsoft's existing products well, so they don't
| need to necessarily change SO too much to make money from it.
|
| It can tie to their dev tooling story with GitHub, VSCode etc
| on one end and from LinkedIn end, they could have tied SO's
| jobs platform to Linkedin one. This makes MS more powerful but
| it might have left SO largely untouched.
| codeulike wrote:
| I heard that the deal got _closed by the mods_
| croes wrote:
| Ever heard of survivorship bias?
| marsrover wrote:
| I hate when people bring up survivorship bias about something
| like this. It's such a negative outlook. It's like a "don't
| even try because it's just a fluke that happened to them"
| type of mindset. It doesn't help anyone.
| prepend wrote:
| I read this more as "make sure to account for survivor bias
| and don't say stupid stuff."
|
| Survivor bias doesn't mean that everything is a fluke. It
| just means that some things are flukes and it's important
| to include that in our models so we don't think something
| random is non-random.
|
| This is very different than everything being 100% random.
| bigdict wrote:
| Yeah but why do those who survive survive?
| croes wrote:
| You know that old scammer trick? Pick 512 wealthy people,
| pick a stock, write half of the the people the stock will
| rise, the other half the stock will fall. Wait for the real
| development, dump the addresses of the losers, pick a new
| stock and start again. Write one half stock will rise,
| other half, stock will fall. Repeat until only one address
| is left. Now give him the opportunity of an large
| investment. You have shown your skills because you were
| right 10 times in a row.
| bidirectional wrote:
| And how does this apply to modern investment funds who
| have to regularly provide client reports and make
| disclosures?
| sangnoir wrote:
| Take 512 investment funds, in one year half of them make
| a profit, half of them will make losses. Drop the ones
| that had losses, the next year half will make profits,
| the other half will suffer losses. Repeat until one fund
| is left: "Invest in us - we are market experts who had no
| losses for the past 9 consecutive years!"
| bidirectional wrote:
| Well yes, I understand that. The point is that your model
| predicts the current landscape of funds as being about as
| likely as pigs flying.
| croes wrote:
| Because people don't know the performance of dart
| throwing monkeys
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/rickferri/2012/12/20/any-
| monkey...
| bidirectional wrote:
| That article explains that the outperformance was due to
| a broader economic trend of small cap companies
| outperforming weighted indices. They effectively baked in
| a known-to-win strategy from the start and then ran it in
| various slightly-randomised ways (and they're fully open
| about it!)
| kennywinker wrote:
| You can invest in Apple stock in the early 90s because
| you are a savvy investor who sees the massive potential,
| or you can invest in them because the stock shows up at
| the top of an alphabetical list. Either way you're rich,
| and get called a brilliant investor, while all the people
| who invested in ZZCO because they picked the bottom of
| the alphabetical list, or some other similarly random
| choice, are bankrupt.
| bidirectional wrote:
| Of course you can invest at random and it will sometimes
| work. But it does not explain the realities of the
| industry. Even just one of the top funds has an
| infinitesimally small chance of existing randomly, let
| alone a glut of them.
| kennywinker wrote:
| The impeccable track record of index funds suggests that
| "Even just one of the top funds has an infinitesimally
| small chance of existing randomly" is not actually
| correct.
| bidirectional wrote:
| Well index funds aren't 'the top funds', they're the
| benchmark against which the alpha of the top funds is
| measured. If we change the framing to
| over/underperforming the S&P500 I don't see how the
| argument changes. RenTec is up 66% per year since 1988,
| how could that possibly be random?
| prepend wrote:
| One big early hit can keep paying off. And some funds
| have long lock-ins.
|
| In this case, they sold part of their tencent to buy
| this. Selling a little bit each year of a superstar early
| investment shows good earnings each year.
|
| I don't know this fund at all, so they could be awesome
| for all I know. But saying "they are super smart for
| buying tencent" is not useful without lots of other info.
|
| Usually people who say that without extra evidence or
| mentioning survivor bias aren't properly aware of what's
| what.
| croes wrote:
| Simple answer, it's impossible that all people choose the
| wrong investment even if you just choose by chance. It like
| playing the lottery, why do some people win? Because not
| all can lose all the time. And as soon you reach a certain
| wealth level it's easier to keep that level than to reach
| it in the first place, unless you are in idiot.
| passivate wrote:
| How many times can one person win the lottery? The large
| firms seem to successfully bet on winners quite a bit.
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| _Somebody_ wins it every week.
| passivate wrote:
| People lose money in lottery tickets, casinos, equity
| investments, etc all the time. If a VC is successful over
| a period of time with a history of investing in winners,
| then there is something more than simply randomness.
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| With enough VC firms, and enough small bets, that's not
| guaranteed to be true.
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| Mostly luck.
| ytNumbers wrote:
| To quote Mazarin, "One must not ask of a general, 'Is he
| skillful?', but rather, 'Is he lucky?'". I think what
| Mazarin was probably getting at was that the best
| generals will always have others claiming that their
| success was due to luck.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Luck, usually.
| ttul wrote:
| Mostly it's random chance. The reality of investing is that
| it's mostly down to chance. Take an equally skilled set of
| investors and give them the same market access and some
| will do exceptionally well.
| bidirectional wrote:
| This does not stand up to scrutiny at all, for any kind
| of investing. There have not been so many VC/hedge/PE
| funds in history that the top ones would arise through
| chance.
| SanFranManDan wrote:
| I mean you can get ten thousand monkeys throwing darts at
| a board full of companies as an investment strategy, and
| a handful of those monkeys will be top performers with
| excellent returns.
| prepend wrote:
| How many vc/hedge/pe funds were there? How many funds
| around today were here 20 years ago.
|
| Failures don't typically advertise and it's quite likely
| there ARE/WERE thousands or millions of small firms
| managing a few million each.
| DavidWilkinson wrote:
| Agreed, it's an interesting complement to Codecademy and
| SimilarWeb
| sangnoir wrote:
| > And remember, they were a bunch of nobodies based out of
| South Africa when that happened.
|
| Hard disagree - they weren't nobodies, Naspers was already a
| media juggernaut by 2001 (print and TV). Naspers was founded in
| 1915 (as _De Nasionale Pers Beperkt_ - National Press) to
| promote Afrikaner Nationalism in the aftermath of the Anglo-
| Boer war. One of Naspers founders was also the founding
| president of the National Party (you might know them from their
| hit - _Apartheid_ ) and the mutually-beneficial, cozy
| arrangement between the NP and _Nasionale Pers_ lasted until
| the very end of the Apartheid government in 1992.
| herodoturtle wrote:
| Ja true, but don't we Saffers all wish we bought more Naspers
| on the JSE before their gamble on Tencent.
| foobarbazetc wrote:
| A bit ironic that the "nationalists" made their money from
| a Chinese company though...
| xwolfi wrote:
| Nationalists always like each other, it's not like China
| is asking SA to marry a chinese girl for each yuan
| invested...
| enedil wrote:
| Especially not, since China suffers from disparity with
| much greater number of boys than girls.
| [deleted]
| throwaway158497 wrote:
| What is good for the company is not necessarily good for
| developers or community.
| dgb23 wrote:
| They might have first class access to data that enables a
| powerful shift in integrated development.
| jakemcgraw wrote:
| One of the first 300 users, SO was revolutionary when launched, I
| followed their development via Codinghorror and Joelonsoftware
| blogs (probably in an RSS feed). I've since moved into management
| and away from day to day coding, so I use it very infrequently,
| but, I have to imagine more than a few software startups only
| exist today because SO democratized software development Q&A.
| e12e wrote:
| Well, I guess they won and experts-exchange.com now finally lost?
| :)
| tambourine_man wrote:
| I'm always amazed at how we price stuff. A social media startup
| being bought for $10B is not surprising but a cornerstone of
| modern day software development is a mere $2B. But I'm biased of
| course.
| Ekaros wrote:
| When I think about it. I still consider 2B to be a lot... And
| those social media startups just being just a mess...
| [deleted]
| sjclemmy wrote:
| Fun fact and one of my dinner party anecdotes; I have the
| accepted answer for one of Ross Ulbricht's (Silk Road's Dread
| Pirate Roberts) SO questions that got him busted.
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9563675/destroying-a-spe...
| LegitShady wrote:
| Not exactly on topic but I click on this link and it's been a
| long time since I went on SO...it popped up the cookies choice
| thing...except it remembered my choices from last time so there
| was no reason to...I think it was just hoping i'd mistakenly
| hit 'accept all'.
| polynomial wrote:
| Where did his 3,675 reputation come from? He only asked 2
| questions and has a small number of badges.
| scandinavian wrote:
| His questions have 444 upvotes, so he should actually have
| 4400 rep. He lost some to users being deleted. Looking at the
| reputation log he actually has less than he should have, but
| I'm not an expert.
| shagie wrote:
| You keep reputation on sufficiently old, sufficiently voted
| posts even if they are deleted.
|
| Presumably, there are also deleted questions or answers that
| were up voted.
|
| Additionally, there was a "up votes on questions are also
| worth 10 points" recently (past few years).
| eveningsteps wrote:
| details:
|
| *
| https://web.archive.org/web/20140705203439/http://www.slate....
|
| * https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/199353/did-the-
| stac...
| spockz wrote:
| Wow CodeIgniter, blast from the past. Funny at the time it was
| a pretty nice ORM/Framework. Apparently I still used SVN also.
| https://alessandrovermeulen.me/tags/codeigniter/
| skinnymuch wrote:
| CodeIgnitor. What a blast from the past. I was able to read
| the entire code base and then again and grok all of it fairly
| quickly. That gave me a lot of confidence then and helped
| with imposter syndrome
| TenJack wrote:
| Woh, how did this lead to his demise?
| [deleted]
| polynomial wrote:
| 1. He originally submitted the question using his real name
| before quickly changing his user name to "frosty." Oops, too
| late.
|
| 2. Forensic testimony in the complaint asserted Silk Road
| used this method and in fact used code identical to that in
| the answer.
|
| 3. Silk Road server encryption was signed with Frosty@Frosty.
|
| #2 and #3 were evidentiary, but #1 is what tied everything to
| a real person's name.
| deepfriedrice wrote:
| How did they find out he originally posted under his real
| name? They must have known that was his profile, and then
| SO handed over the data proving it?
| polynomial wrote:
| it's a good question, and i could only speculate what
| sleuthing led them to ask SO for information about that
| account, but yes, they sent an info request to SO, who
| complied.
| bad_username wrote:
| Raymond Chen answered my question. And then blogged about it in
| Old New Thing.
| jmkni wrote:
| I remember being obsessed with that trial when it was going on,
| Ars Technica in particular had excellent coverage.
|
| The fact that his SO question led to his demise is particularly
| nuts IMHO.
| dave_sid wrote:
| I hope Jon Skeet gets something out of it.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| One article said they were making 61 new millionaires so if
| he's a significant SO stock holder he's doing quite well.
| robertlf wrote:
| Top 3%er here and I rarely use Stack Overflow anymore. I got so
| tired of the snarky answers to questions (both mine and others)
| and peoples' ability to downvote you without giving any
| justification. I've been there for 12 years but fortunately, in
| that time, I've become a good enough developer that I can
| generally figure out my own problems. And if I get stuck, I'll go
| to the relevant Google group or to a sub Reddit. Stack Overflow
| is no longer relevant to me.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Google groups is killing off whole groups that are decades old
| for little more than a couple bad posters rather than filtering
| them. I bet it won't last 3-4 more years before they close it
| and any archives.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| From their blog post:
|
| > _It allows us to continue to operate as an independent company
| with our current team and with the backing of a global technology
| powerhouse._
|
| Sure, sure.
| switch007 wrote:
| Indeed. That statement might be true for a short period of time
| as part of a transitional plan.
| berkes wrote:
| Prosus has taken a backseat in most of their investments,
| though.
|
| That is no guarantee that it'll leave SO running as it does,
| but it gives a good hint that this statement is probably right,
| with prosus as owner.
| giarc wrote:
| Just ask Kevin Systrom.
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Unable to access article due to paywall. Here is a corresponding
| post by Joel Spolsky:
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2021/06/02/kinda-a-big-announ...
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.md/IYMAm
| maddyboo wrote:
| I can't read the whole article, but did this deal include the
| entire Stack Exchange network or just Stack Overflow?
| teh_klev wrote:
| Here's the article de-paywalled:
|
| https://archive.is/IYMAm
|
| I'm guessing it's the whole shebang. They renamed Stack
| Exchange to Stack Overflow back in 2015:
|
| https://stackoverflow.blog/2015/09/15/were-changing-our-name...
|
| Stack Exchange appears now to just be a brand for the whole
| network of Q&A sites, but stackoverflow.com is the golden
| goose.
| YesThatTom2 wrote:
| Both.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| some negative comments here. i believe when Jeff introduced Stack
| Overflow is because ExpertSExchange suck. this seem to be a
| perfect opportunity for people to build a Stack Overflow
| replacement.
|
| this 1.8B deal just validated the StackOverflow business is
| profitable and attractive.
| xtracto wrote:
| I remember a couple of weeks ago someone showed their project
| which was a "personalized" version of StackOverflow: You hired
| one hour or so of a developer to help you solve an issue.
|
| The problem I see with StackOverflow is monetization: They
| tried with Ads (which have slowly been rejected by society).
| They tried as a candidate sourcing service (I used them to hire
| a long time ago, and it didn't have good Signal to Noise
| ratio). Then they tried with "StackOverflow for work" which I
| think makes sense for very large companies (think Oracle, IBM
| or similar size) but not so much for SMEs.
|
| I would love to see them test-drive a micro-transaction mode
| where they ask people viewing a Q&A page for a small fee (think
| $0.01) to view the responses, and they could even share the
| revenue with people who write accepted/updated answers. This
| could be an interesting use case for something like Neo, Nano,
| IOTA or Ethereum (once it goes PoS).
|
| They could even do some kind of "diminishing return" model
| where the first person seeing an answer pays a bit more (say
| $0.10) and as more people see the q&a they pay less and less
| until it is practically free.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| What about Stack Exchange, is that a separate entity? Did they
| buy everything?
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| > Prosus, one of Europe's most valuable tech companies, is best
| known as the largest shareholder in Chinese internet and
| videogaming giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. Listed in Amsterdam,
| Prosus signaled its appetite for deal making when it sold a small
| portion of its equity stake in Tencent in April for $14.6
| billion. The Stack Overflow deal ranks among Prosus' biggest
| acquisitions.
| anticristi wrote:
| My reaction to the title: Everyone knows Stack Overflow, who the
| heck is Prosus?
| codeulike wrote:
| Was it the mods that closed the deal?
| usr1106 wrote:
| This makes no sense. Stackoverflow is a useful resource for
| programmers, but it's difficult to monetize.
|
| More than average users will have an ad blocker or otherwise
| mostly ignore ads. Not enough users would pay a subscription.
|
| My prediction would be they start to introduce obnoxious features
| to try get their 1.8B back and will annoy users away slowly. I
| have nothing against my prediction turning out wrong.
| dbingham wrote:
| One possibility is that they invest heavily in Teams and Jobs.
| Those two both solve problems that many teams really struggle
| with and would be willing to pay a premium for tools to help
| them solve: documentation and hiring.
| tester756 wrote:
| by that logic hn is worthless too, yet I bet it created a lot
| of $ for yc
| shagie wrote:
| My crystal ball says...
|
| * Improve channels from Stack Overflow to other properties -
| kind of like what they tried to do with the Developer Story,
| just with more reason to do it. (
| https://www.pluralsight.com/newsroom/press-releases/pluralsi...
| )
|
| * There are a lot of eyeballs hitting SO, and a lot places to
| send people - https://www.prosus.com/companies . As they
| control the server, they can inline those ads more easily.
|
| * Job portal expansion. Supposedly this is profitable now, just
| not VC deals profitable. There are quite a few classified sites
| that Prosus has already.
|
| * Expand links to edtech - Skillsoft, Codecademy, Udemy to name
| a _few_ of them.
|
| * Have the resources to spend on making that enterprise content
| product if it's not too late (Atlassian and Microsoft have been
| there for a while). People kept wanting a SO instance they
| could host locally. They were willing to pay a bit for it (but
| not the Big Tech prices that SO was supposedly selling it for).
| SO tried to do this with Teams, not sure how well that
| works/went. So, maybe they'll get that product finally made.
| [deleted]
| linsomniac wrote:
| I ended up losing access to my ancient account (it was using the
| OpenID providers that they don't even support anymore and the
| provider I used isn't around). I had gone fairly inactive, but
| recently wanted to contribute some content.
|
| This was on the DIY stackoverflow, there's a fairly common
| problem on my stove, but an easy, low/no cost fix, it's just very
| involved. The DIY SO had a good discussion of the problem. To
| contribute back, I spent ~3 days making an instructional video on
| the replacement. Posted it to Youtube. Then went over to the SO
| to post it there as well, and realized it'd take like a month of
| dicking around to get a new account up to the point that I could
| post a response in the thread.
|
| I reached out to site support about getting back into my old
| account, but have never heard back. <shrug>
| mssundaram wrote:
| Yeah I've very often had something of substance to contribute
| but lacked the "merit" (or points or whatever). I wonder how
| common that is and how it could be handled - i.e.
| differentiating against spam
| bhandziuk wrote:
| > realized it'd take like a month of dicking around to get a
| new account up to the point that I could post a response in the
| thread
|
| If you made a whole video just post it as an answer. That takes
| 1 rep (the lowest it can possibly be). If you wanted to post it
| in a comment ...well you needed 15 rep which is also pretty
| easy to get.
|
| I don't understand this criticism of SO as if it is some walled
| garden and it's so hard to participate you may as well not.
| adwww wrote:
| Similar to me. Only when I actually needed to ask a question a
| while ago, I signed up again and found I no longer had enough
| points?!
|
| There's a wealth of knowledge in old questions on that site,
| but UX for occasional users is poor!
| mathgenius wrote:
| Glad to hear I'm not the only one that lost their S.O. account
| because they decided to try the amazing sounding OpenID.
| raydev wrote:
| It's been several years now but they had a long (1 year?)
| window where you could migrate to a supported login method.
| linsomniac wrote:
| Oh, I know it's entirely my fault for letting it be
| inactive and all, I'm not blaming them.
|
| It _IS_ unfortunate that there 's both a fairly high
| barrier to entry _AND_ apparently no real way to recover
| older accounts.
|
| It's hard to justify the time investment to improving an
| existing answer on stackoverflow, when I've already posted
| it to Youtube and that's 95% of where I get my DIY
| education.
|
| Backstory: SO has a post about this stove that has several
| people showing bad solders of one joint on a relay in the
| bowels of the stove (really, it took me and my son almost 2
| hours to disassemble it to get to it). My video details
| disassembly, location, repair, and a quick reassembly. ~8
| minutes of video. Sadly, people report most repair services
| just recommend you replace the whole stove, because
| replacement boards are ~$700, and you can't tell which of 3
| boards until you've spent 2 hours on
| disassembly/reassembly. Most repair services aren't willing
| to re-solder a joint.
|
| Here's the video I made, FYI:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbxugIpIiS8
| skipants wrote:
| Didn't they have some way to transfer your account over from
| OpenID? Pretty sure I used it at the start as well, but now
| my account is a normal SO account.
| bambax wrote:
| Me too!
| sida wrote:
| Why didn't Microsoft go after this? it seems like an incredibly
| powerful community that blends really well with linkedin AND
| github
| jmcphers wrote:
| Total speculation, but Joel is ex-Microsoft (he worked on Excel
| for years) and I don't think he would sell to his former
| employer. I've worked with a number of Microsoft alums; all of
| them have seen how Microsoft acquisitions usually turn out.
| htrp wrote:
| Stackoverflow about to add that copy paste subscription they
| previewed on April 1st
| w0mbat wrote:
| Hey, we users built the knowledge-base. Where is our cash? (Only
| half joking).
| schappim wrote:
| Many moons ago, I sold chiphacker.com which became
| electronics.stackexchange.com for only 2K. It seems I should have
| asked for stock instead of cash :-P
| yayr wrote:
| why just 1.8B?
| furgooswft13 wrote:
| Top 0.54% apparently (what do I win?). Though my top answer has
| thousands of up-votes, and my next top one around 100...
|
| And it was for a question that was already LMGTFY worthy at the
| time, so I was just a bit quicker with my documentation
| copy&paste than the next guy.
| vaseabcd wrote:
| Same
| karmicthreat wrote:
| I remember back in the day Jeff or Joel came on the
| somethingawful forums and started talking about their idea. They
| were resoundly trolled about how horrible their site idea is. Why
| would we want un-certified randos on the internet giving people
| advice?
|
| Stack Overflow succeeded and SA is just kind of limping along.
| Though maybe now that Lowtax is gone it can just kind of
| maintain.
| SlimyHog wrote:
| > SA is just kind of limping along
|
| Jeffery has been posting financials that look pretty good
| horsemans wrote:
| You're confusing Joel/StackOverflow for Jeff Atwood, who posted
| on the forums while designing Discourse.
|
| Atwood was lambasted for not understanding the SA forums
| culture before making assertions about it, and for being seen
| as wanting to ignore the necessary role that human moderation
| plays in maintaining strong communities.
| ddingus wrote:
| 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 extract
| the purchase price, and whatever additional additional returns
| they intend. Everything costs something.
|
| So what will it be?
|
| Subscription access?
|
| Less favorable signal to noise?
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Subs, ads or something else to monetize. You can't spend $1.8b
| and expect things to stay the same.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| 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 Overflow is
| joining Prosus. Prosus is an investment and holding company,
| which means that the most important part of this announcement
| is that Stack Overflow will continue to operate independently,
| with the exact same team in place that has been operating it,
| according to the exact same plan and the exact same business
| practices. Don't expect to see major changes or awkward
| "synergies". The business of Stack Overflow will continue to
| focus on Reach and Relevance, and Stack Overflow for Teams. The
| entire company is staying in place: we just have different
| owners now._
|
| I wonder how true this will be over time.
| will4274 wrote:
| > Conde Nast managed not to destroy Reddit after buying it.
|
| I would have said the exact opposite. The Reddit community
| was destroyed. People no longer recommend Reddit for
| interesting discussions or speak excitedly about its
| communities. Conde Nast monetized and changed Reddit,
| recouping their investment, and now it's hard to find people
| who have good things to say about it.
|
| Consider e.g. /r/darknetplan or similar topic focused
| subreddit a that were thriving in the early 2000s - all
| graveyards today. Those people are on Discord now.
| ssaturn wrote:
| Where can I find links to these discord invites?
| jedberg wrote:
| That subreddit was started after the acquisition. In fact,
| every subreddit was, because user created subreddits were
| paid for by Conde Nast. As was self posts and pretty much
| every major innovation.
|
| It was after they brought in outside investors that they
| were pressured to monetize.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Reddit's managed that on their own.
| LegitShady wrote:
| >most important part of this announcement is that Stack
| Overflow will continue to operate independently, with the
| exact same team in place that has been operating it,
| according to the exact same plan and the exact same business
| practices
|
| ...at least until this purchase news died down a bit, and
| then we can get some managers in there to make new priorities
| and get some of the old ones out...
| Dah00n wrote:
| >Conde Nast managed not to destroy Reddit after buying it.
|
| That.... is a very positive view of Reddit. I'd say
| everything on Reddit is way worse now and going downhill
| fast.
| lupire wrote:
| That was after Conde Nast sold.
| Dah00n wrote:
| Also before. It isn't something new. I'm amazed it can
| still become worse but it does.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| No it isn't.
| skunkworker wrote:
| Conde Nast also owns Ars Technica, which personally is my
| favorite tech-news site and has high and consistent quality.
| thefz wrote:
| 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.
| ddingus wrote:
| Not sure the fourms are caused by acquisition.
|
| I do see the UX experience being more thick, less
| favorable signal to noise happening due to acquisition.
| There may be editorial conflicts of interest too. I do
| not notice at present.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| 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.
| ddingus wrote:
| I don't think the Reddit transition has gone very well. But
| there is still a lot to be seen on that front. Ars is an
| example of a successful acquisition. I totally agree.
| milkytron wrote:
| > I don't think the Reddit transition has gone very well.
|
| I would agree, although I do not think it has been
| particularly bad either. If they had broken apps the
| enhance reddit and removed old.reddit.com, then I would
| think otherwise. For the most part, I am still able to
| use the site as I have since 2011.
| ddingus wrote:
| To me, and I'm in the same scenario as you, that's mostly
| bad.
|
| old.reddit.com isn't going to last, is it?
| bhaak wrote:
| For what it's worth, even i.reddit.com aka
| reddit.com/.compact is still working.
| phist_mcgee wrote:
| If you ever want to see thee Ars community dogpile on a
| certain topic, read any article on cryptocurrencies. You
| will get the following comments at the top of the heap:
|
| Crypto means I can't buy a graphics card
|
| Crypto is a ponzi scheme and should be banned
|
| It is immoral to own Bitcoin, and governments should punish
| people who do
|
| Would you like to buy my new XCoin ha ha ha.
|
| Elon Musk is amazing, but this crypto thing makes me a
| little unhappy with him.
|
| Ad nauseum. I have been visiting that site less and less,
| because I think the audience has become an echo chamber.
| [deleted]
| soheil wrote:
| > Stack Overflow is so good, and its fate is now entirely in
| the hands of the purchaser.
|
| I wonder how much of it is Google making it look good by
| providing laser-precise results for the vaguest search
| queries.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > Conde Nast managed not to destroy Reddit after buying it.
|
| Reddit is simply dying a slow death. I wouldn't touch the
| place now.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| >> 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."
| x0x0 wrote:
| I read this differently -- I think there's a ceiling on
| just how much money SO will make, and the SO team has
| realized there's no future in which they are a company that
| makes $1B or so per year. Which is fine, but hard if you
| want to play in vc land or go public.
|
| There definitely are companies that will buy something like
| this to operate it essentially as an annuity.
|
| The risk to the employees there is if SO essentially
| becomes done and the owners want to put it in maintenance
| mode and operate it as a run-out.
|
| Also, it's been 12 years. There's probably a bunch of
| employees that would like some liquidity.
| spurgu wrote:
| Naive indeed. I flew to meet a company we had just acquired
| and I personally promised them that nothing would change.
| Even though I believed it at the time of course it didn't
| pan out that way and to this day I regret saying that.
| sulam wrote:
| 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!
| GenerocUsername wrote:
| 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"
| picodguyo wrote:
| Yep. At best this holds true for 12-18 months. The
| founders/execs play dumb in the interest of minimizing
| attrition.
| izgzhen wrote:
| 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.
| bhandziuk wrote:
| 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.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Or you can pump it, promise lots of new technology and
| "synergies" and profits and then dump it for a huge sum
| to VC or Big 10 company while it's still promising but
| you're pretty sure it's time to dump.
| Aditya_Garg wrote:
| If the total accumulation of year to year profits was
| higher than 1.8B, then the current owners of Stack
| Overflow would've never sold.
| rurp wrote:
| Maybe they wanted the cash in hand rather than a high
| variance company valuation. Or just wanted to transition
| their money and attention to something else. There are
| plenty of reasons to want to sell a company in a way that
| both sides come out ahead.
| bhandziuk wrote:
| Also keep in mind that the public SO doesn't even have to
| change much for there to be "big changes". SO Jobs is
| where the money is made and they have private Q&A sites
| for businesses.
| qyph wrote:
| Perhaps they want liquidity, a more diverse portfolio,
| etc.
| xenadu02 wrote:
| While somewhat rare there are holding companies like Jonas
| Software that buy lots of smaller software companies in
| various markets then effectively let each subsidiary run
| without too much interference. Their philosophy seems to be
| own most or all of the competitors in a vertical market,
| sell the software for a reasonable (read: non-Oracle) price
| with ongoing maintenance, and collect the cash. I only know
| about them because a relative was Director of Engineering
| at the time they were acquired and is now CEO.
|
| They don't expect any massive changes in revenue with the
| companies they acquire. They're willing to hire and invest
| in revamping/improving their products. Their goal is stable
| revenue by making customers happy enough to keep paying the
| maintenance.
|
| They seem to be doing OK with that business model.
| rurp wrote:
| Thanks for the context. It's crazy that this sounds like
| a radical investing approach these days. Prosus seems
| more promising than most potential buyers, so hopefully
| this isn't the beginning of the end for SO.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _Conde Nast managed not to destroy Reddit after buying it._
|
| Their current plan seems to be a race to the bottom; a new
| re-design for the default landing page that rewards infinite
| scroll over in-depth content.
|
| Meanwhile, the moderation tools are still garbage.
| jq-r wrote:
| They should ask slashdot how the redesign worked out...
| DistressedDrone wrote:
| And Digg.
| jedberg wrote:
| This actually just proves OPs point. When CN bought reddit,
| reddit thrived. They gave us a bunch of money and no
| constraints.
|
| When reddit recapitalized is when all the monetization
| stuff really started. Once they brought in outside
| investors and had people to answer to.
| ddingus wrote:
| Yes. That is what I intended and did not articulate as
| well as you just did.
| chairmanwow1 wrote:
| Their app is 2x slower than their mobile site and their new
| mobile site is 4x slower than their old site. Why do these
| brands feel the need to make everything a fucking SPA.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| The entire field of front-end engineering needs to take a
| step back and think about the user instead of
| overengineering every problem and constantly changing
| things just to justify their job existing.
| J5892 wrote:
| As a front-end engineer I don't feel any pressure to
| justify my job. The issue of "constantly changing things"
| tends to be completely out of our hands, so work is
| pretty abundant.
|
| That said, I agree with you in principal. In this field I
| feel like I'm constantly fighting to keep the code simple
| and lean, while others think it's okay to import an
| entire bloated library just to make a button shine a
| certain way.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| fwiw, I use a third party app, and can't really imagine
| using the web-based interface or their official app.
| jakub_g wrote:
| 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).
| swiley wrote:
| The fact that "old." still works is a pretty strong
| indication that the new redesign is to ensure new users
| will tolerate manipulation while retaining a large
| portion of the old users. Looking at the ratio of old/new
| site users is probably a very powerful analytics tool for
| predicting ad revenue for a given subreddit.
| pier25 wrote:
| I agree.
|
| old.reddit.com + RES is still the best Reddit experience.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| by FAR
| htrp wrote:
| > Reddit seems like an example of a successful acquisition.
| Conde Nast managed not to destroy Reddit after buying it.
|
| Ehhhh not so sure on that one.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| This is why we societal debt > equity, for ownership is like a
| debt that can never be paid back.
|
| I'm convinced this is a sensitivity to initial conditions
| phenomenon where if we hadn't transitioned to capitalism from
| feudalism, equity/ownership-like contracts would be laughed out
| of the room. "Perpetuity? C'mon!"
| [deleted]
| yougotrioted wrote:
| You saw it with their latest April fools joke - Premium Copy &
| Paste
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| They'll double-down on the enterprise offer I would think. I
| don't think jobs was the money-maker they planned on, and the
| public individual site doesn't have a lot of revenue approaches
| that justify ~2B purchase price. I'm sure they original VCs
| made money but not sure it's their typical unicorn multiple.
| ddingus wrote:
| Great take. You're very likely to be proven in that
| observation.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| "Log in to see 8 answers on Qu^H^HStack Overflow!"
| ddingus wrote:
| Yes, could very well be that. However I wrote a bit of angst
| because maybe they'll be smart about it and this will be
| okay.
| chadlavi wrote:
| "You've read 3 of your 5 free answers this month"
| callamdelaney wrote:
| They already make money by having a job board (probably one of
| the best around for hiring devs, so probably costs a bomb) and
| they sell an internal version of SO for enterprise customers.
| Old_Thrashbarg wrote:
| I'll just be happy if they keep their Creative Commons
| licensing.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| I think this will not happen immediately because people would
| panic and run. It will be more subtle and over a couple
| years, but it will fade away in time.
| sharken wrote:
| I hope StackOverflow can continue to be a great source for
| accurate information, it was hard to find good quality
| information before they started.
|
| Two things I'd wish I had done:
|
| 1. Mine a lot of bitcoins back when it was just starting out.
|
| 2. Asked Jeff Atwood author of codinghorror.com if he had an
| extra spot on the team for this new venture called StackOverflow.
|
| Here is a link to Jeff talking about the ideas behind
| StackOverflow back in 2008.
|
| https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/
|
| Thanks to all who helped build StackOverflow, it still makes a
| difference.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| suggested Stack Overflow game - for all of those with top X%
| despite not contributing for years - see how quickly you can move
| from the top X% to the bottom X% by doing Y.
|
| Y can be combinations of asking or answering questions.
|
| If you get banned before reaching bottom X% you lose.
|
| I guess would need some sort of site to keep track of stats of
| those playing.
| jmkni wrote:
| Can I git stash my current SO profile before starting?
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I thought HN people liked to play hard and for keeps!
|
| anyway if you've got X% and haven't done anything for it in
| years it can't be worth that much to you.
| falcolas wrote:
| That's unexpected. Then again, 1.8B is a lot of money for what
| I'm guessing is a small number of major shareholders.
|
| After seeing how Tencent purchased gaming companies have fared
| (that is, typically with few changes), this probably won't have
| much of a negative impact on the site.
| tyrust wrote:
| Tencent isn't the buyer. Prosus, a Tencent investor, is.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| True, but they have a large enough stake in Tencenz to have
| relevant impact on Tencent's acquisition culture.
| robbyking wrote:
| I may be being a little more optimistic than some other people
| here, but I agree with you. There's a history of larger
| companies acquiring smaller ones only to ruin them (ahem,
| Yahoo), so hopefully Prosus understands what makes Stack
| Overflow so successful and will be mostly hands off. (Also, I'm
| not sure when Prosus acquired Udemy, but as far as I know that
| acquisition didn't negatively affect that site.)
| ibrahimsow1 wrote:
| They're south african and a huge holder in tencent. Edit:
| Memory failed me, the parent company is south african.
| slartibartfast_ wrote:
| Ugh I guess monetization incoming so I better learn how to code
| fast.
| tanepiper wrote:
| You had a good run Stack Overflow - sad to see it die this way
| (because we know it all will)
| [deleted]
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I don't want to seem like a jerk saying this, because I've put
| effort into supporting the site and helping with moderation, I
| know it's all very challenging and difficult, but: I think
| stack overflow has been dead for a while.
|
| Maybe you and I wanted different things from it and you still
| find it useful, but I haven't really enjoyed it for many years.
| I loved it over a decade ago, these days I generally avoid it.
|
| I was surprised by this purchase for that reason alone. I must
| be missing something. Stack must be way more useful and active
| than I realize, for reasons I'm unaware of.
|
| I find the community pretty abrasive mostly.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| swman wrote:
| I mostly build apps and services, so SO (lol) continues to be
| very useful for me. For instance, there are a myriad of bugs
| and glitches that come up in mobile app dev, or when using
| any popular programming language or framework. SO continues
| to have relevant, up-to-date information for the types of
| questions I'm seeking to answer. For example, I recently
| found out an issue I was pulling my hair out over was
| happening only on a particular version of a simulator...
|
| Personally, I have never heard anyone say SO is not that good
| anymore, and certainly not that it is dead/dying.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| The StackOverflow community has always been extremely
| abrasive. People will constantly be rewriting or deleting
| your questions or leaving unhelpful comments complaining
| about something silly like the formatting.
|
| With that said, it's still extremely useful. It makes my job
| easier and saves me a ton of time.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| Formatting doesn't seem like a silly consideration when we
| are talking about programming.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| > People will constantly be rewriting or deleting your
| questions or leaving unhelpful comments complaining about
| something silly like the formatting.
|
| I will mercilessly soft-rewrite and spelling/formatting
| correct every question and answer into oblivion if I can be
| bothered, and find the issue annoying enough.
|
| I treat SO like a Wikipedia of sorts, so presentation is
| important. Each topic will inevitably be read by a thousand
| other people in the future, so I might as well leave it
| looking presentable. It's a commons thing. "Don't leave
| trash behind and clean up if others didn't", basically.
| realsimplesynd wrote:
| Jeff Atwood explained this behavior as stemming from the
| fact that when you work with a computer all day, you kind
| of become one.
|
| Source: https://youtu.be/KZkYSSE8HHI
| jmkni wrote:
| I found it incredibly useful as a beginner. As long as you
| could put together a decent question and were a little
| patient you would usually get your answer.
|
| The more experienced I got, the less useful I found it. These
| days, if I'm stuck, most of the time so is everybody else
| reading my question.
|
| Quite often it's actually because I've encountered a bug with
| whatever framework I'm using, or a mistake in the
| documentation.
|
| I find raising an GitHub issue more useful than asking on SO.
|
| It's still great as a knowledge bank thought, as others have
| pointed out most of the time when you Google an issue the
| answer will be on SO. The only issue there is when the top
| rated/accepted question is actually no longer correct, or
| best practice, as the language/framework has changed or
| evolved.
| xmprt wrote:
| That's a great point. I haven't really noticed it but over
| the last few years, the first place is rarely Stack
| Overflow unless it's basic things (like how to use a git or
| tar feature). Checking Github issues or even just reading
| the code. Maybe the Google algorithm or Github SEO was
| improved to bring it up in the results but it has helped so
| I'm not complaining.
| oezi wrote:
| Yes, people have gotten so mean. Even well researched
| questions are often downvoted within minutes. The whole
| moderation fiasko is just mirroring Wikipedia's decline.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Wikipedia's decline? It still has no viable competitor
| whatsoever, and certainly not one that's open for reading
| to all. It's not going away for a long time, and maybe not
| ever.
| oezi wrote:
| Decline in being an inclusive community where a wide
| range of people contribute rather than a semi-
| professionell league of gate-keeping white old men.
|
| The internet just leads to new monopolies of the mind
| where "The winner takes it all". Wikipedia would deserve
| a competitor but there is 0% chance for one any time
| soon.
|
| Same holds for SO.
| hu3 wrote:
| > stack overflow has been dead for a while
|
| Yep. SO has been read-only for me for years.
|
| When I need help with something it's usually advanced enough
| to merit a Github issue otherwise I seek
| Slack/IRC/Discord/Gitter comunities of the technology I'm
| having trouble with.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| I feel like it is read-only for the vast majority of users.
| The whole internet is.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Realistically, does it have to be read-write? I'm at the
| knowledge level where I can navigate my way around most
| things I need to without having to ask questions that
| haven't been asked already. RTFM has been drilled into me
| by online communities since my teens, and SO is to me
| exactly that "TFM".
| abraae wrote:
| To me, SO is the very opposite of TFM.
|
| A manual contains all the possible answers to all the
| possible questions in a single document. To get an answer
| to your question, you just have to read, re-read,
| assemble, interpret and then you have your answer. It
| could take you 5 or 10 minutes depending on the quality
| of the manual and the complexity of the question.
|
| With SO, you bypass all that and simply get an answer.
| You don't gain any understanding of the bigger picture,
| but then again, maybe you don't need to. Maybe you're
| diving into say esp32 to build your smart doorbell. Your
| don't want to become an esp32 expert, you just want your
| question answered.
|
| Horses for courses
| canadianfella wrote:
| > sad to see it die this way (because we know it all will)
|
| Why?
| rambambram wrote:
| Not OP, but my guess is that it's not going to take long
| before there's a paywall of some sort. Bye bye free-'n'-easy
| programming answers. I don't ask questions there that much,
| but it is and has been extremely helpful for me.
| arp242 wrote:
| The entire reason Stack Overflow is a success to start with
| is because it's _not_ paywalled; it was literally founded
| as a response to Experts Exchange 's paywall, and outgrew
| it in no-time. Paywalling the content would demonstrate a
| spectacular lack of insight, althouh that's not unheard of
| I would be surprised if they ended up paywalling it.
| xrstf wrote:
| Good thing there are many spam knock-off sites re-using their
| content, so we don't need to start an archiving campaign like
| with Geocities.
| ajayyy wrote:
| They provide data dumps and everything is liberally licenced
| throwaway87906 wrote:
| Former naspers subsidiary employee here (far removed) : but
| yeah, they're generally hands off until you wake up one day
| realising all the good leaders were replaced by tools and a few
| large mandates have come in to "collaborate" (use inferior
| home-grown tech (when not paying AWS to do it for you)) - stack
| overflow's a completely new game though, both sides will be
| learning monetization the painful way.
|
| they have some good sides too though.
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