Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B
wsj.comI 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!
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.
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.
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.
One of my funniest work experiences comes from a coworker who had a question about an obscure RHEL 5 thing long after RHEL5 should have been abolished, him googling it, and finding an answer I had posted about a decade before when RHEL5 was in beta and I had experienced and answered the same issue.
Through the “asking and searching” phase, he was sitting next to me on a rooftop at a really stressful job, we were drinking daily on the job, and I had no idea why he suddenly started smacking my left arm and laughing to the point he couldn’t speak. He finally turned his laptop towards me and I just saw my StackOverflow profile with the icon I use at work and on GitHub and everywhere else, the picture of my first dog. He could have just spoken up (but I’d probably forgotten the answer) … he googled instead and got the answer of the person he was sitting next to.
When occasionally I have worked at big companies, now people know my dog’s face more than they know me as a person.
I've had the same experience of looking up and finding an old answer from someone I knew, but one that I made _myself_ for the exact same problem I've just hit again years later... :D
Happens to me all the time. I'm either not automating enough things, or automating too many things.
Btw, is there a simple way to backup all of ones own answers from across all stackexchange, in case the new owners mess everything up?
It has been posted elsewhere, but there is a complete data dump of stackexchange on archive.org.
I’ve had a worse experience - I end up looking for a solution to a problem only to find an unanswered question from years earlier, which was also asked by me back then :(
I've done this too. Its at the point, i figure there is no solution
If I had an dollar for searching and finding a reddit thread that I created for a question that I eventually had to find the answer to myself since somehow everyone else remembers this, I'd have at least 10 dollars.
Come on brain, you remember fucking commercials.
Hilarious and heart-warming (minus the drinking daily on the job part, of course)!
I found an answer I had posted a few years prior.
High reward for joining early is a good growth strategy.
It is also why crypto is having a run. Basically a Ponzi scheme that rewards early adopters
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).
Cryptocurrency doesn't have dividends or share buybacks which are what make stocks have inherent value.
Stocks do not need buybacks or dividends. They are rights to control a share of a company, which earns (or potentially earns) money. That’s inherently valuable even without a stock market to determine a price. You control a machine, which makes things and earns money.
Crypto is only valuable, because others think so, too. You control a place inside a distributed list. Others think a place in exactly this list is valuable, while all the other lists are shitcoins.
How do you explain the prices of Class-C shares which don't bestow voting rights to the holder? For example, GOOG trades for over 2000 a share. In fact, it even trades at a $50 premium over GOOGL, which offers voting rights. Strange.
You don’t have to control a company personally, you can also rely on other shareholders to do that. You just have to know, somebody is voting in your interests, since you probably won’t do it (but again: you could).
I don’t know whether your statement about the price difference is true and if so, I don’t know why. Maybe different free float? My statement was about inherent value not short term price negotiations via stock exchange.
I thought about an actual attack against my argument: Stocks are just shares of companies, which sell stuff that is valuable because other people think so. Some stuff might have inherent value (because it can generate money), but in the end it still comes down to people deciding something has value. Turtles all the way down.
"You don’t have to control a company personally, you can also rely on other shareholders to do that. You just have to know, somebody is voting in your interests"
How would you know they're voting in your interests?
I've never known how any other shareholder voted in any of the stock I owned. For all I know they could have been voting completely contrary to what I'd wanted.
No. Unless you own enough of a stock to vote and make a difference, stock ownership is not about influencing a company but just about hoping the value of the stock will rise, and there are many theories about why that might happen, from fundamental to technical analysis to people who invest based on the phase of the moon, divination, tips from friends, insider trading, trend following, news, etc.
Those other shareholders also want the shares to retain value, so your interests are aligned regarding my initial argument that stocks are valuable because of the voting rights.
Yes it does. Proof of stake networks (Ethereum, Tezos, etc) pay dividends + transaction fees to stakers, decentralized exchanges pay a cut of fees to token holders (with decent P/E ratios), and the list goes on.
This is an out of date view that does not match the current reality.
As a thought exercise, suppose a proof is stake currency was only used by one person. How exactly does do it’s dividends create value? In short “crypto dividends” don’t actually create any value it’s purely incrementing an arbitrary number rather than creating an income stream.
The same is true if N people use the currency without any new money coming in they can’t cash out. Therefore it’s not an actual dividend. This is why everyone calls crypto a pyramid scheme, the only way to cash out is to get someone else to buy in.
For proof of stake, I agree - I think it's useful to instead focus on net issuance. For ETH2 this could very well could be negative since the base transaction fee will be burned, and transaction fees currently are greater than miner rewards a decent percentage of the time.
Proof of stake coins that don't have much usage and mostly pay out rewards from new issuance have an interesting piece.. - they are inflating the base supply to pay out dividends that holders pay taxes on. Effectively moving normal gains from the capital gains bracket to regular income, which is sub-optimal.
For DeX's, the image is a lot better - the biggest issue here is - are fees arbitrarily high, and will they go down over time. My gut says the percentage fee will go down, but the volume increase will more than make up for this loss.
US dollars wouldn’t be worth very much either if you were the only one using them.
> The same is true if N people use the currency without any new money coming in they can’t cash out.
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.
Yes, cryptocurrency can be programmed in many different ways and can be defined as several different things at once.
PancakeBunny too! I’m considering to buy the dip…
Not all stocks have dividends.
The ones that don’t are valued on the assumption that they will in the future.
Have google, Facebook amazon or Netflix ever issued a dividend?
They are likely to do stock buybacks which are the same thing. You’re certainly not buying them for voting rights - FB and Google almost don’t give those out, and ETFs don’t pass on their voting rights but are not cheaper than the underlying stocks.
When was the last buyback?
What is your basis for saying this?
Are you asking me to link the Wikipedia article for capital asset pricing?
> The [stocks] that don’t [pay a dividend] are valued on the assumption that they will in the future.
Could you please make a specific section that justifies your claim?
I skimmed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_asset_pricing_model but I don't see anything there that validates your claim. I may have overlooked something, if so please let me know.
I'm skeptical of your claim. Based on some other reading [1]:
> To manage your portfolio, you need a way to compare your different investments and decide which are worth keeping. The dividend discount model and the capital asset pricing model are two methods for appraising the value of your investments. DDM is based on the value of the dividends a share of stock brings in, whereas CAPM evaluates risks and returns compared to the market average.
You could have written "the Wikipedia article for capital asset pricing". I don't see the need to make it a question.
Your comment comes across as passive aggressive, unfortunately. I hope that wasn't your intent.
Buybacks are very popular in crypto. Its call token burning. Binance does it all the time with BNB.
Yep like the stock market and the idea of money.
and being involved with a common question
the more newbish the better
It's always interesting to see what SO posts I participated in - either as an asker or answerer - that became popular over time.
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 ;-)
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.
I'm chuckling at the idea that you could have possibly misinterpreted that post.
"No, int_19h, he said to NOT use regex to parse HTML!"
int_19h: wạ͈ͣ̿i̘̱͚̝̍̎ṱ̜̙ͯ̏̾̐̃ͮ,̿̑̓̒̇̄ ͈̺̯͙̰ͦ̐̎̂w̜̦̱͇̝͂̐̈́̄ͅh͚̞̯̰͑͑̐̋ͪa̩͕͑̂̒̔t̪̬̱̞̞̹͌̿́̆̑ͮͮ?͕̮͒̊̃͒̊̈
/s
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.
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.
> it's how useful you are/were to the site
One person asks a single naive question once: "How do I undo the most recent local commit with GIT", gets 200,000 reputation.
Another person answers 100 complex, delicate questions useful to high-performance computation underlying widely-available cloud services; gets an average score of 5, has 5000 reputation.
Another person occasionally asks and answers a few questions, reaching 2000 reputation, but does a lot of editing work, triages new posts, fixes up tag pages etc.
Who has been more useful to the site?
> One person asks a single naive question once: "How do I undo the most recent local commit with GIT", gets 200,000 reputation.
I imagine the person that asked the question about git was the first to ask. There's a benefit to being the first, or asking unique questions. The value of the first time that was asked and answered usefully on SO is vastly greater than the 100th time, and the value of having it at one time compared to a year later is also great. Sometimes what matters is how it's asked, so it looks like other people's questions.
> Another person answers 100 complex, delicate questions useful to high-performance computation underlying widely-available cloud services; gets an average score of 5, has 5000 reputation.
I would guess those complex and delicate questions didn't help a lot of people, or they would have upvoted, right? Whether that's because people didn't see them or it's so esoteric as to not really help many people, the result is the same.
> Who has been more useful to the site?
The person who asked a question that got a useful answer first, or that answered a question usefully first, is greater.
Stack Overflow would be a pretty shit site if the first time someone answered that git question was in 2021 and not a decade or more ago, so optimizing for people identifying, asking and answering unique questions that match the questions other people have and are easily identified when people search for that problem makes sense IMO.
In the mechanical turk metaphor, you're willing to pay a lot for someone to take out your overflowing smelly trash because that's what you need, but you're not willing to pay as much for someone to do the same thing a day later if it's not even half full and doesn't smell. You reward people more for doing the things you need.
The person who asked the naive question that a million other new git users will have at some time or another.
If that person hadn't asked the question, any number of other people would have asked it, probably a couple of days later.
And then they would have gotten the rep
They're fake points that don't matter
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.
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?
Also, if these answers contained any code, it might end up the most used code you've ever written.
Out of curiosity I've done code searches on identifying substrings and found code from my stackoverflow answers all over the place, though of course the hits tend to be in that long tail of seldom used code out there. Pretty sure my most used code would be in deliberate open source contributions.
I'm in the top 3%, joined in 2010, it's mostly all from questions though. I only posted 8 answers, vs 83 questions. When I joined I remember allot of the issues I came across has no answers, so I guess with the years to come lots of others had the same issues/questions. At the time I thought it was just me, everyone else seems to know so much. Guess we all start at the bottom at some point.
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.
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.
a CDN wouldn't go amiss either, or at least some sort of geographic mirroring
Agreed. Having Jeff and Joel on the podcast was great and the hosts really complimented each other. However, once Jeff left, that was pretty much for me though and I tuned out after a few episodes. Just wasn't the same without Jeff.
Personally, I was a latecomer to the podcast and was about a year behind the launch of SO but still in top 13 today.
After all these years, I still remember exact locations I walked while listening to that. Funny thing, memory.
That’s funny, so do I!
Method of Loci
Not quite the same as what the commenters are mentioning: an involuntary, strong association of ideas and (real) places ... still, an interesting method, which may harness the brain's ability to connect location with particular non-location thoughts.
I used to listen to every episode of that while taking walks around Berkeley. I totally forgot about it until I saw this comment!
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.
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.
I'm a fan of Spolsky's writing. I haven't heard of that podcast before. I see joelonsoftware.com has some expired links. Where can I listen to this archived podcast ?
You have them on SoundCloud [1]. Note, there is a mess with numbering of episodes.
Came here to share this! What a weird and innocent time that was.
Ha, I'm user 26! So funny: https://stackoverflow.com/users/26/shawn
What's the story about the XSS vulnerability? If this is the right time for that...
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.
With Jeff, loved the podcast. But without Jeff, not so much.
Do top contributors get compensated financially ? This is a question that is burning me out of curiosity...
Do not get me wrong, I understand the whole point of giving back to a community, selfishly helping others and all that. But lets get a simple example: For example the famous Jon Skeet. https://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet
Based on the account statistics this user is a member as of today, for 12 years and 8 months. So a total of 152 months. Again according to the site statistics, Jon Skeet provided so far 35,254 answers.
Making some assumptions of continuous linear work, :-) this user in the last almost 13 years, provided an average of 232 answers PER MONTH,non-stop for the last 13 years.
That is an average of almost 8 answers PER DAY non stop, 13 years in row, while having a job at Google ( per the site account details ...) maybe a family, side interests ? etc ...
Assuming the mythical Jon Skeet, is not a team of 200 engineers at Google :-) I want to understand how a person who provides EIGHT well researched developer related answers PER DAY, non stop, for 13 years, feels about the site founders making 2 Billion while this user ( again...presumably...) gets a pat in the back and "reputation " ?
>Do top contributors get compensated financially
Not from Stack Overflow / Stack Exchnage
That's for sure
There may be employers that look at your standing and say, "hey - let's toss a couple extra $K in this candidate's offer"
..but I've not seen or experienced it
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 ;-)
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.
How much of the billion dollars will you get?
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%
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.
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.
By contrast, I have the 639th Reddit account and I don’t seem to be anywhere close to the top percentile in karma.
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:
So, the site has 14+ million users with no real activity and the percentile ranking is based on users with 200+ points.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+ | 14,875,253The compression of the top end of the ranking among active/once-active users is pretty extreme (or rather, I guess it's probably more a factor of just how many people are at the low end of the scale): I have around 1/4 your reputation but that's still good for "top 0.91% overall".
I have a similar experience though, I haven't been active for many years, and have a handful of very simple answers to common problems that still make the reputation graph pretty linear.
>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?
Eventually you choose "Sign-in with Google"
I was there a few months and I had 20-30 points. I left because of grammar nazis.
My point is the no real activity is bad intepretion of this chart.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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).
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.
This has been my exact experience. So to me it's always been a read only site.
Adding my voice to the quorum, same here.
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.
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.
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.
Having a barrier helps manageability of the site, so from a business' perspective it's been good, indeed.
Don't forget that a site being able to be managed & stay in business is also good for users.
It wasn't good for the users whose questions I wasn't allowed to answer, but you have a point.
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.
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.
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.
If a question is very popular, a lot of people think it's like a normal forum and post “me too” answers. (Or, at least, they used to, before everyone knew Stack Overflow.) So there's a mechanism to “protect” questions so you need at least 10 rep (on that site – the “you contributed lots on another site so probably aren't a spammer” bonus doesn't count) before you can answer.
Very few questions are protected.
The first post on SO for most accounts tend to be from Newbs. The people see the question and think Read The Fucking Manual and downvote. Then you have zero karma and you can't do anything else.
The problem is that the Newb doesn't even know where to start in the manual.
If you want, I'll give you some points by making a bounty on some old question and giving it to you. You have to answer it though.
Thank you, but this was never something that I wanted to do for my own interest.
I just saw someone with an unsolved problem and found out that I'd had to go through loops to help, so I gave up.
Actually it seems that owners became rich and it's now a popular site without my help, so I guess it can still survive without me :)
As helpful as you no doubt would be, until you interact with SO in some way you're indistinguishable from a misleading moron.
That wasn't a problem in any of the other forums I've contributed to. Go figure!
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.
Do you just forget your passwords? Why would you make so many SO accounts?
Why would they -- SX, that is -- need so many different sites?
Are you suggesting you use a different account per SX site?
No, I don't, but I'm suggesting that the UI could well be (or especially, earlier have been?) confusing enough for a lot of people not to realise they could use the same one on them all.
Just, say, google some programming question, get directed to SO, create an ID and post your question. Some time later, google an OS -- or maths, literature, whatever -- question, get directed to a different SX site, and repeat the process before (or wholly without) realising they're parts of the same whole.
Possibly do the same a few more times, and hey presto, you have umpteen SX IDs.
Seems utterly plausible to me. Not you?
> No, I don't, but I'm suggesting that the UI could well be (or especially, earlier have been?) confusing enough for a lot of people not to realise they could use the same one on them all.
There was a time when SO used their own openId server/backend.
It was confusing because you had one openId stackexchange account to sign-in into something but still had to create an account on each stack and you could login from any stack but not with your email but with the openId account... for which you used your email to login... so the URL jumping around was confusing. Add one forced logging out when cookies expire or something and it was frustrating just to log in because you could be logged in into SO but not into SU for instance (despite using the same login but with a different identity).
I could log in with another openId providers but the details are fuzzy.
I can't downvote your comment here on HN, presumably because I don't have enough reputation. And HN doesn't even tell me.
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).
I think you need 100 points in order to downvote. HN generally prefers to upvote good content rather than to downvote bad content.
you need >500 points
I've got close to 600 ... yet only see the downvote option on very new posts
It's a mitigation to the "bury brigade" problem digg used to have. I think a relatively low hurdle is a good balance.
For me, I just don't use it often enough to log back in. It's largely been supplanted by browsing issue trackers and reading the source.
At the same time, google search results are massively less useful now and if I don't get a hit, I'm going to reach out to the source.
To that extent, I think SO has the same problem as Google - it will regress to the mean.
This is also because google search results will be flooded with SO mirrors that rerender content but with more ads.
I like logging in and bookmark answers I might need later.
Didn't you also need a few upvotes on comments before it would let you post an answer?
The other way around. You can't comment without a bit of reputation. You can always ask and answer questions.
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.
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.
Can't upvote on SO without spending ??? hours farming karma. People start answers with "don't have enough reputation to comment, but in response to the other answer [...]". Left the only answer on several questions, probably averaging 0.2 upvotes per answer.
My high priority work questions: mostly no answers, even years later. I wrote a self answer, years later one or zero upvotes.
I ask a question with an example, the only answer "solves" the example and ignores the question, I self answer correctly when I figure it out on my own, years later no upvotes.
Several questions I arrive from Google are closed without an answer, or duplicate to a completely offtopic question. Or it's an XY question where I still need an answer for X but I don't have the secret question Y.
If you're not actively gaming SO for karma, it can be kind of a wasteland for anything but read only.
Oh yeah, if you don't have enough karma to upvote then I totally agree (especially if you've put in the effort). I was assuming that you had upvote privileges.
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.]
Is there public data behind this, or your estimate?
I wonder how many of those 10,000 views were from logged in users? I’m guessing there are a lot of people who use Stack Overflow without ever creating an account.
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.
It's gotten brutal. I was learning a new language last year and all my posts were downvoted out of the que.
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.
Easy to build out the platform, difficult to build out the knowledge base (especially since so many areas have already been covered on SO)
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Yeah what? Maybe it’s some local dialect.
Not sure TomTom had as dominant a brand for navigation as Stackoverflow has for Q&A. Stackoverflow is pretty much alone in this space still which is pretty amazing when you think about it.
Quora?
Ah no I meant technical/developer Q&A of course
Brand is not a moat.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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."
SO has a SEO moat.
As soon as the answers I need start appearing in some other site, I will use the new site.
> 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!
I want both! With commentary!
And SO is particularly hostile to this, with their "duplicated question" giving canonical status to obsolete answers.
Good point. When I wrote that comment I was imagining the value of something like Datomic, which could let you see the result of a query at any point in time. In 2014, how did someone answer this question?
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.
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.
“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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The latter. The initial wordings described multiple q and a sites in the article.
Right, but MS probably isn't interested in that content for its software dev portfolio.
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.
One's about discussions; the other isn't.
Sure, but BOTH about solving problems and getting answers. That's the important thing.
The culture of SO become incredibly weird and IMHO will eventually sink it.
If you zoom out far enough you can always find a shared level of abstraction, but I don't think that's helpful.
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.
In my experience probability of getting a useful answer, especially for a question about a specific library, is much higher on Github Discussions.
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...
Could they potentially integrate the existing StackExchange content, given that it’s creative commons licensed?
For people who read SO (rather than ask and answer), SO is useful in the places where the documentation is lacking.
The way to integration that content into an existing project would be to document it better - possibly with a FAQ for development questions. That doesn't really need CC licensing (its helpful, but not essential) in that people who want to contribute documentation can already do so.
Just pull up a SO tag for the library, find the top voted question, and figure out where it goes in the docs.
Q&A shouldn't be used as an alternative to documentation.
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
I totally agree with you. Legislators should watch out for too much power consolidation here.
I am not sure, if developer tools are on the watchlist of state regulators, nor am I sure, if they should be.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
Was it always this way? It's been a few years since I last gave it a shot.
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)
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.
A lot of people want to treat SO as a forum and instead of contributing an answer with the right information try to comment on a post.
Many times, people try answering questions in comments when they're unsure of an answer rather than trying to say "this is the answer" and create an answer of their own that is sufficiently in depth to be helpful to others.
Other times, new users try to ask questions on the comments of "I'm having this problem too, do you have a solution yet?" or, while they do try to ask for clarification on the question - do so on questions that are stale.
Lastly, comments were often (in the days of 0 rep comment permissions) targets of spam that could go undiscovered.
The way that SO decided to solve these problems was to add a bit of friction to leaving a comment. This meant that users who were trying to contribute answers were directed to answers; users who were trying to ask questions on stale content would... get frustrated and go to a question where there is sufficient information; and automated spam would be that much harder (requiring an investment of time from the spammer).
It's not an ideal solution, but from the standpoint of a site with volunteers curating and moderating the content, creates fewer problems for the people who invest the time than other solutions do. Burning out those people who invest the time is one of the things that has concerned people in the company concerned about the existing community - losing them would have SO devolve into something that more closely resembled the software development section of Yahoo answers... or https://www.answers.com/t/computer-programming
I don't get it really but I think a lot of people have a similar experience. So while technically you are allowed to post an answer/question the moment you join there must be something else standing in the way. I don't know what that could be but so many people wouldn't complain if there wasn't something.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't see how you can call it "hogging". Having a high reputation doesn't prevent anyone else from getting a high reputation too.
For me the reputation points are a proxy for how helpful I've been to other people overall. I like being helpful. Suddenly seeing that score go down for absolutely no reason would be very disincentivizing for me.
SO had quite some toxic moderators who came in early and dominated everything because of their 5-fig karma. It drove me away from helping out there.
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...
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.
Sometimes you're forced to work with older technology, and it's nice that you can still find answers to questions that many would consider obsolete. I'd hate to see a clean-up effort that makes that information go away forever.
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 3½ 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.
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.
What are some esoteric things that you think are stupid right now? Asking for a friend.
Tesla
Mined about 100 on some old Radeon. Sold them at $30, because I thought they peaked. Trying not to think about that too much:)
Wow...crazy
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.
I don't think many people who do something big and attribute the success to their own foresight are being truthful.
> 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.
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
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.
> 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.
Same here, also 7%. But I benefited from a recalc of the question vs answer points. You might have as well?
> 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%?
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
Up in standing, but 7 is less than 12, so numerically down.
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.
> 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)
*power of compound interest + first mover advantage. If you're the first to ask a silly question that is a common stumbling block for beginners, you're bound to get a steady stream of reputation for life. There's diminishing returns for those arriving later, as low hanging fruit are depleted. For example, see https://stackoverflow.com/q/927358
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
>You must create a new Microsoft 365 hotlive account to reply to this message.
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.
Microsoft or Salesforce. Most of the value over the past few years has shifted from general programming topics to platform-specific StackExchange communities.
Well, those internet points are at least likely to be harder currency than the highly inflationary retweets, upvotes, or likes.
Microsoft has GitHub and I have to admit, I look more into OSS code than I search something on StackOverflow nowadays.
I'm a little bit active as in asking questions and sometimes answering questions I google and find the solution to. Yet, 50% of my rank points comes from one answer I made soon after I created the account.
Owning both GitHub and StackOverflow would be one hell of a combo for Microsoft. They'd really have almost the entire worldwide developer community in their hands.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
> The last thing I want to do is exploit Stack Overflow users for corporate gain, even accidentally. That's horrible.
Not horrible enough to stand in the way of $1.8 Bn, though.
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).
Do you feel there was a certain threshold you passed which made recruiters see your profile and start contacting you? E.g you passed 10k score or won some gold badge in some framework?
Hard to say in hindsight. I’ve been getting contacted by recruiters mentioning my SO profile for more than a decade, but I’ve also been active on Stack Overflow since the very beginning, and earned a lot of reputation very early on (and much less since). I’ve since dropped of the first page of top users (second or third now) but I can’t tell whether that’s led to a decrease in contacts (it probably has but that’s been balanced by an increase due to seniority in my field).
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.
Hahah, neat idea. I can't think of a more "NFT-able" answer than this one https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...
Same, I'm "top 0.20% overall" on askubuntu.com because of some simple questions I asked in 2010 (inactive since).
And a nice reminder of being an early poster to popular things.
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.
Many repo owners close discussion that ain't bugs or feature request because of moderation workload.
Me too! My user id is 26 :P
(this is not compound interest.. )
compound interest is interest proportional to how much you already have. This is like fixed absolute interest. Not sure why I was downvoted.
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?
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.
>> 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."
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.
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.
Berkshire Hathaway has an exactly the same approach: an acquired company keeps operating in the way which made it successful.
I won't say this approach turned out bad for Berkshire or Mr. Buffett personally.
This approach requires
1. a _huge_ amount of trust and respect for the acquired team to not meddle/interfere, and
2. a huge amount of restraint to not force the acquired team into conforming to whatever standards and norms are present in the acquiring team.
Both of these are exceedingly rare.
I'd say this is accurate for the most part but they bought the first company I worked for out of college and they really tightened the screws on our benefits packages under the guise of "unifications" with their existing stuff. They ended up moving me to a high deductible insurance plan which was absolute nads
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.
Wow, yeah, never say that. Even if you believe it's true, saying nothing will change is sort of like waving a red flag in front of the bull. Of course things will change over time, they always do!
Its like fixing the wifi router for your parents and then having them call you to complain that their emails now have a signature at the bottom... "I didnt do that", "Well, you were the last one to touch the internet"
Except that in this situation, you really did put the signature on those emails.
Well to be fair that is how my coworkers (and I) think too. The one with the latest commit get a ping when the top break.
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.
Yep. At best this holds true for 12-18 months. The founders/execs play dumb in the interest of minimizing attrition.
I agree.
Why buying a company if you don’t want to make any change? Investment firms make profits by buying low and selling high, and it is hard to sell higher than the purchase price if things are kept the way it is.
SO being SO has increased it's value year over year. There's no need to change anything, just ride those coat tails to profit.
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps they want liquidity, a more diverse portfolio, etc.
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
If 1.8 billion in the hand is worth more than 1.8 billion year to year, then Prosus would've never bought.
The only way this deal is advantageous for both parties is if something changes, and unfortunately that something is probably Stack Overflow.
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.
Which leaves bigger debt for users to overcome and work past to continue to see even the original value prior to all of this financial activity.
If the burden gets too big, people won't believe it's worth it, and the whole thing dies.
When they do a valuation of a company they also take into account future profits. So all of it should be included in the price.
> Why buying a company if you don’t want to make any change?
To collect its revenue.
> Why buying a company if you don’t want to make any change?
because it keeps printing money which you can use to acquire other companies. That is what Buffett does.
As a financial buyer there are only 3 ways to make money: 1) higher multiple (buy low, sell high), 2) improve cash flow, or 3) lever-it-up with debt (like when you buy a house with a big mortgage). #2 is the only method that really changes the operations and probably the majority of financial buyers are too busy/lazy to be bothered with it. OTOH, some might hire a new CEO 'with something to prove' give him a lot of options/equity and who know what that person will do. But, basically, if the CEO doesnt change, and the CEOs compensation scheme doesnt dramatically change, and no mergers occur, then the company probably wont change.
My employer is owned by private equity companies. Every few years there's a sale and we get told nothing will change... and every time I've seen (which is I think 2-3, over ~13 years) nothing noticeable has changed.
I used to think the same, until the last layoff wave took me out.
I feel like this is basically a cookie cutter declaration you make as part of an acquisition nowadays, not too dissimilar to “sorry we can’t provide feedback for why we rejected you as a job candidate.”
Why is it naive? If you buy distressed assets, sure, but why would you necessarily want to change a working business?
it's naive because it's a common claim that pretty much never plays out that way after a year or two. as to why, i'd say the reasons are poor, but it's because of ego, desire for power and influence, greed
I don’t think holding companies are famous for that.
>Reddit seems like an example of a successful acquisition
For whom? For people who uses it since the beginning it isn’t even the same place anymore. It’s UX (and I’m not talking about the aesthetics of the new design, I don’t mind those) is legitimately the worst I’ve ever experienced and the quality of discussion has went down the drain. Even if you find a tightly controlled community dedicated to a topic you’re interested in it’s either one extreme to another or doesn’t last long.
That doesn’t even get into the constant rolling out for Facebook-tier features that no Reddit user ever wanted. I stopped using Reddit last month after ~12 years and I’ve since realized I was getting nothing but regurgitated memes and anger from a dozen people replying to my every comment who aren’t even addressing what I was saying just arguing for arguments sake.
It’s basically what Facebook groups were in 2016 at this point. I’m sure it’s a great acquisition for those who bought it, but for the old power users it’s anything but.
> For whom?
Well, most people right?
Power users are by almost by definition an insignificant (but over represented in discussions and noise making) cohort right?
If the platform keeps quality content, gets more users over time and maintains both a good DAU and RPU, then, well, what objective metric of success do you want to measure?
Number of happy power users?
I really think most people don't care about that metric.
With SO it remains to be seen...; the power users there are the mods, and they contribute tangible value to the platform... but... you know, the writing is already on the wall. Whether this does it, or it was coming anyway, it's hard to say.
I addressed the fact that there is little to no quality content on Reddit anymore with the exception of a few niche subs (and they tend tend to be quality for long.). This was actually the main point I made.
Objective metrics (like user engagement and active users per day) are probably more relevant than your opinion of “quality” content.
Not really, we aren’t talking about user engagement in fact quite the opposite. The whole point of this comment chain is that SO may go the same route where they sacrifice quality for such engagement to turn a profit. It’s true quality isn’t something that is easy to quantitate but user engagement sure isn’t equal to quality at all. Facebook has ridiculously high user engagement and multiple times (almost 10x) the users that Reddit does and if you try arguing that it is full of quality content you’ll be laughed out of pretty much any room.
Just so we’re clear and to further my point, the website you’re posting on exists because over a decade ago people said that Reddit had dropped significantly in terms of quality of discussion. I’m not the only one saying this you find it here and even on Reddit anytime the subject of quality of content on Reddit is brought up.
old.reddit.com it's the only way to browse Reddit. Not sure for how long, but it's there. That way you don't have to deal with any of the new nonsense that has become Reddit.
And for mobile stick ".compact" at the end.
3rd party apps are a better experience than old.reddit.com to be honest. Rif, sync, boost, relay, etc.
All of those are mobile-only though.
On the upside I think reddit's search team has done a good job. It is not the joke it once was at least.
Have you found an online community filling the niche of old reddit?
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
In my occasional interactions on Reddit it seems a very large proportion of users are on the "new" Reddit, the mobile site, or an app. I'm sure it varies by community though (especially ones that heavily use custom CSS and things that don't work on the new site).
Just as one example I can recall, you can do things that are kind of like "quote retweets" with the cross-post feature that don't really make sense on the old site (on "new Reddit" when you crosspost the original post/title are displayed in a little window so you'll see people make titles that are actually commenting on the original post and not on whatever the link actually is). On old Reddit these just show up as links to whatever the original post linked to, but with the "meta-commentary" title. More than once I've encountered one of these with confusion until a comment explained, or I thought to check the tab that shows where else the same link has been posted.
> In my occasional interactions on Reddit it seems a very large proportion of users are on the "new" Reddit, the mobile site, or an app.
Same. And many of them message me directly via chat when they have a question about a subreddit I moderate. Chat which I check about every two months, which is for some reason fully distinct from both the regular messaging functionality (which to be fair, is very well hidden) and the two methods of contacting the moderators.
i.reddit.com is mobile-optimized while still having the old.reddit.com sensibilities.
TIL!
I don't think a SPA is the problem, in fact a well-made (end to end) SPA should be faster after an initial, cacheable load. It's the fact that it isn't well-made and it's bloated with god knows what.
I agree.
old.reddit.com + RES is still the best Reddit experience.
by FAR
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.
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.
If you look at the past 30 years of frontend, I don't think you'd find a place where you would want to pause the change. The IE 6 era? The Flash era? The jQuery era?
fwiw, I use a third party app, and can't really imagine using the web-based interface or their official app.
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.
Yes. That is what I intended and did not articulate as well as you just did.
They should ask slashdot how the redesign worked out...
And Digg.
>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.
That was after Conde Nast sold.
Also before. It isn't something new. I'm amazed it can still become worse but it does.
No it isn't.
Are we really at YES NO YES NO discussion levels?
Conde Nast also owns Ars Technica, which personally is my favorite tech-news site and has high and consistent quality.
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.
> 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.
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?
For what it's worth, even i.reddit.com aka reddit.com/.compact is still working.
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.
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.
If you don't like downvotes then make your own subreddit and attract like opinions. I personally don't think posts should be voted more negative than -1.
That's really mature, bravo.
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.
I think the downvotes on my comment show I have hit a nerve. I did not disagree with any of the points I listed, I am simply pointing out a fact. Downvoting this comment does disprove not my point.
The downvotes without engaging with my post are what is wrong with commodified community participation (comment/post points); exactly what harms Stack Overflow in the long run.
You posted a tangential rant disparaging the comment section of another website. The voting system is the most appropriate response to flamebait.
> The entire company is staying in place: we just have different owners now.
Says everyone who is involved in huge company acquisitions ever, and most of the time it does not hold true. The rest is common marketing talk.
I'm certainly not saying it is impossible for that to be true, but such a statement itself does not hold any value.
> 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.
> Conde Nast managed not to destroy Reddit after buying it.
Reddit is simply dying a slow death. I wouldn't touch the place now.
>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...
> 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.
Reddit's managed that on their own.
> 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.
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.
Reddit itself didn't exist in the early 2000s wtf is this
/r/darknetplan itself is from late 2010
You're just bullshitting wtf
These are verifiable facts (go to /r/darknetplan and cmd-f for "community for" and then select that text).
> Reddit seems like an example of a successful acquisition.
In relation to money, or to users?
Reddit is awful now, forcing everyone to an app and privacy out the window
> Conde Nast managed not to destroy Reddit after buying it.
Now Bon Appetit on the other hand...
"You've read 3 of your 5 free answers this month"
Sadly, I think you probably nailed it. Back in the day, “experts exchange” was the place to get answers to questions, and look where they’re at.
2 billion dollars. That’s a LOT of money even by 2021 standards. You better believe the investors will be looking for their ROI.
Experts exchange was NEVER the place to get answers. They just perfected the SEO so that Google would point to them first. But everything was behind paywalls and it was never useful.
That wasn’t my experience, but I’m referring to the mid to late 90’s timeframe before “paywall” was even a thing.
SO is CC at the moment IIRC - time to download it all and stick the historic stuff on a static site
Seems to be the case of now https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing .
One of the more recent features added to SO was a timeline of activity and within the timeline you can see which license each the question is under. Here's an example for a random question https://stackoverflow.com/posts/49083680/timeline .
It's kind of weird that while the questions have a license declared the answer don't ... not sure what that's all about.
They're already periodically sending a snapshot to The Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/stackoverflow.com
They can’t legally retroactively change the license on existing content though - and as soon as they change their EULA to say “You irrevocably assign copyright on your postings to us” then they’ll lose their thought-leader users - and the rest tumbles.
All StackOverflow answers are Creative Commons by now. That won't be possible.
> "You've read 3 of your 5 free answers this month"
The content was created by the contributors for free, it would be (legal) theft to do so.
I sold a company to Naspers once (the parent company of Prosus). Their philosophy is to let their portfolio companies continue to operate independently.
I continued to be the CEO of my company, and I reported to a regional CEO, who reported to the CEO of Naspers. I share this because I found it odd that "CEO" was basically a middle manager ;)
That’s interesting and sounds positive you had autonomy.
Did they have an expected return on investment and just use your existing planned earnings growth? If they didn’t change your earnings slope, did they have a timeframe in mind for the multiple they used to buy you?
For example, if you earned $1 in the year of purchase and $.50 the year before and projected $2,3,4,5 in the next four years; did they use this for your purchase price? Or did they project some efficiency that shifted your projections to $3,4,5,6 and used that for the purchase valuation?
Only if you’re able to discuss, obviously.
Our company had just transitioned from social networking to social commerce, and was starting to build out features like a shopping cart, product listings, etc. So the valuation was mostly hand-waiving based on the fact that we were the most recognized e-commerce brand in the region, despite not really being an e-commerce business yet.
We were doing about half a billion in annual GMV but none of it monetized yet.
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.
Great take. You're very likely to be proven in that observation.
"Log in to see 8 answers on Qu^H^HStack Overflow!"
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.
You saw it with their latest April fools joke - Premium Copy & Paste
The whole point of creating Stack Overflow was to not have subscription access like Experts Exchange. Doing that would be suicide for SO.
That was a long time ago. SO has the network effects to pull this off
SO can be cloned very easily nowadays. Network effects are actually getting worse with time; fewer and fewer people actually hang around SO, and it's increasingly spammed by students looking for free homework and people gaming for reputation.
As soon as SO vacates the free tier even a little bit, someone else will jump in.
SO is already cloned - every few months another new SO content farm comes along and clogs up the Google search results.
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.
I'll just be happy if they keep their Creative Commons licensing.
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.
StackOverflow was successfully expanding their service even before this purchase. I'd imagine stackoverflow jobs is a valuable area - sure it's not linkedin but it's still really good. SO also has really strong community following so there's always room for easy expanding.
It's not about the QA area but other areas that surround it. There are a lot of ways to integrate products to QA part of the web - you already see "Python jobs" on python questions which I'd imagine should work really well!
I'd imagine Stackoverflow for Teams will be a big part of it too. We use it a t work and I'm sure lots of big enterprises would be happy to pay good money to build in-house QA and knowledge sharing.
>I expect this to go like Reddit has
"Download the app to see the answers!"
Subs, ads or something else to monetize. You can't spend $1.8b and expect things to stay the same.
I wonder if these acquisitions are like the new art collections of the super wealthy.
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!"
On the other hand, it could lead to a decline of infamous "SO programming style" which is not that bad.
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...
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/
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
Raymond Chen answered my question. And then blogged about it in Old New Thing.
Link?
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.
It wasn't just the SO question. He posted on the Shroomery message board advertising the site in it's earlier days.
Woh, how did this lead to his demise?
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.
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?
> then SO handed over the data proving it?
Yes, something like that.
The very first mention of the Silk Road online was from a user named "altoid" on Shroomery – the post is actually still up: https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/1386099...
altoid was also the name of the account that had originally posted another question on SO, not the one about sessions, but one about Tor services: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15445285/how-can-i-conne...
The SO account was later changed from altoid to frosty. The email address used to register the SO account was rossulbricht@gmail.com.
Also when the FBI imaged the Silk Road server, the username was "frosty". There were just so many links going back to him :-/
There have been long articles about the Silk Road and its demise, the Wired ones have a lot of details including what I mentioned above. Part 1 is here: https://www.wired.com/2015/04/silk-road-1/
good stuff, thanks!
Yes, the DOJ subpoenaed Stack Overflow as part of the investigation. It's pretty standard.
Normally the DOJ gets access to all the emails of the target of the investigation, then from there they look through the emails and subpoena any companies that might hold additional information - such as Stack Overflow.
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.
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'.
Did it really remember all your choices or did your choices just match with the default settings (strictly necessary = on, everything else = off)?
In either case, it's still a problem. It's my impression that if you make the effort to actually customize and decline those options you'll have to do it repeatedly since very few sites will remember those choices - probably on purpose. Luckily uBlock Origin hides most of those annoying consent popups.
Yeah, that’s getting really old. Especially since it’s each site in the family.
Where did his 3,675 reputation come from? He only asked 2 questions and has a small number of badges.
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).
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.
Missing rep could be explained by the daily reputation limit of 200. Many upvotes on the same day when the questions get linked from news articles and discussions like this, only will count until daily cap is hit.
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.
> 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.
Ja true, but don't we Saffers all wish we bought more Naspers on the JSE before their gamble on Tencent.
A bit ironic that the “nationalists” made their money from a Chinese company though…
Nationalists always like each other, it's not like China is asking SA to marry a chinese girl for each yuan invested...
Especially not, since China suffers from disparity with much greater number of boys than girls.
>Apartheid
Sure, but it did gain significant market share and had a massive ROI for many decades for anyone on the profitable side of it. For raging racists & (white) sociopaths, it wasn't so bad.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Getting other people to do hard work in a coordinated fashion to create a valuable collective outcome is itself a form of hard work. On that point, we seem to agree.
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.
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.
What is good for the company is not necessarily good for developers or community.
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".
> 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.
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.
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.
And this is complicated even more by all the "soft" topic sites, each of which has its own culture.
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.
> 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.
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.)
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.
I heard that the deal got closed by the mods
They might have first class access to data that enables a powerful shift in integrated development.
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?
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.
> 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.
Agreed, it's an interesting complement to Codecademy and SimilarWeb
Ever heard of survivorship bias?
Yeah but why do those who survive survive?
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.
And how does this apply to modern investment funds who have to regularly provide client reports and make disclosures?
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Because people don't know the performance of dart throwing monkeys https://www.forbes.com/sites/rickferri/2012/12/20/any-monkey...
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How many times can one person win the lottery? The large firms seem to successfully bet on winners quite a bit.
_Somebody_ wins it every week.
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.
With enough VC firms, and enough small bets, that's not guaranteed to be true.
Luck, usually.
Mostly luck.
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.
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.
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.
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>
Glad to hear I'm not the only one that lost their S.O. account because they decided to try the amazing sounding OpenID.
It’s been several years now but they had a long (1 year?) window where you could migrate to a supported login method.
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
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.
Me too!
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
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!
> 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.
Maybe I misunderstood what it would take, but one of the first things I saw was "account at least 30 days old". At this point, I guess I probably have that one covered, but at the time I didn't want this on my mind for a month.
SO doesn’t have threads.
Discussions are discouraged.
There are clearly people commenting here who don’t understand how the SO works, and haven’t bothered to read the FAQ.
This is exactly why SO needs restrictions on new accounts.
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.
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.
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.
Except the occasional $1.8B
13 years after founding. Most startups don't expect to exist that long.
What is wrong with event sourcing? We also built our app without any microservices but event based processing is actually quite good pattern. Basically the state of the application can be replayed with the events.
Nothing at all. These are all very valid things to do in the right circumstances. But when a certain idea gains hype in the industry, people try to fit it into all sorts of areas and I was making a generalized statement on that.
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.
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.
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.
> (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.
> 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.
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.
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.
People learn in different ways.
Some people will read the documentation, and MDN etc have excellent documentation.
Others will ask questions on SO.
That's likely just a function of the popularity of such language, in terms of constantly attracting newbies.
"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.
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.
OLX is the most popular Craigslist-type website at least in Portugal (and maybe in more places in Europe as well?)
In Romania as well. Also PayU is a common payment processing gateway around here as well.
In Brazil too. And iFood is the largest "food-tech" company in Latin America.
Popular in Poland as well.
Popular in India also
Same for Ukraine
Olx and Swiggy are huge in India.
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?)
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?
Interesting. I've hardly heard of any of those companies - are they mostly non-US?
Delivery hero is pretty big in Germany and other EU countries.
Definitely eastern europe / asia focused
Takealot Group (subdivided into Takealot, Superbalist, and MrD) is basically a trinity of Amazon, [insert fashion e-tailer here], and UberEats, for South Africa.
Some of them are present in Europe. eMag is probably the biggest e-tailer in eastern europe.
Swiggy is the most popular food delivery company in India
Mail.ru Group, btw, is a nasty Russian trash internet holding with interests everywhere, including food delivery
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.
Reminds me of "Tencent owns reddit" threads on reddit then someone points out that Naspers owns Tencent. Hilarity ensures.
Tencent also owns almost half of Epic.
Which was extra funny given Tencent's tiny ownership share in reddit.
In the business world it doesn't take much to exert a big influence on a company.
Indeed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naspers is a fascinating read.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
>Time to revisit my assumptions with respect to how companies are owned.
And what would those be? I'm curious
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%)
It totally blew my mind a few years ago to discover that this is also common in the bar & restaurant world.
That would low key blow my mind a bit. I enjoy corporate stuff and stock numbers as an inane thing. Never came across bars and restaurants and their ownerships
Is it advantageous for a company to own some of its competitor's stock?
Does it represent a conflict of interest?
Spotify and Tencent Music swapped shares when they did a deal together.
There is some hand wringing with all the gaming companies Tencent owns or has a stake in. They own Supercell which was worth $10B+ before. League of Legends parent Riot. A stake in Kakao Daum that does gaming stuff too.
On top of the 40% of Fortnite parent Epic Games, they own 10 or 15% of PUBG parent Bluehole. They own 5%+ stakes in Ubisoft and Activision Blizzard (which owns Candy Crush parent King Games). They are a huge game publisher in China and okay in rest of Asia. So they get to publish a lot of games like WoW in China.
They own a handful of smaller studios and a stake in probably a dozen other gaming studios at minimum. Usually when I say studios I mean outside China too. Miniclip and Agar.io might be familiar to people. 20% of Glu Mobile too which makes a lot of the branded kitsch apps for Kardashians etc. they just got bought so not sure if ownership remains.
Tencent is the closest successor to Berkshire Hathaway. Their other minority stakes are wild too. Minority stakes each worth billions include JD.com(Amazon of China), Kakao Daum as mentioned, Snap[chat], Tesla, Pinduoduo (China’s top 5 richest is founder of this Chinese ecommerce phenom), previously or maybe still Flipkart, one of the big 3 Ecom in India, Didi, the Uber of China of which Uber merged and has a minority stake, Nio (China’s biggest electric car company for now), Meituan Dianping stake which itself could eclipse a $100B market cap, Vipshop another Chinese company. Don’t forget 5% of Reddit though that’s not worth even half a billion
I guess it depends on how much is owned.
A percent or two would be very different to 30-40% (which would probably be a controlling interest).
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.
> Stack Overflow operates a question-and-answer website used by software developers
That's spot on in my opinion, though I guess a bit dry. I suppose they could've included the traffic numbers or Alexa ranking to highlight how much it's used? I don't really see how this is an example of uninformed reporting, that description seems right on the money.
EDIT: The article actually does include traffic numbers.
I'm not saying the reporting is wrong, but that it completely fails to remark on how essential SO is to tons of developers. When they describe the investor as "one of the most valuable", why couldn't they bear to describe SO as "the largest QA site for developers"? Is it so important for readers of WSJ that the extremely tangential relation to "financial professionals and marketers" is explained? That's what confuses me.
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.
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.
I think it's similar to all the super-liberal OS licenses that permit any usage of OS SW without warranting any kind of compensation for the original devs. Licenses that the devs themselves are putting in their OS SW. Why they do so I honestly don't know.
Which leads to a number of weird situations like maintainers begging for compensation from simple users while behemoths make tons of money out of their SW or pretty basic SW being undermaintained (I vaguely remember a case pertaining to a security related library a few years ago where everyone was waiting on an overwhelmed and unpaid maintainer to provide a security fix).
Dunno. Some things just don't make sense to me. FWIW as far as my projects go I license under GPL. If it's free for you let it be free for all. I'd hate to be in the shoes of Redis contributors. To me, if your work is being used you must be compensated. Anything else is just plain wrong.
> 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.
If tech can't stomach unions, it'll never take to co-ops.
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.
>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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
The problem for me is that generally the highest ranked answers are the oldest, and in a fast moving tech stack this leads to really outdated advice. I do a lot of Python programming and some of the answers only work in 2.7 for example. Same as you, these days I'll just look at the official docs.
Yeah I see that too.
Back when python 2.7 was out, the top-rated answer was a really great, python 2.7-specific solution. Now that python 3.9 is out, the top-rated answer is still a really great, python 2.7-specific solution.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Codidact is a community-controlled, open-source alternative to SO:
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
> you're not really told what to do,
I know, right, every stack exchange site should really write down a comprehensive how-to-ask page, and they should have a dedicated section just for what used to be called "MCVE" but has since been renamed to "Minimal, Reproducible Example" ... err I mean one day when they write up these guidelines they will eventually rename it
Then people wouldn't have all those "it don't work, what do" questions closed and instead moderators can put in just as much effort as the asker did
In seriousness, I believe some of the miscommunication stems from the difference between "I had my question closed for not following the published site guidelines" versus an actively hostile "get bent, n00b" interaction
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.
I find Stackoverflow has gotten much worse, you don't get any answers either (i.e. I guess the good people have moved on?), but also Google has gotten worse, and documentation sites aren't helping either. Coding has just gotten harder when you rely on some complicated technology. The internet simply doesn't work as well as it did 5-10 years ago...
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
This exact thing has happened to me, and it was both a surreal and wonderful experience to realize that I had helped myself across a huge gap of time (3+ years).
It provides an even better motivation to help others with technical problems online: we can forget things that we're experts at. It underlines why it is so important to have natural language descriptions of problems that point to correct answers.
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.
Yeah this has happened to me at least a few times as well, it always makes me laugh :)
Do you also use Arch?
Prosus’s Acquisition of Stack Overflow: Our Exciting Next Chapter:
https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/06/02/prosuss-acquires-stack...
"our incredible journey"
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!
I can’t read the whole article, but did this deal include the entire Stack Exchange network or just Stack Overflow?
Here's the article de-paywalled:
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.
Both.
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?
> 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:
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).$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 = $186MJoel also has his sale of Trello (probably >$120M), and his ownership of Glitch (formerly Fogcreek - private) and Hash (private).
Well, there's Codidact (Community Interest Company): https://codidact.com/
And TopAnswers, which isn't yet a charity: https://topanswers.xyz/
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.
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.
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++.
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.
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.
I'm estimating that the marginal value add of SO is order of magnitude 1T, on no particular basis.
Stack overflow's users, please.
> 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).
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.
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.
Or less than Minecraft (2B)
> 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.
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.
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.
That could very well be. It was quite a while ago.
> SA is just kind of limping along
Jeffery has been posting financials that look pretty good
I'd love to see SO be replaced by some collaborative ad-free solution like wikipedia.
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.
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.
They can say whatever they want. But they are not and never will be.
Their community management tools are awful and the philosophy they and the moderators abide to is that questions/answers must be closed as soon as possible.
For example: take one question such as "how to do X in Y". The answer today is "not possible". it is accepted. done. Tomorrow it is "now you use Y.abc" and that old question will never be updated because the person who asked is not interested anymore, or worse, it might even be locked. This is a very common pattern. There's also thousands of the "A: copy and past this, which i do not understand either" which completely kills any knowledgeable discussion.
Arguably, SO is already a Wikipedia for techie matters. It's just very poorly maintained and quirky.
Just like regular Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is usually much more presentable, in my experience.
Depends on the topic. Stuff like political topics are a mess.
How would that work? A site to collect common code snippets?
As if Wikipedia never shoves banners in your face. I'd rather have the stackoverflow model than the Wikipedia one. As for collaborative, try the edit button on any question or answer. It's already a wiki. If you have enough karma, you can put your words in anyone's mouth; if not, it gets into a review queue. I'm one of the people with enough karma to process that queue, there is very very little abuse actually. You can even submit anonymously, on Wikipedia your IP is then published but on SO I just see "anonymous user". Again, stackoverflow already has the better model. Finally I'd like to add one point to the two comparison points you already mentioned: the Wikipedia syntax is one of a kind, weird and you need to learn it specifically for Wikipedia (and other MediaWikis, but they're not that common that everyone already knows it). Stackoverflow just uses markdown, which as a developer is not something you won't already partially know. Let's not turn it into Wikipedia.
So like the ArchWiki but for all things tech, not just Linux?
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?
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.
This have come now https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/06/02/prosuss-acquires-stack...
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.
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.
SO is explicitly NOT for discussion. It's Q&A.
What's wrong with GH discussions?
Looks like Joel Spolsky is cashing out. Fogbugz, Trello, and now Stack Overflow.
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.
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
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)
I hope Jon Skeet gets something out of it.
One article said they were making 61 new millionaires so if he's a significant SO stock holder he's doing quite well.
That's great. Man, always felt for those SO employees high on "market rate" spiel.
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.
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.
Value is different from price.
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.
Is there really so much money in SO to justify $1.8B? AFAIK they just run some some ads and show relevant job offers.
It's in the top 50 websites of the world. Probably worth something. https://www.alexa.com/topsites
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.
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.
I don't think anything :) just that the price, if it were reflecting existing revenue sources, would be much lower.
The seller and buyer both agree that the promise of something else is what was traded, as the price proves.
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.
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.
It’s because of their Teams product - https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/17/stack-overflow-adds-a-free...
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.
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.
I do wonder about some sort of partnership with the people using your platform might be good. What if the top 10,000 people got a proportional share of this cash towards their contributions. Stack overflow wasn’t made just by those who have shares in it...
As far as I understand it, that's the key idea behind DAOs
I still want a payday (and because of that incentive this is why decentralised almost always fails vs a centralised focused startup) but if one of my users writes 50,000 stack overflow answers (or whatever) they deserve a piece of the pie IMO.
I keep thinking of ways to encourage this. I guess treat your customers/users like employees - have a vesting schedule based on number of winning answers or some other relevant metric for your app.
Ugh I guess monetization incoming so I better learn how to code fast.
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.
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.
Not bad for one NT machine.
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.
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.
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...
All the free content you and I provided is our way of giving back to the community that answered our questions.
That content generates value for SO, but they do provide the infrastructure we use for free to get our problems solved and questions answered, so it seems like a fair deal to me.
If you didn't want anyone to profit from your answers, you shouldn't post them. If your answer is reasonably popular, you can bet it will be used in a product that makes money without you ever getting compensated for that.
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.
$1.8B is the value of the business that encouraged this content creation, not the value of the information that has flowed through SO. The developer productivity gained by the existence of SO is probably on the order of trillions.
I hope this benefits the founders.
SO has definitely helped lot of folks for their career growth. I had lot of my queries answered just from Q/A of SO.
I contributed my knowledge or learnings on SO https://stackoverflow.com/users/1993944/rasik-jain
I hope to see SO at the next well.
Wow, remarkable.
Tech forums were a crowded field when stack overflow entered, but it really was a cut above everything else.
Good answers, well moderated, no dancing mortgage ads, no long bitter arguments where people call each other idiots because they use Java, no pop up windows. That's not the worst path to 1.8 bil.
I liked SO because it was a refreshing change from the php based bulletin boards.
However, I do miss hanging out on Ubuntu forums(in fact all *nix forms for that matter).
People were always always ready to help no matter how big or small the question. Someone always came along and showed me the right way to setup the printer.
Apparently Stack Overflow already owns a majority stake in Prosus. This is going to get interesting ;)
Was it the mods that closed the deal?
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.
> 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.
If they own 200bn then 15bn is a small portion. It's relative.
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.
When I think about it. I still consider 2B to be a lot... And those social media startups just being just a mess...
Holy cow. I did not see this coming. Hopefully the service stays free.
It will. Or it would disappear and they know it.
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.
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.
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.
Not really related to the sale but it might be an opportunity to completely rebase the score system. You can ask a dumb question that lots of other people upvote, like "What is a null reference exception" and end up with a score of 5000. On the other hand, you can answer lots of complex questions that are more niche and harder to answer and still be only double-digit score.
I'm not sure that it can be deliberate but maybe it is, otherwise they would have changed it?
I think this is a wise investment for them given that they have stakes in Codecademy and Udemy. They could probably build a more integrated school. Kinda like having their own flywheel. Software devs share info and help each other, then go learn a new language from Codecademy if they need extra help, plus more. The result? $0 spent on marketing and they have 2 gigantic investments that work together for effortless product based marketing.
> 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.
Not sure this was properly vetted.
Call me tinfoil Thursday, but this sounds off.
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
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.
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.
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.
by that logic hn is worthless too, yet I bet it created a lot of $ for yc
$1.8B seems low, no? WhatsApp was sold for 19B. I understand that they are aren’t exactly comparable, but SO has a B2B offering with clear mark value and a very strong brand. I know at least few medium-to-large companies that has subscriptions with SO. I think they can expand into other areas more, such as recruiting and tools for hiring.
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.”
all the users sharing they are in the "top X%" on SO shows how much the "gamification" took over and was fully embraced by the users. On HN, I never read comments on Reddit where users write "I have X karma points" or comments on Twitter with people writing "I have X number of followers".
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.
Did Prosus read the documentation first before just coming to SO and asking questions about acquisitions?
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.
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.)
Tencent isn't the buyer. Prosus, a Tencent investor, is.
True, but they have a large enough stake in Tencenz to have relevant impact on Tencent's acquisition culture.
They're south african and a huge holder in tencent. Edit: Memory failed me, the parent company is south african.
Most answers I've asked there I've answered myself and some did get quite a bit of upvotes over time, but the most popular answer is of course one I've copied over from someone else in a Github issue, nothing I've done with my own sweat and tears.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Indeed. That statement might be true for a short period of time as part of a transitional plan.
Just ask Kevin Systrom.
Anyone scared that one day they won't be able access SO for free for answers? :(
"Prosus, one of Europe’s most valuable tech companies"
What do they actually do? It seems they hold a lot in Tencent, and ... that's about it?
They seem to have a web of corporate subsidiaries around the world, but... what do they do?
I think Google might have tweaked their search to not always go to stack overflow. That might be start of their downfall. Recent times it is rarely stack overflow as top result and it happened suddenly, not gradually.
What sites have done better after being sold after being already successful?
This is an honest question, theres probably some but I dont know. Most known sites seem to fade into obscurity after a high profile purchase.
GitHub. Microsoft bought it, people said it was doomed, it has grown.
Hope the new owners don't turn it to another _Expert Exchange_.
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.
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.
I’m dying to have that feature again.
I just want to downvote/remove W3Cschools and upvote MDN.
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.
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.
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.
Well, this still works.
`my_search_phrase -quora.com`
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.
You'd probably also downvote all the pay-for-placement results on Google's search page now. That would lead to some difficult questions.
You mean ads? I don't think search results themselves are altered based on payments.
Depends. We have trained ourselves to be blind to garish pictures top and bottom, or over to the side... But when the top item in the search results column proper is distinguished from the others only by a laconic "sponsored result" label below it, is that perceived as what we usually call "an ad"? I'd say it's pretty reasonable to call that "pay for placement".
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.
The user generated content is under a fairly liberal license so if they restricted access someone could just create a mirror.
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...
in that case I've jumped to conclusions, that's great
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
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.
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".
"Type 58008 into your calculator. Now turn it upside down!"
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. ;)
I mean, the domain is experts-exchange.com. There's a dash there to prevent this mistake from happening.
They changed it.
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.
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?# curl expertsexchange.com <html><head><title>expertsexchange.com</title></head><body><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.comAccording to DNS expertsexchange.com was registered in 2005. However, it definitely existed earlier:
https://web.archive.org/web/19990429180417/http://www.expert...
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.
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...
That's exactly the kind of site Stack Overflow replaced, namely ExpertSexchange.
"Pay to be marked off topic" would be a great idea.
A lot of times if you just kept scrolling past the paywall the answer was at the bottom.
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
Reading the headline "<Business I've never heard of> selling for $<N>bn" is become an increasingly common occurrence for me
For me it's the "<Company I never heard of> is buying <Business I believed to be successful> for $<N>bn" type of headlines that seems to be on the rise.
Yeah agreed. My comment was tongue in cheek copying a comment from the Depop sale thread on HN yesterday.
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.
My favorite quip about Stack Overflow: Boss: Where did you get this code? Dev: Stack Overflow. Boss: From the questions or the answers?
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.
Why didn't Microsoft go after this? it seems like an incredibly powerful community that blends really well with linkedin AND github
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.
Jeff said it minted 61 new millionaires. Not bad.
Good for Joel and Jeff. They made a good product that produced value and people loved. They finally made the big bucks they deserve.
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.
You know Prosus will get all their money back and then some . time to build a new one [thinking face...]
It's time to provide a monetization strategy like GitHub with a "Sponsor" feature (:
Just when you started to think Stack Overflow was bad.... it's about to get a lot worst.
Is Experts-Exchange still a thing?
Stackoverflow about to add that copy paste subscription they previewed on April 1st
My reaction to the title: Everyone knows Stack Overflow, who the heck is Prosus?
Hey, we users built the knowledge-base. Where is our cash? (Only half joking).
What about Stack Exchange, is that a separate entity? Did they buy everything?
$1.8B seems like a lot for a website that doesn't even have a homepage.
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.
Well, I guess they won and experts-exchange.com now finally lost? :)
I'm just curious Do we have any alternatives to StackOver Flow
Closed. Off-topic. Not a good fit for our Q&A format.
I wonder what Tencent will do with all of the data
You had a good run Stack Overflow - sad to see it die this way (because we know it all will)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
Formatting doesn't seem like a silly consideration when we are talking about programming.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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".
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
I feel like it is read-only for the vast majority of users. The whole internet is.
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.
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.
They provide data dumps and everything is liberally licenced
> sad to see it die this way (because we know it all will)
Why?
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.
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.
<Narrator> It was not worth $1.8B
SO should allow repeated questions at least within ca calendar year. That would ensure fresh answers to evolving questiins.
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.
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.
Can I git stash my current SO profile before starting?
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.
This guy looks like a tool.
So where are we moving to?
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...
why just 1.8B?
Oh no :(
I hope there is a public archiving effort in case the posts get paywalled or something in future.
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.
Time to donate to archive.org I think. Ok. Gave them $5.
Stack Overflow releases archives every 3 months.
I though it was already paywalled?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sure, no claim that it's better, just that it's not (yet?) screwed up so as to be markedly worse.
> 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.
I believe they were called E̶x̶p̶e̶r̶t̶ ̶S̶e̶x̶c̶h̶a̶n̶g̶e̶ Experts Exchange.
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)?
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...
Actually the answers were obfuscated by html/css. Dev tools could expose the answers.
Experts Exchange
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
Since when is stack overflow dying?
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.
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.
Now?
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.
The former of which as well
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.
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.
> 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).
SO sells ads to recruiters.
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.
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.
will somebody smarter than me please explain why this was downvoted? tia
How much am I going to get for all the answers I posted? :) (Hint: not a dime)
Uh, you knew that going in, right? Aren't all answers CC0?
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.
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.
Yep, simply start something like https://nullptr.com and continue on.
That's rather callous
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.
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 :)
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.
But your answers clearly had value, otherwise they couldn't have sold the site as it would have nothing on it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I guess it's the same as if a busy pub was sold. The customers making it busy (and profitable) don't get anything.
Your analogy only holds if the customers to that pub were also supplying the drinks, the food, and handling the orders.
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.
They're certainly providing the ambiance and the conversation.
Also stickers and writing on the walls
They are selling the community, not the content. Similarly, when Instagram got bought by Facebook the users didn't get cash and stock
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...