Stack Overflow Sold to Tech Giant Prosus for $1.8B (2021)
wsj.comPretty bad timing, I would say.
Yep. Enjoy your toxic, obsolete echo chamber!
for the buyer, yes. it's worthless now.
It’s interesting that they managed a 1.8 billion dollar sale when they had been on the decline for years.
https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-...
The story of how AI ate stack overflow’s lunch is, to me, way less interesting than the story of how stack overflow managed to kill their own growth with aggressive moderation. The correlation between the sudden end of high growth and the adoption of hostile moderation is strong.
Wildly true. Purely anecdotal on my part, but in my experience the cooking stack exchange was just awful to even try to ask something on.
They used to have a lot of ego, specially established mods there would delete whatever you post, mock you, and all. And then there comrades would chear and double the insults.
While it did help me at time, i saw it was hard for average Joe to contribute to it.
It was extremely weird to do things like that as a policy, since it was systemic and natural for a user to just post a question and not find what it might be related to. You just put in an automation to link up / coalesce questions together if they have enough similarity and that would catch most of the things they'd turn around and berate people for and completely avoid this issue by a change in structure. Or like, anything else that would have solved it.
> They used to have a lot of ego, specially established mods there would delete whatever you post, mock you, and all. And then there comrades would chear and double the insults.
Yeah, it was a shitshow.
The thing i hated the most were mods rewriting your posts, because they didn't like the wording. Years after I am still salty and convinced it was a petty way to farm points or whatever.
I'm so glad that StackOverflow is dead.
It’s still 100m monthly visitors allegedly. So some value in that
now 99m and dropping each day - sell fast!
Oops just realized article was from 2021
That sounds like a pretty good deal for stack overflow...
SO should create an MCP interface or such, to make real-world context available to agents, the stuff that's not in docs.
Surely all of SO has been ingested by the LLM training at this point.
why post an article from 5 years ago ?
Looking back it seems like a very bad deal.