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!
As user 100,754, I am ranked in the top 0.12%, current #830 based on 2,139 answers and 33 questions
https://stackoverflow.com/users/100754
Some of my useful answers get no upvotes: https://stackoverflow.com/a/18162345/100754
And some just keep accumulating :-)
https://stackoverflow.com/a/1763683/100754
Now, if you look on the ranking pages, you'll see the following table:
Total Rep* Users
-----------------------
100,000+ | 1,007
50,000+ | 2,879
25,000+ | 7,533
10,000+ | 23,325
5,000+ | 50,374
3,000+ | 85,384
2,000+ | 125,638
1,000+ | 229,491
500+ | 398,573
200+ | 675,767
1+ | 14,875,253
I think they said a couple years ago that over 50 or 60% of registered users have 1 reputation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My questions seem lame and my top answer is my own question: https://stackoverflow.com/users/108512/andrew-johnson?tab=pr...
The heyday of SO is long over and all the serious Q+A takes place on GitHub, which MS already owns.
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?
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.
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 ;)
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!
"Download the app to see the answers!"
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!"
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9563675/destroying-a-spe...
The fact that his SO question led to his demise is particularly nuts IMHO.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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>
There's a wealth of knowledge in old questions on that site, but UX for occasional users is poor!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
Also, are the food ones profitable or loss making like most other food delivery startups?
And what would those be? I'm curious
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When can they buy Mozilla?
That's the kind of consolidation I'd like to see.
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.
>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.)
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.
>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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
Why then does nobody seems to think there's an upside to the acquisition? Maybe they can fix some of the problems.
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.
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.
nothing that helps the product/user base.
Acquisition that improves things are extremely out of the norm.
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.
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.
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.
https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/06/02/prosuss-acquires-stack...
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.
Also, what is Jeff Atwood's and Joel Spolsky's net worth now?
This is a fun game.
Some assumptions: both founders own equally. Early funding rounds take 20%, late funding rounds take 10%, all rounds make a new option pool (I used 15% to account for the Option Pool Shuffle). There were 5 rounds AFAICT.
So each founder would get:
$1.8B
* 0.5 # initial
* 0.8 * 0.85 # series A
* 0.8 * 0.85 # Series B
* 0.9 * 0.85 # Series C
* 0.9 * 0.85 # Series D
* 0.9 * 0.85 # Series E
= $186M
Joel also has his sale of Trello (probably >$120M), and his ownership of Glitch (formerly Fogcreek - private) and Hash (private).
And TopAnswers, which isn't yet a charity: https://topanswers.xyz/
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.
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.
Stack Overflow succeeded and SA is just kind of limping along. Though maybe now that Lowtax is gone it can just kind of maintain.
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.
Jeffery has been posting financials that look pretty good
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.
Has anyone seen anything?
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 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.
I don't imagine Prosus or SE cares very much.
There are likely a lot of companies with lower revenues and higher valuations.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not sure that it can be deliberate but maybe it is, otherwise they would have changed it?
Not sure this was properly vetted.
Call me tinfoil Thursday, but this sounds off.
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.
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.”
The collective knowledge accumulated is SO is fantastic. You children that don't remember the savage world before SO.
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.
this 1.8B deal just validated the StackOverflow business is profitable and attractive.
> 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.
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?
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.
> 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
Stackoverflow is where I go when I don’t want an answer.
I'd hate to see my investment of time turn to smoke.
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.
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.
I hope there is a public archiving effort in case the posts get paywalled or something in future.
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.