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Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B

• 9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
  > 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.
• falcolas 5y ago
  That's unexpected. Then again, 1.8B is a lot of money for what I'm guessing is a small number of major shareholders. After seeing how Tencent purchased gaming companies have fared (that is, typically with few changes), this probably won't have much of a negative impact on the site.
  • tyrust 5y ago
    Tencent isn't the buyer. Prosus, a Tencent investor, is.
    • johannes1234321 5y ago
      True, but they have a large enough stake in Tencenz to have relevant impact on Tencent's acquisition culture.
  • robbyking 5y ago
    I may be being a little more optimistic than some other people here, but I agree with you. There's a history of larger companies acquiring smaller ones only to ruin them (ahem, Yahoo), so hopefully Prosus understands what makes Stack Overflow so successful and will be mostly hands off. (Also, I'm not sure when Prosus acquired Udemy, but as far as I know that acquisition didn't negatively affect that site.)
  • ibrahimsow1 5y ago
    They're south african and a huge holder in tencent. Edit: Memory failed me, the parent company is south african.
• tanepiper 5y ago
  You had a good run Stack Overflow - sad to see it die this way (because we know it all will)
  • steve_adams_86 5y ago
    I don’t want to seem like a jerk saying this, because I’ve put effort into supporting the site and helping with moderation, I know it’s all very challenging and difficult, but: I think stack overflow has been dead for a while. Maybe you and I wanted different things from it and you still find it useful, but I haven’t really enjoyed it for many years. I loved it over a decade ago, these days I generally avoid it. I was surprised by this purchase for that reason alone. I must be missing something. Stack must be way more useful and active than I realize, for reasons I’m unaware of. I find the community pretty abrasive mostly.
    • deleted 5y ago
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    • deleted 5y ago
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    • RandallBrown 5y ago
      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.
      • realsimplesynd 5y ago
        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 https://youtu.be/KZkYSSE8HHI
      • mitchdoogle 5y ago
        Formatting doesn't seem like a silly consideration when we are talking about programming.
• dt3ft 5y ago
  How much am I going to get for all the answers I posted? :) (Hint: not a dime)
  • gerikson 5y ago
    Uh, you knew that going in, right? Aren't all answers CC0?
    • dt3ft 5y ago
      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 :)
      • Graffur 5y ago
        I guess it's the same as if a busy pub was sold. The customers making it busy (and profitable) don't get anything.
        • the_local_host 5y ago
          Your analogy only holds if the customers to that pub were also supplying the drinks, the food, and handling the orders.
          • dt3ft 5y ago
            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.
• yewenjie 5y ago
  Oh no :( I hope there is a public archiving effort in case the posts get paywalled or something in future.
  • YesThatTom2 5y ago
    https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19579/where-are-the-stack-exchange-data-dumps https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19579/where-are-the... For pete's sake don't scrape what Stack provides for you in an easy to parse format.
    • ilaksh 5y ago
      Time to donate to archive.org I think. Ok. Gave them $5. https://archive.org/donate/ https://archive.org/donate/
  • nly 5y ago
    I though it was already paywalled?
  • minimaxir 5y ago
    Stack Overflow releases archives every 3 months.
• wpaladin 5y ago
  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.
  • est 5y ago
    Reminds me of "Tencent owns reddit" threads on reddit then someone points out that Naspers owns Tencent. Hilarity ensures.
    • ak217 5y ago
      Tencent also owns almost half of Epic.
    • jedberg 5y ago
      Which was extra funny given Tencent's tiny ownership share in reddit.
      • BitwiseFool 5y ago
        In the business world it doesn't take much to exert a big influence on a company.
  • tpmx 5y ago
    Indeed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naspers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naspers is a fascinating read.
  • aixi 5y ago
    >Time to revisit my assumptions with respect to how companies are owned. And what would those be? I'm curious
    • skinnymuch 5y ago
      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%)
• dested 5y ago
  I always thought Microsoft would be a natural buyer given the tech stack and Microsoft's support for developers. Unrelated story, I have a day one Stack Overflow account. I don't remember how I found it but I'm sure it was posted on digg or slashdot or something at the time. I had a lot of posts in the first few years about some generally broad concepts, and completely inactive since. In spite of this, I am in the top 7% of accounts on the site, which is a nice reminder on the power of compound interest!
  • caturopath 5y ago
    I played Stack Overflow years ago and have a ~0.3% ranked account, despite not really posting in years. It's amazing how little the ranking seems to have changed in the last 10 years, wavering around in the top half percent whenever I've peeked. I don't know whether the number is dishonest, or whether the new stars and new signups just happen to hold it in status, never sending it to 0.03% or 3%.
    • jrockway 5y ago
      Same. I think what happened is that the early users answered all the most frequently occurring questions, and the questions honestly haven't changed much. I think my most popular answer is like how to diff with git. People are using git even more than they were when SO started, so it gets upvoted regularly.
      • geerlingguy 5y ago
        Some of my oldest answers have hundreds of votes and required minimal effort to answer well... some of the newer answers have less than ten votes, since they're much more niche (even if they take 10x the effort to answer well). A lot of the early broad answers got those huge upvote counts and make the early users who answered them stay in the top percentiles.
      • caturopath 5y ago
        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.
• zwieback 5y 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.
  • lurkerasdfh8 5y ago
    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.
  • IshKebab 5y ago
    > Maybe they can fix some of the problems. I don't think so. Most of their problems are things that they don't even think are problems. They've attracted a large community of moderators who think similarly. Once you get to that point it's too late. Any changes you make to fix things (e.g. allowing users to block nuisance users, making it harder to close questions, etc.) will just anger your mods who are a vocal minority that love closing questions and are nuisance users. The only way is a new site.
    • Ekaros 5y ago
      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.
  • caymanjim 5y ago
    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.
• armchairhacker 5y ago
  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.
  • yreg 5y ago
    >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.)
  • bena 5y ago
    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.
• geonic 5y ago
  Is there really so much money in SO to justify $1.8B? AFAIK they just run some some ads and show relevant job offers.
  • mikeryan 5y ago
    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.
  • tnolet 5y ago
    It's in the top 50 websites of the world. Probably worth something. https://www.alexa.com/topsites https://www.alexa.com/topsites
    • lurkerasdfh8 5y ago
      This is the only correct answer, IMO. all the other pundits miss that if the deal was for existing source of revenue, it would have been priced as modestly as those are.
      • stjohnswarts 5y ago
        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.
        • lurkerasdfh8 5y ago
          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.
    • LunaSea 5y ago
      Is it though? Genuinely curious. It has been show time and time again that users of free websites likes this won't pay and ads are only worth so much.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• numair 5y ago
  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.
  • DavidWilkinson 5y ago
    Agreed, it's an interesting complement to Codecademy and SimilarWeb
  • dgb23 5y ago
    They might have first class access to data that enables a powerful shift in integrated development.
  • systemvoltage 5y ago
    I don't see how giving money to Tencent has anything to do with the ability to steer SO. The best thing would have been the status quo. SO has been running on its feet for many years. This consolidation, while disputably better than Microsoft acquisition, is no worse than large companies buying out small ones usually guaranteing their demise. If anything else, Microsoft has left Github untouched so far. I am not convinced that this is "absolutely phenomenal".
    • teh_klev 5y ago
      > The best thing would have been the status quo. SO has been running on its feet for many years You forgot that there's a bunch of VC's who now want their investment back plus interest.
      • B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
• deleted 5y ago
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• neonate 5y ago
  https://archive.md/IYMAm https://archive.md/IYMAm
• maddyboo 5y ago
  I can’t read the whole article, but did this deal include the entire Stack Exchange network or just Stack Overflow?
  • teh_klev 5y ago
    Here's the article de-paywalled: https://archive.is/IYMAm https://archive.is/IYMAm I'm guessing it's the whole shebang. They renamed Stack Exchange to Stack Overflow back in 2015: https://stackoverflow.blog/2015/09/15/were-changing-our-name-back-to-stack-overflow/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2015/09/15/were-changing-our-name... Stack Exchange appears now to just be a brand for the whole network of Q&A sites, but stackoverflow.com is the golden goose.
  • YesThatTom2 5y ago
    Both.
• dboreham 5y ago
  Not bad for one NT machine.
• softwaredoug 5y ago
  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-happen-to-stack-overflow-now-that-it-has-been-sold-to-prosus-for-1-8 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/408138/what-will-ha... Has anyone seen anything?
  • erk__ 5y ago
    This have come now https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/06/02/prosuss-acquires-stack-overflow/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/06/02/prosuss-acquires-stack...
  • brown9-2 5y ago
    https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2021/06/02/kinda-a-big-announcement/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2021/06/02/kinda-a-big-announ...
    • Noumenon72 5y ago
      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.
• marcodiego 5y ago
  I'd love to see SO be replaced by some collaborative ad-free solution like wikipedia.
  • lurkerasdfh8 5y ago
    SO will never be wikipedia and that is OK. What we miss the the middle ground. And that is open for the taking! (hint) SO is transient and disposable. It is about the error message of the day and by chance hits the language/pattern of the year. Wikipedia is about stablished knowledge already accepted and published. The open spot in the middle is about accepted techniques for the pattern of the recent years. Those are filled currently by random blogs, posts and news aggregators.
    • asadlionpk 5y ago
      How would that work? A site to collect common code snippets?
    • selfhoster11 5y ago
      Arguably, SO is already a Wikipedia for techie matters. It's just very poorly maintained and quirky.
      • pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
        Just like regular Wikipedia.
        • selfhoster11 5y ago
          Wikipedia is usually much more presentable, in my experience.
          • stjohnswarts 5y ago
            Depends on the topic. Stuff like political topics are a mess.
• topper-123 5y ago
  > sold a small portion of its equity stake in Tencent in April for $14.6 billion. Personally I would never use “small” to describe anything worth 15B… Anyway, Tencent is worth 850B and these guys own approx. 200B of that, so they’re quite large.
  • bidirectional 5y ago
    If they own 200bn then 15bn is a small portion. It's relative.
• eric_b 5y ago
  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.
  • rossdavidh 5y ago
    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.
    • eric_b 5y ago
      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.
    • pavel_lishin 5y ago
      > 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.
• romanovcode 5y ago
  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.
  • thepete2 5y ago
    They certainly have bought a lot of very useful "user-generated data", would be a shame if they restricted access to it now or in the future.
    • robjan 5y ago
      The user generated content is under a fairly liberal license so if they restricted access someone could just create a mirror.
      • thepete2 5y ago
        in that case I've jumped to conclusions, that's great
      • jodrellblank 5y ago
        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-exchange-and-stack-overflow-have-moved-to-cc-by-sa-4-0 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchan...
  • cheschire 5y ago
    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.
    • amackera 5y ago
      I mean, the domain is experts-exchange.com. There's a dash there to prevent this mistake from happening.
• macando 5y ago
  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.
  • Macha 5y ago
    Github issues have also replaced most of my stack overflow usage. Part of it is that I'm now more experienced, so most of my questions are about edge cases or potential bugs and not "How do I call system()?". But it also feels like stackoverflow took off because it was lower friction than mailing lists and experts exchange, but has been overshadowed as projects migrated to github and most developers already having a github account, rendering it lower effort. This changed things by (a) having stuff in google results from other sites and (b) encouraging developers to write better docs to reduce the rate of support requests in github issues.
    • macando 5y ago
      > (a) having stuff in google results from other sites Yeah. Programmers now give really nice answers to basic questions about the up and coming tech on their personal/company blogs. Also, SO benefited from having a decent code formatting in a time where code blocks looked horrible pretty much everywhere else. They lost that edge.
  • vultour 5y ago
    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.
    • 5y ago
• efficax 5y ago
  Either the rest of the private equity world is insanely overvalued or this is a really small price for such an important part of the software engineering community
  • iKevinShah 5y ago
    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)
• yaitsyaboi 5y ago
  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.
  • AbrahamParangi 5y ago
    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.
    • toyg 5y ago
      Why must it be a tragedy? The owners were well-compensated. Shouldn't we celebrate instead the amazing result/effort ratio one can achieve these days with a basic website...? SO was notoriously and pragmatically simple.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    • switz 5y ago
      You'll never capture all of the value you create. But in the case of StackOverflow it really must be a large schism. SO really did help the world. Count me++.
    • rightbyte 5y ago
      Stack overflow's users, please.
    • pishpash 5y ago
      Why should they capture all of that value, most of which was generated by the community itself? They should get paid for the generated efficiency but should not be paid for the gross value passing through the network.
      • AbrahamParangi 5y ago
• caution 5y ago
  Prosus’s Acquisition of Stack Overflow: Our Exciting Next Chapter: https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/06/02/prosuss-acquires-stack-overflow/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/06/02/prosuss-acquires-stack...
  • sundarurfriend 5y ago
    "our incredible journey"
  • munificent 5y ago
    https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
    • stjohnswarts 5y ago
      I don't know why you are downvoted, this is hilarious :)
• rho4 5y ago
  Wow, I just wish there was some real competition from a site owned by some independent foundation. Also, what is Jeff Atwood's and Joel Spolsky's net worth now?
  • pbiggar 5y ago
    > Also, what is Jeff Atwood's and Joel Spolsky's net worth now? This is a fun game. Some assumptions: both founders own equally. Early funding rounds take 20%, late funding rounds take 10%, all rounds make a new option pool (I used 15% to account for the Option Pool Shuffle). There were 5 rounds AFAICT. So each founder would get: $1.8B * 0.5 # initial * 0.8 * 0.85 # series A * 0.8 * 0.85 # Series B * 0.9 * 0.85 # Series C * 0.9 * 0.85 # Series D * 0.9 * 0.85 # Series E = $186M The numbers usually skew worse than this ideal version,, and it also depends how much of the deal was cash for ownership, vs incentives to keep the existing team (which is often included in the headline number but doesn't cash out owners). So I'd round down to maybe $100M. (They might also have had a few sweetheart rounds, so it could also go better). Joel also has his sale of Trello (probably >$120M), and his ownership of Glitch (formerly Fogcreek - private) and Hash (private).
  • wizzwizz4 5y ago
    Well, there's Codidact (Community Interest Company): https://codidact.com/ https://codidact.com/ And TopAnswers, which isn't yet a charity: https://topanswers.xyz/ https://topanswers.xyz/
• fabian2k 5y ago
  This is the official announcement from Stack Overflow: https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/06/02/prosuss-acquires-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.
• croes 5y ago
  "The group’s expansion into internet platforms began in the 1990s' spanning online consumer services, including: E-commerce - including its subsidiary, OLX (100%) Takealot.com (96%) Fintech - including its subsidiary, PayU (98.8%) Food delivery - including its subsidiary and associates, iFood (54.8%), Delivery Hero (22.3%) and Swiggy (38.8%) Etail - including its subsidiary, eMag (80.1%) Travel - including its associate, Ctrip (6%) Mobility - Bykea It is also the largest shareholder of social Internet platforms: Tencent (28.9%) Mail.ru Group (28% in 2019)" Doesn't sound to good for me.
  • jiofih 5y ago
    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.
  • mssundaram 5y ago
    Interesting. I've hardly heard of any of those companies - are they mostly non-US?
    • klohto 5y ago
      Definitely eastern europe / asia focused
    • iSnow 5y ago
      Delivery hero is pretty big in Germany and other EU countries.
    • TheCapeGreek 5y ago
      Takealot Group (subdivided into Takealot, Superbalist, and MrD) is basically a trinity of Amazon, [insert fashion e-tailer here], and UberEats, for South Africa.
    • moonbas3 5y ago
      Some of them are present in Europe. eMag is probably the biggest e-tailer in eastern europe.
• gigatexal 5y ago
  Holy cow. I did not see this coming. Hopefully the service stays free.
  • dystroy 5y ago
    It will. Or it would disappear and they know it.
• gigatexal 5y ago
  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.”
• pookeh 5y ago
  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.
  • fastball 5y ago
    What's wrong with GH discussions?
  • Rapzid 5y ago
    SO is explicitly NOT for discussion. It's Q&A.
• tambourine_man 5y ago
  I’m always amazed at how we price stuff. A social media startup being bought for $10B is not surprising but a cornerstone of modern day software development is a mere $2B. But I’m biased of course.
  • Ekaros 5y ago
    When I think about it. I still consider 2B to be a lot... And those social media startups just being just a mess...
• linsomniac 5y ago
  I ended up losing access to my ancient account (it was using the OpenID providers that they don't even support anymore and the provider I used isn't around). I had gone fairly inactive, but recently wanted to contribute some content. This was on the DIY stackoverflow, there's a fairly common problem on my stove, but an easy, low/no cost fix, it's just very involved. The DIY SO had a good discussion of the problem. To contribute back, I spent ~3 days making an instructional video on the replacement. Posted it to Youtube. Then went over to the SO to post it there as well, and realized it'd take like a month of dicking around to get a new account up to the point that I could post a response in the thread. I reached out to site support about getting back into my old account, but have never heard back. <shrug>
  • mssundaram 5y ago
    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
  • mathgenius 5y ago
    Glad to hear I'm not the only one that lost their S.O. account because they decided to try the amazing sounding OpenID.
    • bambax 5y ago
      Me too!
    • raydev 5y ago
      It’s been several years now but they had a long (1 year?) window where you could migrate to a supported login method.
      • linsomniac 5y ago
        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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbxugIpIiS8
• slartibartfast_ 5y ago
  Ugh I guess monetization incoming so I better learn how to code fast.
• nikolay 5y ago
  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!
• pavel_lishin 5y ago
  From their blog post: > It allows us to continue to operate as an independent company with our current team and with the backing of a global technology powerhouse. Sure, sure.
  • switch007 5y ago
    Indeed. That statement might be true for a short period of time as part of a transitional plan.
  • giarc 5y ago
    Just ask Kevin Systrom.
  • richardwhiuk 5y ago
    https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
  • berkes 5y ago
    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.
• JustSomeNobody 5y ago
  Jeff said it minted 61 new millionaires. Not bad.
• neonate 5y ago
  https://archive.is/IYMAm https://archive.is/IYMAm
• gadders 5y ago
  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.
• sharken 5y ago
  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/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/ Thanks to all who helped build StackOverflow, it still makes a difference.
• ravenstine 5y ago
  I hope they dismantle it and start over. So many outdated answers on there that I don't find it worth using anymore, whereas it used to be a staple of my software development.
  • selfhoster11 5y ago
    That depends on what stack you're using. Anything based on Linux and Java will be fairly applicable even years later. Even if it's not applicable, it's often possible to tell this from the answer and the date of the question. IMO, two things would improve matters greatly. One, add a mechanism to mark questions as "potentially obsolete" based on thresholds that can vary per-topic, or per StackExchange site (so e.g. Java has an 8 year shelf-life, general Linux has a 10-year shelf life, Ubuntu in particular has a 4 year shelf life, etc). Two, allow moderators to override an accepted answer after some time passes. I've seen posters not bothering to mark a superior answer later on, or not knowing how to do it. If the community is unanimous about which other answer should go to the top, choose that instead of the original poster's selection.
    • ravenstine 5y ago
      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.
• hughrr 5y ago
  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.
• auntienomen 5y ago
  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.
• codeulike 5y ago
  Was it the mods that closed the deal?
• furgooswft13 5y ago
  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.
• bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  suggested Stack Overflow game - for all of those with top X% despite not contributing for years - see how quickly you can move from the top X% to the bottom X% by doing Y. Y can be combinations of asking or answering questions. If you get banned before reaching bottom X% you lose. I guess would need some sort of site to keep track of stats of those playing.
  • jmkni 5y ago
    Can I git stash my current SO profile before starting?
    • bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      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.
• macspoofing 5y ago
  Looks like Joel Spolsky is cashing out. Fogbugz, Trello, and now Stack Overflow.
  • stjohnswarts 5y ago
    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.
• dave_sid 5y ago
  I hope Jon Skeet gets something out of it.
  • stjohnswarts 5y ago
    One article said they were making 61 new millionaires so if he's a significant SO stock holder he's doing quite well.
    • Rapzid 5y ago
      That's great. Man, always felt for those SO employees high on "market rate" spiel.
• sida 5y ago
  Why didn't Microsoft go after this? it seems like an incredibly powerful community that blends really well with linkedin AND github
  • jmcphers 5y ago
    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.
• karmicthreat 5y ago
  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.
  • horsemans 5y ago
    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.
    • karmicthreat 5y ago
      That could very well be. It was quite a while ago.
  • SlimyHog 5y ago
    > SA is just kind of limping along Jeffery has been posting financials that look pretty good
• ddingus 5y ago
  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?
  • sillysaurusx 5y ago
    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-announcement/ 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.
    • skunkworker 5y ago
      Conde Nast also owns Ars Technica, which personally is my favorite tech-news site and has high and consistent quality.
      • ddingus 5y ago
        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.
• wg0 5y ago
  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.
• jakemcgraw 5y ago
  One of the first 300 users, SO was revolutionary when launched, I followed their development via Codinghorror and Joelonsoftware blogs (probably in an RSS feed). I've since moved into management and away from day to day coding, so I use it very infrequently, but, I have to imagine more than a few software startups only exist today because SO democratized software development Q&A.
• e12e 5y ago
  Well, I guess they won and experts-exchange.com now finally lost? :)
• sjclemmy 5y ago
  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-specific-session-in-code-igniter https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9563675/destroying-a-spe...
  • jmkni 5y ago
    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.
    • digianarchist 5y ago
      It wasn't just the SO question. He posted on the Shroomery message board advertising the site in it's earlier days.
  • bad_username 5y ago
    Raymond Chen answered my question. And then blogged about it in Old New Thing.
    • notRobot 5y ago
      Link?
  • eveningsteps 5y ago
    details: * https://web.archive.org/web/20140705203439/http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/02/silk_road_s_dread_pirate_ross_ulbricht_asked_stack_overflow_question_under.html https://web.archive.org/web/20140705203439/http://www.slate.... * https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/199353/did-the-stack-exchange-staff-members-assist-in-the-apprehension-of-ross-ulbricht https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/199353/did-the-stac...
  • TenJack 5y ago
    Woh, how did this lead to his demise?
• mixmastamyk 5y ago
  What about Stack Exchange, is that a separate entity? Did they buy everything?
• ipaddr 5y ago
  SO should allow repeated questions at least within ca calendar year. That would ensure fresh answers to evolving questiins.
  • Macha 5y ago
    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.
• amelius 5y ago
  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
• anticristi 5y ago
  My reaction to the title: Everyone knows Stack Overflow, who the heck is Prosus?
• flerchin 5y ago
  $1.8B seems like a lot for a website that doesn't even have a homepage.
• usr1106 5y ago
  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.
  • shagie 5y ago
    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/pluralsight_and_stack_overflow_partner 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 https://www.prosus.com/companies . As they control the server, they can inline those ads more easily. * Job portal expansion. Supposedly this is profitable now, just not VC deals profitable. There are quite a few classified sites that Prosus has already. * Expand links to edtech - Skillsoft, Codecademy, Udemy to name a few of them. * Have the resources to spend on making that enterprise content product if it's not too late (Atlassian and Microsoft have been there for a while). People kept wanting a SO instance they could host locally. They were willing to pay a bit for it (but not the Big Tech prices that SO was supposedly selling it for). SO tried to do this with Teams, not sure how well that works/went. So, maybe they'll get that product finally made.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • dbingham 5y ago
    One possibility is that they invest heavily in Teams and Jobs. Those two both solve problems that many teams really struggle with and would be willing to pay a premium for tools to help them solve: documentation and hiring.
  • tester756 5y ago
    by that logic hn is worthless too, yet I bet it created a lot of $ for yc
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• davidhyde 5y ago
  Apparently Stack Overflow already owns a majority stake in Prosus. This is going to get interesting ;)
• Black101 5y ago
  Just when you started to think Stack Overflow was bad.... it's about to get a lot worst.
• papito 5y ago
  Recent discussion about their tech stack: https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/03/30/roberta-arcoverde-stack-overflow-teams-building-tests-best-practices/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/03/30/roberta-arcoverde-stac... Summary: simple as possible, maintainable, no micro-service hell - just a bunch of boxes serving with the cache and highly optimized SQL queries. Know your storage engine. This is yet another example that not getting bogged down in cargo cults, micro-services, and instead solving problems you have will result in a smaller, more agile team, leaner infrastructure bill and burn rate, and a higher chance of a successful exit.
  • potamic 5y ago
    You can bet your ass if one of these obscenely funded startup takes on the same problem, you are going to see all of that microservices, event sourcing, reactive patterns, service mesh jazz all over the place when they are dealing with like 100k users. And throw in the obligatory machine learning for intelligent ranking or some shit like that.
    • papito 5y ago
      Correct. Because the whole system is filled with anti-incentives. You can't attract money by demonstrating that you can be frugal. It's absurd.
      • JoeAltmaier 5y ago
        Except the occasional $1.8B
        • zymhan 5y ago
          13 years after founding. Most startups don't expect to exist that long.
    • A-Train 5y ago
      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.
• MangoCoffee 5y ago
  some negative comments here. i believe when Jeff introduced Stack Overflow is because ExpertSExchange suck. this seem to be a perfect opportunity for people to build a Stack Overflow replacement. this 1.8B deal just validated the StackOverflow business is profitable and attractive.
  • xtracto 5y ago
    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.
• vaseabcd 5y ago
  Same
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• bjourne 5y ago
  One one hand, I'm glad that Stackoverflow is profitable. That someone is making money on it. On the other, I'm peeved that someone made two billion on all free content I and others created for no other gain than imaginary internet points. Without our work, SO wouldn't have been worth much. None of us can objectively claim to have been take advantage of... but still...
  • hinkley 5y ago
    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.
  • fastball 5y ago
    $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.
  • iFreilicht 5y ago
    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.
• htrp 5y ago
  Stackoverflow about to add that copy paste subscription they previewed on April 1st
• yayr 5y ago
  why just 1.8B?
• samstave 5y ago
  Did Prosus read the documentation first before just coming to SO and asking questions about acquisitions?
• erjjones 5y ago
  You know Prosus will get all their money back and then some . time to build a new one [thinking face...]
• ejb999 5y ago
  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.
  • tigger0jk 5y ago
    Smaller contributor here, so when I googled for a specific flash log location it was my own EDIT to an existing answer that I needed.
  • burlesona 5y ago
    Yeah this has happened to me at least a few times as well, it always makes me laugh :)
  • stjohnswarts 5y ago
    Do you also use Arch?
  • mirrorlake 5y ago
    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.
• neves 5y ago
  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.
• schappim 5y ago
  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
• robertlf 5y ago
  Top 3%er here and I rarely use Stack Overflow anymore. I got so tired of the snarky answers to questions (both mine and others) and peoples' ability to downvote you without giving any justification. I've been there for 12 years but fortunately, in that time, I've become a good enough developer that I can generally figure out my own problems. And if I get stuck, I'll go to the relevant Google group or to a sub Reddit. Stack Overflow is no longer relevant to me.
  • stjohnswarts 5y ago
    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.
• baobabKoodaa 5y ago
  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-announcement/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2021/06/02/kinda-a-big-announ...
• rkagerer 5y ago
  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.
  • lupire 5y ago
    Value is different from price.
  • stjohnswarts 5y ago
    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.
• w0mbat 5y ago
  Hey, we users built the knowledge-base. Where is our cash? (Only half joking).
• OliverJones 5y ago
  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.
• gnzoidberg 5y ago
  Good for Joel and Jeff. They made a good product that produced value and people loved. They finally made the big bucks they deserve.
• sneilan1 5y ago
  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.
  • the_other 5y ago
    > 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.
  • crazygringo 5y ago
    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.
  • Kye 5y ago
    If tech can't stomach unions, it'll never take to co-ops.
  • one2three4 5y ago
• MauranKilom 5y ago
  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.
  • frakkingcylons 5y ago
    > 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.
    • MauranKilom 5y ago
      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.
• janacm 5y ago
  I wonder what Tencent will do with all of the data
• YeBanKo 5y ago
  $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.
• gafferongames 5y ago
  <Narrator> It was not worth $1.8B
• tldrthelaw 5y ago
  So where are we moving to?
• Juntu 5y ago
  1.8 b is equal to 2b but another 2 mill won’t hurt sold bin price but i would raise the stakes unforgiving deal what you ask for always will not your satisfaction in the end when it meets in the middle my price is right prosus won the bargain maybe going beyond and 2 million less than 2b is enough. Maximum level coding is Juntu. I’m known but it’s anonymous hit first claim your cig smoke guhd break do. What makes sense is logical but my minds at 1000 in maximum level.
• geebee 5y ago
  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.
  • SNosTrAnDbLe 5y ago
    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.
• lanbanger 5y ago
  Closed. Off-topic. Not a good fit for our Q&A format.
• mraza007 5y ago
  I'm just curious Do we have any alternatives to StackOver Flow
• Romeoxogrowth 5y ago
  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.
• FoxCaptain 5y ago
  There goes the neighborhood
• shp0ngle 5y ago
  "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?
• tomglynch 5y ago
  Reading the headline "<Business I've never heard of> selling for $<N>bn" is become an increasingly common occurrence for me
  • ac42 5y ago
    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.
    • tomglynch 5y ago
      Yeah agreed. My comment was tongue in cheek copying a comment from the Depop sale thread on HN yesterday.
• bilekas 5y ago
  > 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.
• andy_ppp 5y ago
  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...
  • giansegato 5y ago
    As far as I understand it, that's the key idea behind DAOs
    • andy_ppp 5y ago
      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.
• dep_b 5y ago
  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.
• gpmcadam 5y ago
  Is Experts-Exchange still a thing?
• pknerd 5y ago
  Hope the new owners don't turn it to another _Expert Exchange_.
• lbriner 5y ago
  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?
• ElectricMind 5y ago
  Anyone scared that one day they won't be able access SO for free for answers? :(
• dreen 5y ago
  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.
  • SavantIdiot 5y ago
    GitHub. Microsoft bought it, people said it was doomed, it has grown.
• vdddv 5y ago
  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".
• rasikjain 5y ago
  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 https://stackoverflow.com/users/1993944/rasik-jain I hope to see SO at the next well.
• _alexander_ 5y ago
  It's time to provide a monetization strategy like GitHub with a "Sponsor" feature (:
• icosahedron 5y ago
  My favorite quip about Stack Overflow: Boss: Where did you get this code? Dev: Stack Overflow. Boss: From the questions or the answers?
• maypeacepreva1l 5y ago
  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.
• broooder 5y ago
  This guy looks like a tool.