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.
anyway if you've got X% and haven't done anything for it in years it can't be worth that much to you.
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.
The more experienced I got, the less useful I found it. These days, if I’m stuck, most of the time so is everybody else reading my question.
Quite often it’s actually because I’ve encountered a bug with whatever framework I’m using, or a mistake in the documentation.
I find raising an GitHub issue more useful than asking on SO.
It’s still great as a knowledge bank thought, as others have pointed out most of the time when you Google an issue the answer will be on SO. The only issue there is when the top rated/accepted question is actually no longer correct, or best practice, as the language/framework has changed or evolved.
With that said, it's still extremely useful. It makes my job easier and saves me a ton of time.
Personally, I have never heard anyone say SO is not that good anymore, and certainly not that it is dead/dying.
Yep. SO has been read-only for me for years.
When I need help with something it's usually advanced enough to merit a Github issue otherwise I seek Slack/IRC/Discord/Gitter comunities of the technology I'm having trouble with.
they have some good sides too though.
Why?
I will mercilessly soft-rewrite and spelling/formatting correct every question and answer into oblivion if I can be bothered, and find the issue annoying enough.
I treat SO like a Wikipedia of sorts, so presentation is important. Each topic will inevitably be read by a thousand other people in the future, so I might as well leave it looking presentable. It's a commons thing. "Don't leave trash behind and clean up if others didn't", basically.
Source: https://youtu.be/KZkYSSE8HHI
The internet just leads to new monopolies of the mind where "The winner takes it all". Wikipedia would deserve a competitor but there is 0% chance for one any time soon.
Same holds for SO.
A manual contains all the possible answers to all the possible questions in a single document. To get an answer to your question, you just have to read, re-read, assemble, interpret and then you have your answer. It could take you 5 or 10 minutes depending on the quality of the manual and the complexity of the question.
With SO, you bypass all that and simply get an answer. You don't gain any understanding of the bigger picture, but then again, maybe you don't need to. Maybe you're diving into say esp32 to build your smart doorbell. Your don't want to become an esp32 expert, you just want your question answered.
Horses for courses
I hope there is a public archiving effort in case the posts get paywalled or something in future.
For pete's sake don't scrape what Stack provides for you in an easy to parse format.
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.
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.
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.
Occasional drama is just what happens when you become the effective Wikipedia of everything that is possible to ask about any technical topic. The actual Wikipedia is also not free of drama or political struggles in the background. But, much like Stack Overflow, it's also far from dead and continues to be a priceless resource to all of humanity.
I like how all the other comments are pointing out that the forces behind an acquisition are never good for 'focused products' and then there's this comment that shows us the truth, it's those damn kids and their social justice that ruins the products.
My point is that these companies are moving focus away from the products that got them to where they are, to a set of vague handwavy concepts that are completely unquantifiable. And, in my experience anyways, this usually comes at a cost to the existing products.
#1: lots of people want answers to subjective issues. "Should I do it like this or like that?" "What's the best way to ..."
#2: many of the people who ask the questions just don't know the right way to ask their questions in order to get answers. Also, taking all the steps to make something reproducible can often make the problem apparent, eliminating the need to post the question.
SO has these rules so that they can be a canonical place for people to be pointed by people who go to search engines looking for answers. But I think it's a big turnoff that they close so many. They might have been better served if they had created roles to prune questions that they don't want indexed or shuffle them to a sister site. Pruning them without telling the user they're "closed" or "on hold" would be a much more friendly experience.
What is SO business model? Is it ads-based?
Just hope it won't devolve into news-sites free-article quota with account points mixed in for some throttling. IMO, the most attractive part of SO is that low friction to contribute an answer, oftentimes seeing a relevant topic to suggest an answer in passing or when looking for answers myself.
Also SO's value is tied to the intensive community moderation effort, hope this would not be discounted in any future roadmap (wonder if there's anysuch).
While suit-speak often marks the decline of a business, it is not clear lefty-politics makes that much difference in regards to the decline.
But the parent to your response has a point - knowing that the answers are CC licensed and knowing that the owners might have a ten-figure exit are different things. If the community were more aware of the latter, they might have been more canny about donating their efforts.
As really, SO really was all about gamification, at least I think I remember them talking about 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.
* Improve channels from Stack Overflow to other properties - kind of like what they tried to do with the Developer Story, just with more reason to do it. ( https://www.pluralsight.com/newsroom/press-releases/pluralsi... )
* There are a lot of eyeballs hitting SO, and a lot places to send people - https://www.prosus.com/companies . As they control the server, they can inline those ads more easily.
* Job portal expansion. Supposedly this is profitable now, just not VC deals profitable. There are quite a few classified sites that Prosus has already.
* Expand links to edtech - Skillsoft, Codecademy, Udemy to name a few of them.
* Have the resources to spend on making that enterprise content product if it's not too late (Atlassian and Microsoft have been there for a while). People kept wanting a SO instance they could host locally. They were willing to pay a bit for it (but not the Big Tech prices that SO was supposedly selling it for). SO tried to do this with Teams, not sure how well that works/went. So, maybe they'll get that product finally made.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I just want to downvote/remove W3Cschools and upvote MDN.
Anyway after years of dealing with that I went ahead and got the sex change and everything is good now. ;)
> 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.
Experts Exchange had no paywall for years. Endless people built the site up, provided help, then suddenly?
All their posts, content, and more were one day monetized, and locked away. Same thing happened with IMDB too, at the start. It was all, all of it, user contributed.
Then one day, they locked it all up. Of course, IMDB has grown a lot since then, and allows you to download the database if you wish regardless...
But point is, this sort of thing happens all the time...
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchan...
I don't think social justice messages on a website or social media are necessarily a sign of losing focus. It's just some branding stuff. If the company is "losing focus" is likely due to many more factors.
I guess most of the posters understand that they may sell the site, but the content was safe because of the license.
Whereas the company maintaining the site as a whole has to invest a whole lot of time and money into keeping the site running, and have a huge responsibility in continuing to do so if they want to site to even stay in existence, let alone grow and succeed.
I don't owe Donald Knuth anything more than the $100 (placeholder) for his books, even if they helped me get a 6 figure job right out of college.
Yes, his books had a lot more "value" than $100, but those were the terms of the deal.
Stack Overflow wouldn't be a success without its users, but its users also wouldn't be a success without Stack Overflow.
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.
Also stickers and writing on the walls
The landing page for expertsexchange.com just says "Coming soon.", and if you view it with redirects turned on, you're sent to a page offering to sell it, owned by Venture.com.
# curl expertsexchange.com
<html><head><title>expertsexchange.com</title></head><body><h1>expertsexchange.com</h1><p>Coming soon.</p></body></html>
# dig +short expertsexchange.com | head -3 | paste -sd,
96.126.123.244,45.79.19.196,45.33.2.79
# dig +short experts-exchange.com | head -3 | paste -sd,
104.22.5.165,104.22.4.165,172.67.36.241
# whois experts-exchange.com | grep Registrar
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.networksolutions.com
# whois expertsexchange.com | grep Registrar
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.uniregistrar.com
https://web.archive.org/web/19990429180417/http://www.expert...
Edited to add: so the domain lapsed and then was reregistered later. If you click on any of the links in that archived page they are redirections to experts-exchange.com.
Probably a ten-year-old beef. W3Schools used to spam search results with questionable-at-best information. I forget whether they got bought, or just cleaned up their act, but the current version is vastly improved over what it was. Still, I have muscle memory that hesitates to click one of their links despite knowing that W3Schools sucks much, much less than they used to.
`my_search_phrase -quora.com`
I just don't feel it's correct to say that the contributions actually had no monetary value, they definitely did, it's just that we handed it to Stack Overflow for free in exchange for participating in the platform.
I don't think it's unreasonable to feel a little bit jaded about it either. I'm not, I didn't contribute nearly enough to feel entitled to squat. But I get it.
>I just don't feel it's correct to say that the contributions actually had no monetary value, they definitely did, it's just that we handed it to Stack Overflow for free in exchange for participating in the platform.
How did you know the answer had value when you typed it up? The value is not solely determined by you or me - It's by the large number of visitors/viewers actually benefiting from the answer. And you need both, the platform attracting tons of readers, and the high-quality answer.
Certainly, there is lots that can be said here to expand on that and add more nuance, but not in a comment box.
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.
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.
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.
There are likely a lot of companies with lower revenues and higher valuations.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not sure that it can be deliberate but maybe it is, otherwise they would have changed it?
The seller and buyer both agree that the promise of something else is what was traded, as the price proves.
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!
Edit: I'm in the top 2%. Most of my rep. comes from interest earned on questions/answers I posted very early on.
Is there anything else out there like it?
EDIT: People mentioning that they could remember where they were when they listened to the podcast makes me remember where I was when they had Jason Calacanis on the show who informed them that they were sitting on a gold mine.
Do not get me wrong, I understand the whole point of giving back to a community, selfishly helping others and all that. But lets get a simple example: For example the famous Jon Skeet. https://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet
Based on the account statistics this user is a member as of today, for 12 years and 8 months. So a total of 152 months. Again according to the site statistics, Jon Skeet provided so far 35,254 answers.
Making some assumptions of continuous linear work, :-) this user in the last almost 13 years, provided an average of 232 answers PER MONTH,non-stop for the last 13 years.
That is an average of almost 8 answers PER DAY non stop, 13 years in row, while having a job at Google ( per the site account details ...) maybe a family, side interests ? etc ...
Assuming the mythical Jon Skeet, is not a team of 200 engineers at Google :-) I want to understand how a person who provides EIGHT well researched developer related answers PER DAY, non stop, for 13 years, feels about the site founders making 2 Billion while this user ( again...presumably...) gets a pat in the back and "reputation " ?
We’re now on AWS, go figure ;-)
Nothing to brag about, but it's definitely higher than I would've expected. The required mental model is different from what I'm used to HN/reddit — rather than posts going stale and/or getting archived, Stack Exchange and Quora are more like social wikis. Writing a popular early answer that happens to remain relevant over time is like writing a high-profile Wikipedia article and then collecting karma on it indefinitely.
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 have a similar experience though, I haven't been active for many years, and have a handful of very simple answers to common problems that still make the reputation graph pretty linear.
Maybe there more people like me who create an account just to do one thing. And the next time they create a new account?
My point is the no real activity is bad intepretion of this chart.
On the other hand if I'm casually browsing twitter or instagram I'll gladly like posts that are interesting and there's no cost because it's recreation time.
[In particular, I don't have an account in SO.]
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.
Hard to see that many new questions with such broad appeal that weren't already asked or answered for any new users to get their rep as easily
It's remarkable as perhaps the lowest effort/highest benefit to others online action in my life.
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.
Isn't being in the top 7% up, not down, from being only in the top 12%?
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.
Probably another case of the 1% rule[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
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...
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?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9563675/destroying-a-spe...
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.
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>
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Why then does nobody seems to think there's an upside to the acquisition? Maybe they can fix some of the problems.
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/
But in the case of StackOverflow it really must be a large schism. SO really did help the world. Count me++.
And almost every single bit of it is due to community work, not the people inside company. (That is not to say the company is irrelevant - but seeing how consequently stackexchange dropped bricks on everybody's feet two years ago and the community still carried on gives you some perspective on what is keeping the site alive).
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?
> 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.
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.
The heyday of SO is long over and all the serious Q+A takes place on GitHub, which MS already owns.
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've been a part of a couple of these. This statement is somewhere on the spectrum of absolutely naive to willfully disingenuous.
"Someone just paid 2 billion dollars to buy us, but they're not going to change anything, exert any influence or expect payback beyond what we've already been doing."
For whom? For people who uses it since the beginning it isn’t even the same place anymore. It’s UX (and I’m not talking about the aesthetics of the new design, I don’t mind those) is legitimately the worst I’ve ever experienced and the quality of discussion has went down the drain. Even if you find a tightly controlled community dedicated to a topic you’re interested in it’s either one extreme to another or doesn’t last long.
That doesn’t even get into the constant rolling out for Facebook-tier features that no Reddit user ever wanted. I stopped using Reddit last month after ~12 years and I’ve since realized I was getting nothing but regurgitated memes and anger from a dozen people replying to my every comment who aren’t even addressing what I was saying just arguing for arguments sake.
It’s basically what Facebook groups were in 2016 at this point. I’m sure it’s a great acquisition for those who bought it, but for the old power users it’s anything but.
Their current plan seems to be a race to the bottom; a new re-design for the default landing page that rewards infinite scroll over in-depth content.
Meanwhile, the moderation tools are still garbage.
That.... is a very positive view of Reddit. I'd say everything on Reddit is way worse now and going downhill fast.
Says everyone who is involved in huge company acquisitions ever, and most of the time it does not hold true. The rest is common marketing talk.
I'm certainly not saying it is impossible for that to be true, but such a statement itself does not hold any value.
I wonder how much of it is Google making it look good by providing laser-precise results for the vaguest search queries.
Reddit is simply dying a slow death. I wouldn't touch the place now.
...at least until this purchase news died down a bit, and then we can get some managers in there to make new priorities and get some of the old ones out...
Ehhhh not so sure on that one.
I would have said the exact opposite. The Reddit community was destroyed. People no longer recommend Reddit for interesting discussions or speak excitedly about its communities. Conde Nast monetized and changed Reddit, recouping their investment, and now it's hard to find people who have good things to say about it.
Consider e.g. /r/darknetplan or similar topic focused subreddit a that were thriving in the early 2000s - all graveyards today. Those people are on Discord now.
In relation to money, or to users?
Reddit is awful now, forcing everyone to an app and privacy out the window
Now Bon Appetit on the other hand...
2 billion dollars. That’s a LOT of money even by 2021 standards. You better believe the investors will be looking for their ROI.
The content was created by the contributors for free, it would be (legal) theft to do so.
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 ;)
Did they have an expected return on investment and just use your existing planned earnings growth? If they didn’t change your earnings slope, did they have a timeframe in mind for the multiple they used to buy you?
For example, if you earned $1 in the year of purchase and $.50 the year before and projected $2,3,4,5 in the next four years; did they use this for your purchase price? Or did they project some efficiency that shifted your projections to $3,4,5,6 and used that for the purchase valuation?
Only if you’re able to discuss, obviously.
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!"
The fact that his SO question led to his demise is particularly nuts IMHO.
2. Forensic testimony in the complaint asserted Silk Road used this method and in fact used code identical to that in the answer.
3. Silk Road server encryption was signed with Frosty@Frosty.
#2 and #3 were evidentiary, but #1 is what tied everything to a real person's name.
In either case, it's still a problem. It's my impression that if you make the effort to actually customize and decline those options you'll have to do it repeatedly since very few sites will remember those choices - probably on purpose. Luckily uBlock Origin hides most of those annoying consent popups.
Presumably, there are also deleted questions or answers that were up voted.
Additionally, there was a "up votes on questions are also worth 10 points" recently (past few years).
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.
Sure, but it did gain significant market share and had a massive ROI for many decades for anyone on the profitable side of it. For raging racists & (white) sociopaths, it wasn't so bad.
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".
Actually, I think it has gotten better. I don't like the consolidation of independents like GitHub to big corporations like Microsoft, but I can't deny that thus far, it actually worked out pretty well.
Stack Overflow is a difficult company/website to manage though; it's not "just a website with a SaaS product" and really requires a good understanding of the social dynamics and such to run well, much more than e.g. GitHub.
You forgot that there's a bunch of VC's who now want their investment back plus interest.
Revenue in 2020 was US$238-million up by 41% the previous year no doubt due to the lockdown.
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.
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.
Yeah. Programmers now give really nice answers to basic questions about the up and coming tech on their personal/company blogs.
Also, SO benefited from having a decent code formatting in a time where code blocks looked horrible pretty much everywhere else. They lost that edge.
I 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.
Some people will read the documentation, and MDN etc have excellent documentation.
Others will ask questions on SO.
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?
Share buy backs and one or two other strategies are their next options along with the recent sale of some of Tencent to diversify. Like one strategy is for the two companies to exchange their stocks to own one another more. Own one another more.
SoftBank has a similar massive discount. I believe SoftBank is worth around as much as their Alibaba stake. While they also have stakes in T-Mobile US of around 8% (Tmobile market cap is $175B so that’s $14B) and 50% of Z Holdings (Yahoo Japan + LINE) which has a $30B market cap
One caveat to the T-Mobile stake is that U believe Deutsche Telekom is currently and can in the future buy back a considerable amount of Softbank’s shares. Perhaps at a discount. Nonetheless their stake is still going to be very sizeable.
So SoftBank is like Naspers and Prosus in that their market values and claim to fame and money rested on one moonshot. Now their valuations are awful.
SoftBank of course has other issues possibly with the founder and CEO and their vision fund but it was undervalued even five years ago.
—
Another issue is what is the final value of those stakes. How would they get taxed etc. It is rare for big companies to have the majority (or even say 50%) of their value come from a stake in an unrelated company. I don’t think there are any other examples of this.
For related stakes. I think Deutsche Telekom is not worth much more than their T-Mobile US stake and they do more than just that.
Note that Prosus, which is a subsidiary almost completely owned by Nasper (they have a small amount of public float), is worth close to $180 billion, which is much closer to the Tencent holding value. This reflects that people are much more confident of Dutch business than of South African business, and there probably is every right to be.
Selling Yahoo to Verizon meant splitting the web properties out from the company, leaving it as a shell for its holdings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naspers
its probably because of their early investment in Tencent.
And what would those be? I'm curious
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%)
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.
>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.
I also don't believe in the value of "community management" at SO. Moderation is just senseless busywork which discourages people to participate. Closing questions as if there is any value in this instead of letting people play the game of asking and answering questions which matter to them and let Google do the filtering.
Back when python 2.7 was out, the top-rated answer was a really great, python 2.7-specific solution. Now that python 3.9 is out, the top-rated answer is still a really great, python 2.7-specific solution.
This may also be a testament to Git's terrific development, or to Git's obtuse early versions.
>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.
I'm not sure that people giving good answers and help are well matched by a system designed for people who like "leveling up". I think that system pulls in a mismatched crowd over time, too focused on the game goal.
The solution creating a match is supposed to be what you get the points for leveling up for. However, that does not really remove the mismatch, it just covers it up a bit. You _will_ get, at least for a time, a lot of people who focus on quality to get ahead. Over time you will get more and more people focusing on just the points and the levels for their own sake though, who start cheating the system. I think gamification might, over time, slowly erode the target it wanted to achieve, even if/when it starts out doing well.
Of course, all of it happens in a context. Why are there so many people chasing after such fake "power" and "fame" in the first place? Are so many at least somewhat qualified people (on the Internet and with more than basic programming knowledge) that bored and dissatisfied with their local situation to chase purely virtual achievements?
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.
I know, right, every stack exchange site should really write down a comprehensive how-to-ask page, and they should have a dedicated section just for what used to be called "MCVE" but has since been renamed to "Minimal, Reproducible Example" ... err I mean one day when they write up these guidelines they will eventually rename it
Then people wouldn't have all those "it don't work, what do" questions closed and instead moderators can put in just as much effort as the asker did
In seriousness, I believe some of the miscommunication stems from the difference between "I had my question closed for not following the published site guidelines" versus an actively hostile "get bent, n00b" interaction
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.
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.
I can think of a few (not that this hasn't been discussed to death already):
How to properly moderate a site like that.
How to keep answers updated.
How to keep answers updated without mods shutting things down due to duplication. A lot of html and JS questions are garbage in 2021 but there's no way to improve the situation without mods screaming "duplication".
How to allow for answers that are more than just what you'd find in the documentation. A lot of the value of the site came in the first few years, when you were allowed to expand on your answers and provide useful information. The amount of new value created by SO is decreasing rapidly.
One final one is that they need to stop worrying about low-quality questions. That's the only problem they've tried to solve in the last decade, and it's already solved by upvoting and search.
1) low-quality questions ("do my homework", etc.)
2) over-zealous moderators closing things they don't like
With the vast data SO accumulated maybe some kind of deep network thing? I'm a DNN skeptic but would love to be proven wrong in this case. If someone could extract a quality metric and then add a bot that prompts users to improve the question we'd be a long way towards getting higher quality content.
In part, due to a lot of their subtle UI and reputation choices. Really well designed.
Massive scale may at one point break that, but another cause may be found in the change of tone by the team behind SO. They're on the "inclusive" train now.
Don't get me wrong, being inclusive is good, but there's a difference between somebody being a beginner or not proficient in English, and somebody being plain lazy.
This "softening" I do not consider a good development. I prefer the tough love approach that weeds out garbage from good stuff. If that mechanism is compromised, its unique value is lost.
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.
Not from Stack Overflow / Stack Exchnage
That's for sure
There may be employers that look at your standing and say, "hey - let's toss a couple extra $K in this candidate's offer"
..but I've not seen or experienced it
Their community management tools are awful and the philosophy they and the moderators abide to is that questions/answers must be closed as soon as possible.
For example: take one question such as "how to do X in Y". The answer today is "not possible". it is accepted. done. Tomorrow it is "now you use Y.abc" and that old question will never be updated because the person who asked is not interested anymore, or worse, it might even be locked. This is a very common pattern. There's also thousands of the "A: copy and past this, which i do not understand either" which completely kills any knowledgeable discussion.
The "top n-%" contribution would also improve if the lurker userbase increases. No need for continuous up-votes of old answers
We were doing about half a billion in annual GMV but none of it monetized yet.
One of the more recent features added to SO was a timeline of activity and within the timeline you can see which license each the question is under. Here's an example for a random question https://stackoverflow.com/posts/49083680/timeline .
It's kind of weird that while the questions have a license declared the answer don't ... not sure what that's all about.
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
Survivor bias doesn’t mean that everything is a fluke. It just means that some things are flukes and it’s important to include that in our models so we don’t think something random is non-random.
This is very different than everything being 100% random.
Also, maybe this is just because I'm just a forgetful idiot, but on numerous occasions upvoting has proven beneficial to me. I'll be searching for the solution to a problem and I find that I've already upvoted a question which relates to my issue - then if there's an answer I've upvoted, that's probably going to be the best one.
My high priority work questions: mostly no answers, even years later. I wrote a self answer, years later one or zero upvotes.
I ask a question with an example, the only answer "solves" the example and ignores the question, I self answer correctly when I figure it out on my own, years later no upvotes.
Several questions I arrive from Google are closed without an answer, or duplicate to a completely offtopic question. Or it's an XY question where I still need an answer for X but I don't have the secret question Y.
If you're not actively gaming SO for karma, it can be kind of a wasteland for anything but read only.
(In case of success, of course; failures are just written off, the losses hopefully paid by the successful exits.)
The question closing thing though I agree is annoying.
Who are the the most likely to answer random questions? Those who have the most time to do so.
Who doesn't mind providing free "senseless busywork"? Those whose time has little to no value because they have so much of it.
My account on SO is 12 years and 9 months old and even though I haven't asked or answered a question since 2009, I'm still in the top 10% of reputation. Because in those early months/years, it wasn't difficult to garner reputation.
I just don't have the time to troll questions to answer on SO. As for asking, either the answer already exists, or I can find out by reading the documentation. And deity-forbid I'd pull the answer-my-own-question-to-document-the-solution that used to be the recommended way of just getting content on the site.
It was after they brought in outside investors that they were pressured to monetize.
/r/darknetplan itself is from late 2010
You're just bullshitting wtf
These are verifiable facts (go to /r/darknetplan and cmd-f for "community for" and then select that text).
As soon as SO vacates the free tier even a little bit, someone else will jump in.
https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges
Questions by new users usually need a lot of editing so there is no shortage of things which need editing. You'll get 15 rep after 7 approved edits. Things will accelerate from there.
You'd think that with such strict rules, StackOverflow would have very high quality questions and very high quality answers. But it actually doesn't. One aspect of being a good developer is catching a stackoverflow answer in a mistake and being capable of rejudging the rest of the answer section as a result (ie: scrolling further down and finding the correct answer that has zero upvotes).
If you want to participate in other ways without answering or asking questions then there are still ways to do that.
They shouldn't have entered the job search space. The moment they offered to help their users find work, suddenly those fake Internet points (and activity behind them) started to carry a real (if probabilistic) monetary value.
You get to keep everything that you achieve in your own head, like "having fun" or whatever satisfaction you derive from what you do on those sites. You don't get to take out anything you manage to "create" their though, like your level and points. So except for what you manage to do in your own head it's much-input-no-output, a black hole box that swallows all your efforts and keeps them without giving back. Again, speaking about the "game", not about your own satisfaction e.g. for helping others.
The game is used to pretend to you the rewards are higher, but in order realize that promise you have to stay in the game world because the rewards you earn cannot be taken out.
So yes, within the context of those sites it is "real".
the point i'm making is that to the people playing them as games, the rewards are the points, there's nothing to take out. no one says i'm playing a video game for "imaginary videogame points" that cannot be taken out into the real world, they understand that the score is part of the intrinsic nature of the game.
i think people feel there is some intrinsic reward to participating in stackoverflow, or reddit, or whatever, and that people valuing the karma rather than (or even in addition to) the human interaction, or the satisfaction of helping others, are somehow doing it wrong - for them, the gamified aspect is an unnecessary and fake veneer over the intrinsic rewards of the site's core function. which i can definitely sympathise with, and there are absolutely venues in which i too opt out of gamification, or simply ignore that entire aspect of things, but i do not extend that to sneering at the people who do participate.
You can't control your luck, but you can control how hard you work. Some will read that sentence and conclude that working hard is a fool's errand. Others will read it and conclude the opposite. Neither is entirely wrong.
Yes, something like that.
The very first mention of the Silk Road online was from a user named "altoid" on Shroomery – the post is actually still up: https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/1386099...
altoid was also the name of the account that had originally posted another question on SO, not the one about sessions, but one about Tor services: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15445285/how-can-i-conne...
The SO account was later changed from altoid to frosty. The email address used to register the SO account was rossulbricht@gmail.com.
Also when the FBI imaged the Silk Road server, the username was "frosty". There were just so many links going back to him :-/
There have been long articles about the Silk Road and its demise, the Wired ones have a lot of details including what I mentioned above. Part 1 is here: https://www.wired.com/2015/04/silk-road-1/
Normally the DOJ gets access to all the emails of the target of the investigation, then from there they look through the emails and subpoena any companies that might hold additional information - such as Stack Overflow.
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.
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.
For me the reputation points are a proxy for how helpful I've been to other people overall. I like being helpful. Suddenly seeing that score go down for absolutely no reason would be very disincentivizing for me.
[0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/are-you-a-digital-sharecropper...
Not horrible enough to stand in the way of $1.8 Bn, though.
That said, my profile is very clearly linked to a real person, I don’t see how resale would even work (not that I’d consider it).
The hard part is getting the social dynamics right. Askers want to ask any question, answerers want to answer interesting questions. Keeping both groups happy is a hard task.
People complain about questions being closed (technically: "on hold") and marked as duplicated, but it serves a real purpose as no one wants to answer the same question over and over again. How you do it matters a lot though.
I have a number of gripes with Stack Overflow, and there are quite a few things I would do different. But I see a lot of people complaining about it who probably don't realize just how hard of a problem it is.
Does it represent a conflict of interest?
There is some hand wringing with all the gaming companies Tencent owns or has a stake in. They own Supercell which was worth $10B+ before. League of Legends parent Riot. A stake in Kakao Daum that does gaming stuff too.
On top of the 40% of Fortnite parent Epic Games, they own 10 or 15% of PUBG parent Bluehole. They own 5%+ stakes in Ubisoft and Activision Blizzard (which owns Candy Crush parent King Games). They are a huge game publisher in China and okay in rest of Asia. So they get to publish a lot of games like WoW in China.
They own a handful of smaller studios and a stake in probably a dozen other gaming studios at minimum. Usually when I say studios I mean outside China too. Miniclip and Agar.io might be familiar to people. 20% of Glu Mobile too which makes a lot of the branded kitsch apps for Kardashians etc. they just got bought so not sure if ownership remains.
Tencent is the closest successor to Berkshire Hathaway. Their other minority stakes are wild too. Minority stakes each worth billions include JD.com(Amazon of China), Kakao Daum as mentioned, Snap[chat], Tesla, Pinduoduo (China’s top 5 richest is founder of this Chinese ecommerce phenom), previously or maybe still Flipkart, one of the big 3 Ecom in India, Didi, the Uber of China of which Uber merged and has a minority stake, Nio (China’s biggest electric car company for now), Meituan Dianping stake which itself could eclipse a $100B market cap, Vipshop another Chinese company. Don’t forget 5% of Reddit though that’s not worth even half a billion
A percent or two would be very different to 30-40% (which would probably be a controlling interest).
Well, most people right?
Power users are by almost by definition an insignificant (but over represented in discussions and noise making) cohort right?
If the platform keeps quality content, gets more users over time and maintains both a good DAU and RPU, then, well, what objective metric of success do you want to measure?
Number of happy power users?
I really think most people don't care about that metric.
With SO it remains to be seen...; the power users there are the mods, and they contribute tangible value to the platform... but... you know, the writing is already on the wall. Whether this does it, or it was coming anyway, it's hard to say.
Just so we’re clear and to further my point, the website you’re posting on exists because over a decade ago people said that Reddit had dropped significantly in terms of quality of discussion. I’m not the only one saying this you find it here and even on Reddit anytime the subject of quality of content on Reddit is brought up.
Many times, people try answering questions in comments when they're unsure of an answer rather than trying to say "this is the answer" and create an answer of their own that is sufficiently in depth to be helpful to others.
Other times, new users try to ask questions on the comments of "I'm having this problem too, do you have a solution yet?" or, while they do try to ask for clarification on the question - do so on questions that are stale.
Lastly, comments were often (in the days of 0 rep comment permissions) targets of spam that could go undiscovered.
The way that SO decided to solve these problems was to add a bit of friction to leaving a comment. This meant that users who were trying to contribute answers were directed to answers; users who were trying to ask questions on stale content would... get frustrated and go to a question where there is sufficient information; and automated spam would be that much harder (requiring an investment of time from the spammer).
It's not an ideal solution, but from the standpoint of a site with volunteers curating and moderating the content, creates fewer problems for the people who invest the time than other solutions do. Burning out those people who invest the time is one of the things that has concerned people in the company concerned about the existing community - losing them would have SO devolve into something that more closely resembled the software development section of Yahoo answers... or https://www.answers.com/t/computer-programming
old.reddit.com + RES is still the best Reddit experience.
That said, I agree with you in principal. In this field I feel like I'm constantly fighting to keep the code simple and lean, while others think it's okay to import an entire bloated library just to make a button shine a certain way.
When reddit recapitalized is when all the monetization stuff really started. Once they brought in outside investors and had people to answer to.
It's kind of like Craigslist for me in that random people like me are also the source of poor-quality and low-effort participation, one-sentence or obviously-homework questions. However, I do realize the structure of the site and the Ponzi-like nature of voting there makes the n00b experience difficult if you want points and privileges. But at the end of the day, question choice and moderation are the comb and brush of informative crowd-driven sites.
That said, I assume there is plenty of action to be had if you're participating in cutting edge, new version, or new technology topics. Unfortunately that conflicts with the low-effort/homework population who I assume are constrained by their curriculum and so they have only C++ questions to ask. By that token I wonder how many questions even remain to be asked of common and popular topics like Java. It could just be that SO is "full" in certain topics.
The way to grow an economy is to participate in the economy, but this acquistion is no doubt going to change things for me.
I also speculate that there's a certain mindset that sees unmonetized ratings (or even points) as a market failure, which is what generated acquisition interest.
I recall listening to the stackoverflow podcast and Jeff was asked about his threshold for upvoting.
I recall he said he upvoted something like all answers that were nor spam. Since, people are trying to help for no benefit to themselves, so why wouldn't you at least give them that?
I would agree, although I do not think it has been particularly bad either. If they had broken apps the enhance reddit and removed old.reddit.com, then I would think otherwise. For the most part, I am still able to use the site as I have since 2011.
old.reddit.com isn't going to last, is it?
I do see the UX experience being more thick, less favorable signal to noise happening due to acquisition. There may be editorial conflicts of interest too. I do not notice at present.
Crypto means I can't buy a graphics card
Crypto is a ponzi scheme and should be banned
It is immoral to own Bitcoin, and governments should punish people who do
Would you like to buy my new XCoin ha ha ha.
Elon Musk is amazing, but this crypto thing makes me a little unhappy with him.
Ad nauseum. I have been visiting that site less and less, because I think the audience has become an echo chamber.
The downvotes without engaging with my post are what is wrong with commodified community participation (comment/post points); exactly what harms Stack Overflow in the long run.
Fuck that. I'm not going to waste my time farming karma for the privilege of answer questions for complete strangers that I happen to know the answer to. The moderation on stackoverflow is a complete mess -- it reminds me of the powertripping that you see on Wikipedia, but maybe even worse because there's far less room for interpretation when most of the questions are technical in nature.
https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges
You need 15 points to up vote which means you need to have received 2 up-votes yourself on either a question or answer or have edited 7 questions/answers and had those approved. It's quite easy to hit those numbers. Once you have 1000 points (I think) on any site and you join a new site you get 100 points by default which means you always have those base privileges wherever you are.
Well, not low enough for me. After a few attempts to answer some questions early on, I gave up. Read only for me. I don't even remember what the problem was.
Why making contributing difficult and consuming easy? I guess it worked for them. Counterintuitive, but nice jackpot.
At the same time, google search results are massively less useful now and if I don't get a hit, I'm going to reach out to the source.
To that extent, I think SO has the same problem as Google - it will regress to the mean.
This is also because google search results will be flooded with SO mirrors that rerender content but with more ads.
What matters more is the rate at which content is generated, and I think GH has a pretty competitive story considering that people naturally want to ask the project maintainers/community questions directly (as evidenced by all of the GitHub Issues which are formulated as questions) and considering GitHub's significant share of those maintainers/communities. I posit that new content will increasingly appear on GH Discussions.
Please don't mistake this for some exaggerated "GH is going to kill SO" argument--SO will do fine, but there is a compelling story for why MS wouldn't spend $1bn on SO.
This is a weakness of SO and really the whole knowledge base business model (Q&A or not). You think you're building up this network-effect moat. "We have the best question-askers, answer-givers and answered questions. So everyone comes here!"
But, knowledge goes stale. "How do you X in JS?" is different than it was 10 years ago. People don't want a historical archive of how it was 10 years ago, they want to know today!
Then, like you say, GitHub brings in a whole new weird angle. Why ask on some other site when I have a spot where the maintainers and users hang out? Since my loyalty to SO is approximately zero, I'm just as likely to click on the Google result that takes me to GitHub if it looks more promising.
That's you though. It's not about loyalty, it's about Stackoverflow almost becoming a verb like Google. Many many people are used to using it, it's brand is very powerful. I don't see some competing tool stealing lots of mind share. Btw the thing about talking to maintainers directly is already done on small communities on discuss pages (ElixirForum for instance), on Discord, IRC and many other channels. None of it actually hurt SO.
SO has a network effect moat, not a corpus-size moat (I don't know that SO was ever thinking the size of its corpus would stave off competitors--they probably were correctly assuming that their user-base was their moat). The network-effect moat keeps the rate-of-change of the corpus higher than competitors, which is where the value is (not the size of the corpus). This moat has held up really well apart from (maybe) GH Discussions, which seems (to me) likely to succeed because GH has a similarly large network of experts.
I want both! With commentary!
And SO is particularly hostile to this, with their "duplicated question" giving canonical status to obsolete answers.
I wonder how much of SO fits in the "particular repo" category? Not so much for my interests, but I imagine the chunk for popular web frameworks is huge.
Recently I need some python + mariadb answers and most of the top ones are out-of-date enough that I can't even use them (deprecated packages). I was a bit surprised TBH.
Also TIL GitHub Discussions is a thing.
Some of those SO discussions are the only references to ancient legacy code that is useful, when asking any questions about it today would not get any answers.
So, depending on how we calculate value, if we ignore demand, it can be more valuable.
Github issues, on the other hand, seems to be receptive to open-ended "why" questions which would be smacked down hard on SO. Github has a higher barrier to entry. You have to know where to go, but if you're in the right place it's a much nicer community with more classy and professional conduct. Also, it doesn't have a gamification aspect to it, unlike SO, and thus fewer irritating/persnickety types are attracted to Github because they can't really score points.
The culture of SO become incredibly weird and IMHO will eventually sink it.
I feel like most “often asked” questions has been answered. I very seldomly find that creating a new question is necessary as most things is covered in past awnsers. However for package related problems, GitHub issues has become the go to.
Unless..."Prosus" pulls a Google+DejaNews and obscures SO's availability or paywalls it or, or, or...
The way to integration that content into an existing project would be to document it better - possibly with a FAQ for development questions. That doesn't really need CC licensing (its helpful, but not essential) in that people who want to contribute documentation can already do so.
Just pull up a SO tag for the library, find the top voted question, and figure out where it goes in the docs.
Q&A shouldn't be used as an alternative to documentation.
In this case, they sold part of their tencent to buy this. Selling a little bit each year of a superstar early investment shows good earnings each year.
I don’t know this fund at all, so they could be awesome for all I know. But saying “they are super smart for buying tencent” is not useful without lots of other info.
Usually people who say that without extra evidence or mentioning survivor bias aren’t properly aware of what’s what.
Failures don’t typically advertise and it’s quite likely there ARE/WERE thousands or millions of small firms managing a few million each.
Just as one example I can recall, you can do things that are kind of like "quote retweets" with the cross-post feature that don't really make sense on the old site (on "new Reddit" when you crosspost the original post/title are displayed in a little window so you'll see people make titles that are actually commenting on the original post and not on whatever the link actually is). On old Reddit these just show up as links to whatever the original post linked to, but with the "meta-commentary" title. More than once I've encountered one of these with confusion until a comment explained, or I thought to check the tab that shows where else the same link has been posted.
Same. And many of them message me directly via chat when they have a question about a subreddit I moderate. Chat which I check about every two months, which is for some reason fully distinct from both the regular messaging functionality (which to be fair, is very well hidden) and the two methods of contacting the moderators.
More directly, I question StackOverflow's network effect. Compare it to Craigslist, IMO the best example of network effects ever. It is their sheer size that has entrenched them. They're also not vulnerable to groups moving to another platform (rise and fall of everything from AIM to Snapchat).
I don't actually search StackOverflow. I end up there through Google. If Google starts pointing me somewhere else, or the search previews start looking better for somewhere else, I'm going there. It's not like if I try to sell a single bag of concrete on anywhere but craigslist, which would end in failure.
I'm sure in the M&A docs there was some disclosure like "75% of our traffic comes through Google. If Google started directing people to other sites, that would have a material impact on our business."
As soon as the answers I need start appearing in some other site, I will use the new site.
There's definitely an "interest" dynamic to it, but there's also something like consuming the solutions with a good effort-to-reward ratio inside a search space early and then subsequent solutions get harder (kindof like a cryptocurrency?)
Niche questions do present an interesting opportunity, though. My highest-ranked answer was about rolling your own setInterval / setTimeout function for JavaScript implementations running on the JVM that didn't have them. Not a hot topic, but apparently a few dozen other people cared about this over the years.
Through the “asking and searching” phase, he was sitting next to me on a rooftop at a really stressful job, we were drinking daily on the job, and I had no idea why he suddenly started smacking my left arm and laughing to the point he couldn’t speak. He finally turned his laptop towards me and I just saw my StackOverflow profile with the icon I use at work and on GitHub and everywhere else, the picture of my first dog. He could have just spoken up (but I’d probably forgotten the answer) … he googled instead and got the answer of the person he was sitting next to.
When occasionally I have worked at big companies, now people know my dog’s face more than they know me as a person.
I'm user 537XXXX with an account that can't be more than 8 years old but I did spend a solid 6 months actively posting detailed solutions to problems I ran into - ~50 in total. And some more general answers. Which has amounted to ~4.900 points. Which isn't _that_ much. Just 490 upvotes. Or 10 per answer on average. Still - that puts me in the top 8%.
My guess is that the high percentage is more due to the sheer volume ;-)
A well tuned monolith is a beautiful thing.
Personally, I was a latecomer to the podcast and was about a year behind the launch of SO but still in top 13 today.
I was never even very active. I can only suppose that only 1 out of every 50 signups ever accrues any real significant amount of rep.
But any such "interest" does apply to the magnitude of the initial contribution, so merely being around for long is not enough - you had to have a sufficiently productive period of activity to capitalize on.
I still get a steady rep trickle from a generic answer about WinRT back when Win8 was the hot new thing (or mess, depending on your outlook): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7416826/how-does-windows... - but most upvotes there are from back when it was posted, and I doubt it would get anywhere as many if that answer was written today.
And sometimes, it's the tongue-in-cheek answers that score massive upvotes, like the famous one about using regex to parse HTML.
"No, int_19h, he said to NOT use regex to parse HTML!"
int_19h: wạ͈ͣ̿i̘̱͚̝̍̎ṱ̜̙ͯ̏̾̐̃ͮ,̿̑̓̒̇̄ ͈̺̯͙̰ͦ̐̎̂w̜̦̱͇̝͂̐̈́̄ͅh͚̞̯̰͑͑̐̋ͪa̩͕͑̂̒̔t̪̬̱̞̞̹͌̿́̆̑ͮͮ?͕̮͒̊̃͒̊̈
/s
I got my reputation asking > 1,000 questions and answering > 1,200 , and I can't say whether I should be higher up than people with 10x less reputation than me or 2x more than me.
It's probably better to think of the points as something akin to money paid out by mechanical turk for doing things the site needs, including cleanup and formatting in some cases. At that point, your contribution and what it means is fairly clear.
They don't expect any massive changes in revenue with the companies they acquire. They're willing to hire and invest in revamping/improving their products. Their goal is stable revenue by making customers happy enough to keep paying the maintenance.
They seem to be doing OK with that business model.
I won't say this approach turned out bad for Berkshire or Mr. Buffett personally.
1. a _huge_ amount of trust and respect for the acquired team to not meddle/interfere, and
2. a huge amount of restraint to not force the acquired team into conforming to whatever standards and norms are present in the acquiring team.
Both of these are exceedingly rare.
There definitely are companies that will buy something like this to operate it essentially as an annuity.
The risk to the employees there is if SO essentially becomes done and the owners want to put it in maintenance mode and operate it as a run-out.
Also, it's been 12 years. There's probably a bunch of employees that would like some liquidity.
Why buying a company if you don’t want to make any change? Investment firms make profits by buying low and selling high, and it is hard to sell higher than the purchase price if things are kept the way it is.
To collect its revenue.
because it keeps printing money which you can use to acquire other companies. That is what Buffett does.
Just, say, google some programming question, get directed to SO, create an ID and post your question. Some time later, google an OS -- or maths, literature, whatever -- question, get directed to a different SX site, and repeat the process before (or wholly without) realising they're parts of the same whole.
Possibly do the same a few more times, and hey presto, you have umpteen SX IDs.
Seems utterly plausible to me. Not you?
There was a time when SO used their own openId server/backend.
It was confusing because you had one openId stackexchange account to sign-in into something but still had to create an account on each stack and you could login from any stack but not with your email but with the openId account... for which you used your email to login... so the URL jumping around was confusing. Add one forced logging out when cookies expire or something and it was frustrating just to log in because you could be logged in into SO but not into SU for instance (despite using the same login but with a different identity).
I could log in with another openId providers but the details are fuzzy.
If the burden gets too big, people won't believe it's worth it, and the whole thing dies.
The only way this deal is advantageous for both parties is if something changes, and unfortunately that something is probably Stack Overflow.
Btw, is there a simple way to backup all of ones own answers from across all stackexchange, in case the new owners mess everything up?
Come on brain, you remember fucking commercials.
One person asks a single naive question once: "How do I undo the most recent local commit with GIT", gets 200,000 reputation.
Another person answers 100 complex, delicate questions useful to high-performance computation underlying widely-available cloud services; gets an average score of 5, has 5000 reputation.
Another person occasionally asks and answers a few questions, reaching 2000 reputation, but does a lot of editing work, triages new posts, fixes up tag pages etc.
Who has been more useful to the site?
I imagine the person that asked the question about git was the first to ask. There's a benefit to being the first, or asking unique questions. The value of the first time that was asked and answered usefully on SO is vastly greater than the 100th time, and the value of having it at one time compared to a year later is also great. Sometimes what matters is how it's asked, so it looks like other people's questions.
> Another person answers 100 complex, delicate questions useful to high-performance computation underlying widely-available cloud services; gets an average score of 5, has 5000 reputation.
I would guess those complex and delicate questions didn't help a lot of people, or they would have upvoted, right? Whether that's because people didn't see them or it's so esoteric as to not really help many people, the result is the same.
> Who has been more useful to the site?
The person who asked a question that got a useful answer first, or that answered a question usefully first, is greater.
Stack Overflow would be a pretty shit site if the first time someone answered that git question was in 2021 and not a decade or more ago, so optimizing for people identifying, asking and answering unique questions that match the questions other people have and are easily identified when people search for that problem makes sense IMO.
In the mechanical turk metaphor, you're willing to pay a lot for someone to take out your overflowing smelly trash because that's what you need, but you're not willing to pay as much for someone to do the same thing a day later if it's not even half full and doesn't smell. You reward people more for doing the things you need.
Crypto doesn't behave any differently than the stock market (except the fundamentals are a little shakier, okay, a lot shakier).
Crypto is only valuable, because others think so, too. You control a place inside a distributed list. Others think a place in exactly this list is valuable, while all the other lists are shitcoins.
This is an out of date view that does not match the current reality.
If it's saying "roundabout," I hope you're not correcting it to "roundabound," because "roundabout" is the correct word.
> If you think about it it's mostly the brand, not anything to do with taste. Same can be said about different beers or about Nike, Levi's, Apple (arguably) etc etc.
Brand is king in fashion (and to a lesser extent, low margin consumer products like cola or cereal) because fashion is largely about signaling status. I don't think this effect extrapolates to SO.
They're fake points that don't matter
Having a barrier greatly helps overall quality.
Then again, same stupid "earn points before you can post" system here on HN too.
I don't know why you had a hard time posting. Maybe you're thinking of commenting?
The counter is ExpertsExchange: very difficult to do both.
Very few questions are protected.
The problem is that the Newb doesn't even know where to start in the manual.
I just saw someone with an unsolved problem and found out that I'd had to go through loops to help, so I gave up.
Actually it seems that owners became rich and it's now a popular site without my help, so I guess it can still survive without me :)
I don’t know whether your statement about the price difference is true and if so, I don’t know why. Maybe different free float? My statement was about inherent value not short term price negotiations via stock exchange.
I thought about an actual attack against my argument: Stocks are just shares of companies, which sell stuff that is valuable because other people think so. Some stuff might have inherent value (because it can generate money), but in the end it still comes down to people deciding something has value. Turtles all the way down.
How would you know they're voting in your interests?
I've never known how any other shareholder voted in any of the stock I owned. For all I know they could have been voting completely contrary to what I'd wanted.
No. Unless you own enough of a stock to vote and make a difference, stock ownership is not about influencing a company but just about hoping the value of the stock will rise, and there are many theories about why that might happen, from fundamental to technical analysis to people who invest based on the phase of the moon, divination, tips from friends, insider trading, trend following, news, etc.
The same is true if N people use the currency without any new money coming in they can’t cash out. Therefore it’s not an actual dividend. This is why everyone calls crypto a pyramid scheme, the only way to cash out is to get someone else to buy in.
Proof of stake coins that don't have much usage and mostly pay out rewards from new issuance have an interesting piece.. - they are inflating the base supply to pay out dividends that holders pay taxes on. Effectively moving normal gains from the capital gains bracket to regular income, which is sub-optimal.
For DeX's, the image is a lot better - the biggest issue here is - are fees arbitrarily high, and will they go down over time. My gut says the percentage fee will go down, but the volume increase will more than make up for this loss.
Could you please make a specific section that justifies your claim?
I skimmed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_asset_pricing_model but I don't see anything there that validates your claim. I may have overlooked something, if so please let me know.
I'm skeptical of your claim. Based on some other reading [1]:
> To manage your portfolio, you need a way to compare your different investments and decide which are worth keeping. The dividend discount model and the capital asset pricing model are two methods for appraising the value of your investments. DDM is based on the value of the dividends a share of stock brings in, whereas CAPM evaluates risks and returns compared to the market average.
Your comment comes across as passive aggressive, unfortunately. I hope that wasn't your intent.