&gt; 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.

True, but they have a large enough stake in Tencenz to have relevant impact on Tencent&#x27;s acquisition culture.

Tencent isn&#x27;t the buyer.  Prosus, a Tencent investor, is.

I may be being a little more optimistic than some other people here, but I agree with you. There&#x27;s a history of larger companies acquiring smaller ones only to ruin them (ahem, Yahoo), so hopefully Prosus understands what makes Stack Overflow so successful and will be mostly hands off. (Also, I&#x27;m not sure when Prosus acquired Udemy, but as far as I know that acquisition didn&#x27;t negatively affect that site.)

They&#x27;re south african and a huge holder in tencent.
Edit: Memory failed me, the parent company is south african.

That&#x27;s unexpected. Then again, 1.8B is a lot of money for what I&#x27;m guessing is a small number of major shareholders.After seeing how Tencent purchased gaming companies have fared (that is, typically with few changes), this probably won&#x27;t have much of a negative impact on the site.

The StackOverflow community has always been extremely abrasive. People will constantly be rewriting or deleting your questions or leaving unhelpful comments complaining about something silly like the formatting.With that said, it&#x27;s still extremely useful. It makes my job easier and saves me a ton of time.

I found it incredibly useful as a beginner. As long as you could put together a decent question and were a little patient you would usually get your answer.The more experienced I got, the less useful I found it. These days, if I’m stuck, most of the time so is everybody else reading my question.Quite often it’s actually because I’ve encountered a bug with whatever framework I’m using, or a mistake in the documentation.I find raising an GitHub issue more useful than asking on SO.It’s still great as a knowledge bank thought, as others have pointed out most of the time when you Google an issue the answer will be on SO. The only issue there is when the top rated&#x2F;accepted question is actually no longer correct, or best practice, as the language&#x2F;framework has changed or evolved.

Yes, people have gotten so mean. Even well researched questions are often downvoted within minutes. The whole moderation fiasko is just mirroring Wikipedia&#x27;s decline.

&gt; stack overflow has been dead for a whileYep. SO has been read-only for me for years.When I need help with something it&#x27;s usually advanced enough to merit a Github issue otherwise I seek Slack&#x2F;IRC&#x2F;Discord&#x2F;Gitter comunities of the technology I&#x27;m having trouble with.

I mostly build apps and services, so SO (lol) continues to be very useful for me. For instance, there are a myriad of bugs and glitches that come up in mobile app dev, or when using any popular programming language or framework. SO continues to have relevant, up-to-date information for the types of questions I&#x27;m seeking to answer. For example, I recently found out an issue I was pulling my hair out over was happening only on a particular version of a simulator...Personally, I have never heard anyone say SO is not that good anymore, and certainly not that it is dead&#x2F;dying.

I don’t want to seem like a jerk saying this, because I’ve put effort into supporting the site and helping with moderation, I know it’s all very challenging and difficult, but: I think stack overflow has been dead for a while.Maybe you and I wanted different things from it and you still find it useful, but I haven’t really enjoyed it for many years. I loved it over a decade ago, these days I generally avoid it.I was surprised by this purchase for that reason alone. I must be missing something. Stack must be way more useful and active than I realize, for reasons I’m unaware of.I find the community pretty abrasive mostly.

Not OP, but my guess is that it&#x27;s not going to take long before there&#x27;s a paywall of some sort. Bye bye free-&#x27;n&#x27;-easy programming answers. I don&#x27;t ask questions there that much, but it is and has been extremely helpful for me.

&gt; sad to see it die this way (because we know it all will)Why?

They provide data dumps and everything is liberally licenced

Good thing there are many spam knock-off sites re-using their content, so we don&#x27;t need to start an archiving campaign like with Geocities.

Former naspers subsidiary employee here (far removed) : but yeah, they&#x27;re generally hands off until you wake up one day realising all the good leaders were replaced by tools and a few large mandates have come in to &quot;collaborate&quot; (use inferior home-grown tech (when not paying AWS to do it for you)) - stack overflow&#x27;s a completely new game though, both sides will be learning monetization the painful way.they have some good sides too though.

You had a good run Stack Overflow - sad to see it die this way (because we know it all will)

Of course, I never expected anything in return, but when you see that a small number of people get 1.8 Billion by essentially selling contributions from users, you start to wonder how much each accepted answer is worth :)

I believe the answers are CC-SA.But the parent to your response has a point - knowing that the answers are CC licensed and knowing that the owners might have a ten-figure exit are different things. If the community were more aware of the latter, they might have been more canny about donating their efforts.

I think they use CC BY-SA 4.0. There was some criticism when they moved from CC BY-SA 3.0 even when it was considered an improvement since it wasn&#x27;t clear if stackoverflow needed additional consent to change the license for already existing content.

Uh, you knew that going in, right? Aren&#x27;t all answers CC0?

You already have your Internet-points, what more do you want?As really, SO really was all about gamification, at least I think I remember them talking about it...

How much am I going to get for all the answers I posted? :) (Hint: not a dime)

Time to donate to archive.org I think. Ok. Gave them $5.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;donate&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;donate&#x2F;</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;19579&#x2F;where-are-the-stack-exchange-data-dumps" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;19579&#x2F;where-are-the...</a>For pete&#x27;s sake don&#x27;t scrape what Stack provides for you in an easy to parse format.

Stack Overflow releases archives every 3 months.

Oh no :(I hope there is a public archiving effort in case the posts get paywalled or something in future.

Which was extra funny given Tencent&#x27;s tiny ownership share in reddit.

Reminds me of &quot;Tencent owns reddit&quot; threads on reddit then someone points out that Naspers owns Tencent. Hilarity ensures.

Indeed. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Naspers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Naspers</a> is a fascinating read.

Possibly how weird it is to think of the ownership of ownerships and stakes. NestedSay there is a large [activist] investor -&gt;who owns 5% of Naspers -&gt;which has a sizeable stake in Prosus -&gt;which has a sizeable stake in Tencent -&gt;which has a sizeable stake in Epic Games (40%+)ORa majority stake in Tencent Music -&gt;which has a respectable stake in Spotify (7.5%). Not to mention Tencent’s own stake in Spotify (1-3%)

&gt;Time to revisit my assumptions with respect to how companies are owned.And what would those be? I&#x27;m curious

&gt;In 2001, Naspers made an early, successful investment of US$32 million, in Tencent. As of 2018, Naspers had approximately a 31 percent stake in Tencent, becoming its largest shareholder<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Naspers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Naspers</a>its probably because of their early investment in Tencent.

The same was true of Yahoo in its last days as an independent company. Their holdings in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan (an independent, successful company) were worth more than Yahoo&#x27;s market cap.Selling Yahoo to Verizon meant splitting the web properties out from the company, leaving it as a shell for its holdings.

Most of what I read previously about this has to do with a lot of uncertainty about how the Nasper&#x27;s stake in Tencent will eventually be taxed or how the value will be extracted, and a lot of uncertainty about South African business in general.Note that Prosus, which is a subsidiary almost completely owned by Nasper (they have a small amount of public float), is worth close to $180 billion, which is much closer to the Tencent holding value. This reflects that people are much more confident of Dutch business than of South African business, and there probably is every right to be.

If you read up a bit on Naspers and Prosus. They have been trying to solve the discount problem. That’s the reason for Prosus being listed in Europe. Naspers is too big for South Africa’s stock market. It still is a bit too big.Share buy backs and one or two other strategies are their next options along with the recent sale of some of Tencent to diversify. Like one strategy is for the two companies to exchange their stocks to own one another more. Own one another more.SoftBank has a similar massive discount. I believe SoftBank is worth around as much as their Alibaba stake. While they also have stakes in T-Mobile US of around 8% (Tmobile market cap is $175B so that’s $14B) and 50% of Z Holdings (Yahoo Japan + LINE) which has a $30B market capOne 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.

Naspers&#x27; market cap is 98B, yet they own 31% of Tencent which is worth 775B - am I missing something? I&#x27;m aware of conglomerate discounts but I suspect there&#x27;s something else going on here.

I hadn&#x27;t heard of Prosus or Naspers before this. Apparently Naspers owns 31.2% of Tencent. Time to revisit my assumptions with respect to how companies are owned.

Same.  I think what happened is that the early users answered all the most frequently occurring questions, and the questions honestly haven&#x27;t changed much.  I think my most popular answer is like how to diff with git.  People are using git even more than they were when SO started, so it gets upvoted regularly.

Same. “Top N%” looks to just use score, and momentum on old answers is a big deal. I’m top 0.24%, with my score having increased by about 50% (25,000) in the last 3½ years (as far as their little chart shows), overwhelmingly because of momentum on old answers from 2010–2015—for during that time I’ve only made a handful of edits, three question, and six answers, three of which were for my own three questions.

I played Stack Overflow years ago and have a ~0.3% ranked account, despite not really posting in years. It&#x27;s amazing how little the ranking seems to have changed in the last 10 years, wavering around in the top half percent whenever I&#x27;ve peeked. I don&#x27;t know whether the number is dishonest, or whether the new stars and new signups just happen to hold it in status, never sending it to 0.03% or 3%.

One could try selling answers as Non Fungible Tokens, especially if you have some wierd ones. Lots of geeks have crypto to mess around with, and might want to pay for some bragging rights. Which is the only NFTs can really hope to be good for.

I doubt it. I&#x27;m in the top 0.07% with 300k+. Even such an account is worth nothing. Almost never did a recruiter pay attention to this. My low-rate GitHub account has a much bigger impact.

It&#x27;s surprising what sorts of things people will buy for prestige - that might be worth a good deal of money for resale when you&#x27;re looking to retire.

I loved listening to the Stack Overflow podcast with Jeff and Joel. It was kinda crazy that they were doing a podcast like that while they (Jeff mostly) were building it and coming up with the name, etc. Still have all the mp3&#x27;s somewhere.Edit: I&#x27;m in the top 2%. Most of my rep. comes from interest earned on questions&#x2F;answers I posted very early on.

I miss that podcast. The 2 of them disagreed on some technical things, which made it more interesting. Listening to them all the way to success was pretty cool.Is there anything else out there like it?EDIT: People mentioning that they could remember where they were when they listened to the podcast makes me remember where I was when they had Jason Calacanis on the show who informed them that they were sitting on a gold mine.

I loved this podcast. It came about when we were a year into our first startup (freeagent.com if you wondered) and it was really influential. I loved Spolsky and he was a major influence, and we ended up colocating our infra on our own hardware for 10 years and I can attribute a lot of my faith in that strategy to some of these early discussions! Worked out very well indeed.We’re now on AWS, go figure ;-)

Ha, I&#x27;m user 26! So funny: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;users&#x2F;26&#x2F;shawn" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;users&#x2F;26&#x2F;shawn</a>

I&#x27;m in the top 0.35%. For a while around 2010ish I was answering a lot of questions. I&#x27;ve barely even logged in in many years. I don&#x27;t think the percentile is very useful. SO always tried so hard to find a way to assess devs and hopefully use that to spin up the jobs board side of the business, but I feel like despite a lot of effort it just never quite happened.

I joined maybe within the first year or so and answered one fundamental javascript question which has earned me dividends for many years. I&#x27;m top 11% without having even looked at my profile in at least 5 years. Best part is that my answer was slightly wrong and had to be corrected by a comment.

I was active for maybe 1 year on SO. Account is dormant ever since. Your answer prompted me to check. Still in the top 0.02%

How much of the billion dollars will you get?

Interesting. I&#x27;ve barely posted&#x2F;commented — in particular I&#x27;ve only made seven posts since 2012 (and zero since 2018) — but I guess because signed up in 2010 I&#x27;m in the top 17% of users.Nothing to brag about, but it&#x27;s definitely higher than I would&#x27;ve expected. The required mental model is different from what I&#x27;m used to HN&#x2F;reddit — rather than posts going stale and&#x2F;or getting archived, Stack Exchange and Quora are more like social wikis. Writing a popular early answer that happens to remain relevant over time is like writing a high-profile Wikipedia article and then collecting karma on it indefinitely.

By contrast, I have the 639th Reddit account and I don’t seem to be anywhere close to the top percentile in karma.

Do top contributors get compensated financially ? 
This is a question that is burning me out of curiosity...Do not get me wrong, I understand the whole point of 
giving back to a community, selfishly helping others 
and all that. But lets get a simple example: For example 
the famous Jon Skeet.
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;users&#x2F;22656&#x2F;jon-skeet" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;users&#x2F;22656&#x2F;jon-skeet</a>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 
&quot;reputation &quot; ?

Same for me. Day 1. I&#x27;m user 25 on the site as I listened to the podcast about them making it. Just for answering a few questions early I&#x27;m in the top 0.76% overall.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;users&#x2F;25&#x2F;codingwithoutcomments" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;users&#x2F;25&#x2F;codingwithoutcomments</a>

&gt; I&#x27;m also in the top 7%. That&#x27;s down from 12% or so from five years ago.Isn&#x27;t being in the top 7% up, not down, from being only in the top 12%?

Same here, also 7%. But I benefited from a recalc of the question vs answer points. You might have as well?

&gt; In spite of this, I am in the top 7% of accounts on the site, which is a nice reminder on the power of compound interest!I&#x27;m also in the top 7%. That&#x27;s down from 12% or so from five years ago. However, I haven&#x27;t gained many points during the same interval. That leads me to believe it&#x27;s not about compound interest but new users joining.

Similarly, I answered a few hundred questions some years back when I was running mobile at Mapbox and they were growing, and now I’m in the top 8% despite not doing much the past five years. Interesting.

&gt; Contribution rate must be an extremely uneven distribution.Probably another case of the 1% rule[0].[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)</a>

It&#x27;s relatively easy if you really take the time to answer questions.Around 2016, I wanted to get deeper into some tech and used the learning curve to answer SO questions. I basically stopped the same year, but I am still in the top 8%, used to be top 1% for a couple of months.Contribution rate must be an extremely uneven distribution.

After all those years of being merely a reader I felt like transitioning from reader to contributor recently and the amount of roadblocks you get at reputation one is simply too much. There&#x27;s an answer you think could become more useful with your comment warning of a pitfall to be aware of? Sorry kid, no can do, you need to grind away with top level answers before you can spread you finite wisdom in the small print. This level of gamification puts the subset of contributing users through a heavy self-selection filter and I would expect that the subset that makes through would turn out far worse (spammy, eager to game the system) than what we see. Have the thresholds always been this high or did the walls grow higher over time?

The vast majority of users never post an answer or a question, and most of those that post only once or twice never get upvoted (or get downvoted more than upvoted), so their reputation stays at 1.I think they said a couple years ago that over 50 or 60% of registered users have 1 reputation.

You just made me check - &quot;top 0.84% overall&quot;. Haven&#x27;t posted in a long long time and it looks like my points keep growing pretty much linearly.

Top 3% for me, I guess on the strength of being early in the iOS ecosystem, inactive for a decadeMy questions seem lame and my top answer is my own question: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;users&#x2F;108512&#x2F;andrew-johnson?tab=profile" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;users&#x2F;108512&#x2F;andrew-johnson?tab=pr...</a>

Easy to build out the platform, difficult to build out the knowledge base (especially since so many areas have already been covered on SO)

It looks like GitHub Discussions is sort of filling a similar niche--I&#x27;m guessing they&#x27;re banking on being able to build that out for less than $1B--since they already have GitHub, they don&#x27;t benefit as much from the StackOverflow user network &#x2F; brand. I think that makes sense.

Yeah, top 3% for stuff like being the first person to ask about terminal colour codes and explain typedef.Hard to see that many new questions with such broad appeal that weren&#x27;t already asked or answered for any new users to get their rep as easily

In 2013, I asked a question that I then answered myself. It turned out to be a fairly common question and my response now has more than 101k views.It&#x27;s remarkable as perhaps the lowest effort&#x2F;highest benefit to others online action in my life.

&gt; In spite of this, I am in the top 7% of accounts on the site, which is a nice reminder on the power of compound interest!That&#x27;s how I&#x27;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.

What are some esoteric things that you think are stupid right now? 
Asking for a friend.

Mined about 100 on some old Radeon. Sold them at $30, because I thought they  peaked. Trying not to think about that too much:)

Don&#x27;t be too hard on yourself, it&#x27;s next to impossible to guess which things are going to be transformational and which aren&#x27;t. Look at some of the early early emails from Linus Torvalds on linux. In his mind the original linux kernel was just a cool toy that other devs could play around with. He invented linux and even he never saw it becoming the OS of practically the entire internet.

Ironically I was one of the first ones too but never really participated since I didn’t think the site would actually have lasting power. Never ask me to pick the winning horse.Same thing with Bitcoin. I knew about it from the first day, but never mined any since it was such a dumb idea. Face palm.

I suspect it&#x27;s because so many people use SO for work. When I&#x27;m at work I&#x27;m not thinking about being a good SO user and upvoting a good question or answer, I&#x27;m focused on getting my answer and getting back into the flow of my work.On the other hand if I&#x27;m casually browsing twitter or instagram I&#x27;ll gladly like posts that are interesting and there&#x27;s no cost because it&#x27;s recreation time.

Possibly related: SO requires you reach some number of upvotes before you yourself can upvote. When I use SO and try to upvote a useful answer I&#x27;m always reminded that I don&#x27;t have the privilege of upvoting.

As a rule of thumb here in HN, the number of visits of a post is like upvotes*100+50. There are a lot of lurkers.[In particular, I don&#x27;t have an account in SO.]

Not completely true. I’m active on SO and other stack exchange sites as a consumer and bookmark tons of questions. They sync with <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;Larder.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;Larder.io</a> for me too. I can’t upvote though.

I wonder how many of those 10,000 views were from logged in users?  I’m guessing there are a lot of people who use Stack Overflow without ever creating an account.

It&#x27;s gotten brutal. I was learning a new language last year and all my posts were downvoted out of the que.

Something about how mean people are with voting keeps it this way. It&#x27;s just very hard to get a vote at all. I happened to get a gold badge today for 10k views on an old question. Of those 10k people 17 decided to upvote.

&gt; In spite of this, I am in the top 7% of accounts on the siteThis isn&#x27;t hard since the majority of people are just browsing the site instead of contributing to it, e.g. I&#x27;m in top 0.09% from just answering support questions for our product from a minority of users who prefer asking on StackOverflow instead of our Customer Forums.

I don’t remember how I joined but my profile is apparently older than the official launch date according to Wikipedia? Anyway, I used it heavily for a few years, then pretty much stopped entirely in 2012. And like you I’ve continued to rack up karma, such that I’m still in the top 0.06% somehow. It’s kind of nuts.

Top 7% as well, but most of that came from shitty questions  (both by my own standards now and SO standards) that happened to get a little traction so I don&#x27;t put much stock in the score.

compound interest is interest proportional to how much you already have. This is like fixed absolute interest. Not sure why I was downvoted.

&gt;You must create a new Microsoft 365 hotlive account to reply to this message.

Many repo owners close discussion that ain&#x27;t bugs or feature request because of moderation workload.

I always thought Microsoft would be a natural buyer given the tech stack and Microsoft&#x27;s support for developers.The heyday of SO is long over and all the serious Q+A takes place on GitHub, which MS already owns.

Microsoft or Salesforce. Most of the value over the past few years has shifted from general programming topics to platform-specific StackExchange communities.

I totally agree with you. Legislators should watch out for too much power consolidation here.

I&#x27;m actually glad MS would not also own SO. Github has been basically fine under MS ownership so far, but it seems like we&#x27;re headed into a period of massive corporate consolidation, and I&#x27;d be happy if not all the developer tools are controlled by one interested party

&gt;So, the site has 14+ million users with no real activity and the percentile ranking is based on users with 200+ points.Maybe there more people like me who create an account just to do one thing. And the next time they create a new account?

The compression of the top end of the ranking among active&#x2F;once-active users is pretty extreme (or rather, I guess it&#x27;s probably more a factor of just how many people are at the low end of the scale): I have around 1&#x2F;4 your reputation but that&#x27;s still good for &quot;top 0.91% overall&quot;.I have a similar experience though, I haven&#x27;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.

I was there a few months and I had 20-30 points. I left because of grammar nazis.My point is the no real activity is bad intepretion of this chart.

Hmmmm ... Waited almost the gestation period of a human baby before I joined, mostly to raise the quality and quantity of Perl answers. Haven&#x27;t been very active recently.As user 100,754, I am ranked in the top 0.12%, current #830 based on 2,139 answers and 33 questions<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;users&#x2F;100754" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;users&#x2F;100754</a>Some of my useful answers get no upvotes: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;18162345&#x2F;100754" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;18162345&#x2F;100754</a>And some just keep accumulating :-)<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;1763683&#x2F;100754" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;1763683&#x2F;100754</a>Now, if you look on the ranking pages, you&#x27;ll see the following table:<pre><code> 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
</code></pre>
So, the site has 14+ million users with no real activity and the percentile ranking is based on users with 200+ points.

Except no pay out for you. Maybe the next big site should be backed by crypto or something with token rewards so you make something by building the sure with content?

Microsoft has GitHub and I have to admit, I look more into OSS code than I search something on StackOverflow nowadays.

I asked a question on math.stackexchange 8 years ago and that question got really popular and now I&#x27;m in the top 34% ranking of folks on the Math site. I don&#x27;t really know a lot about math but people really like the TREE(3) function.

I&#x27;m top 4% and I haven&#x27;t posted on the site in over 2 years. Every time I log back in though I see I have 100s of new points or whatever they call it.

*power of compound interest + first mover advantage. If you&#x27;re the first to ask a silly question that is a common stumbling block for beginners, you&#x27;re bound to get a steady stream of reputation for life. There&#x27;s diminishing returns for those arriving later, as low hanging fruit are depleted. For example, see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;q&#x2F;927358" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;q&#x2F;927358</a>

Same, I&#x27;m &quot;top 0.20% overall&quot; on askubuntu.com because of some simple questions I asked in 2010 (inactive since).

And a nice reminder of being an early poster to popular things.

Well, those internet points are at least likely to be harder currency than the highly inflationary retweets, upvotes, or likes.

I&#x27;m a little bit active as in asking questions and sometimes answering questions I google and find the solution to. Yet, 50% of my rank points comes from one answer I made soon after I created the account.

Owning both GitHub and StackOverflow would be one hell of a combo for Microsoft. They&#x27;d really have almost the entire worldwide developer community in their hands.

I always thought Microsoft would be a natural buyer given the tech stack and Microsoft&#x27;s support for developers.Unrelated story, I have a day one Stack Overflow account. I don&#x27;t remember how I found it but I&#x27;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!

because common sense says that acquisitions result in attrition of key people, damaging layoffs, forced integrations, etc.nothing that helps the product&#x2F;user base.Acquisition that improves things are extremely out of the norm.

I think very aggressive karma decay might work. Let&#x27;s say your karma that is older than 1 year does not count for moderator powers. That means you need to be actually productive member of community to have the moderation powers.

&gt; Maybe they can fix some of the problems.I don&#x27;t think so. Most of their problems are things that they don&#x27;t even think are problems. They&#x27;ve attracted a large community of moderators who think similarly.Once you get to that point it&#x27;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.

&gt; I&#x27;m not sure what problems you&#x27;re hoping they&#x27;ll solve.I can think of a few (not that this hasn&#x27;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&#x27;s no way to improve the situation without mods screaming &quot;duplication&quot;.How to allow for answers that are more than just what you&#x27;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&#x27;s the only problem they&#x27;ve tried to solve in the last decade, and it&#x27;s already solved by upvoting and search.

Well said. Especially during the early years, I always found the signal&#x2F;noise ratio of SO to be head and shoulders above anything on the web.In part, due to a lot of their subtle UI and reputation choices. Really well designed.Massive scale may at one point break that, but another cause may be found in the change of tone by the team behind SO. They&#x27;re on the &quot;inclusive&quot; train now.Don&#x27;t get me wrong, being inclusive is good, but there&#x27;s a difference between somebody being a beginner or not proficient in English, and somebody being plain lazy.This &quot;softening&quot; 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.

The two biggest problems I&#x27;d like to see solved:1) low-quality questions (&quot;do my homework&quot;, etc.)2) over-zealous moderators closing things they don&#x27;t likeWith the vast data SO accumulated maybe some kind of deep network thing? I&#x27;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&#x27;d be a long way towards getting higher quality content.

I&#x27;m not sure what problems you&#x27;re hoping they&#x27;ll solve. I think the biggest problem with Stack Overflow is the endless stream of low-quality questions. It&#x27;s hard to find interesting, helpful-to-others questions among all the &quot;do my homework for me&quot; type questions, repeats, poorly-worded unresearched posts, etc. That only gets worse as more people use it. I used to moderate, and got sick of it because it&#x27;s not rewarding to wade through all the garbage. I don&#x27;t know how they&#x27;re going to grow the business and improve the quality at the same time.My biggest concern is that they&#x27;ll ruin it with ads. Historically, Stack Overflow has had some of the least-offensive advertising, to the point that I didn&#x27;t even need an adblocker (although lately I do). They&#x27;re going to want to monetize it for a return on their investment, and that can only lead to bad things.

&gt; Why then does nobody seems to think there&#x27;s an upside to the acquisition?The examples are endless. Keybase, Winamp, Trello (to a lesser extent), MySQL&#x2F;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&#x27;s rare for an acquisition to work out well in the long term, so it&#x27;s understandable to be very sceptical of them.

Maybe. They definitely want a return on the investment. So either they have a plan where SO complements some of their other assets or they just want to milk it for money.

I literally cannot name an acquisition of a useful but not maximally profitable product that I was a user of that has worked out better for me. So that&#x27;s why my expecatations are low.

What would an upside even look like? We expect SO to be free, which it is, always online, which it is, and have decent enough moderation to weed out the nonsense posts, which is generally the case. So the best thing that can come out of an acquisition like this is that nothing changes, so there just isn&#x27;t really anything to get worked up about one way or another.There don&#x27;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&#x27;ll see what happens.

The consensus seems to be that SO has peaked some time ago although I still get a lot of value out of it.Why then does nobody seems to think there&#x27;s an upside to the acquisition? Maybe they can fix some of the problems.

&gt;iOS dev&gt;official docs are usually much betterWhat docs are you talking about? I&#x27;m a Swift&#x2F;SwiftUI novice and my experience is that random SO answers always document the APIs in a much more usable way than Apple&#x27;s documentation.Granted, one needs to scroll to the &quot;[CURRENT YEAR] WORKING SOLUTION&quot; answer first.-----Also:&gt;SO is still a great resource for its archived content, but not for anything newIn the miniscule amount of iOS dev I did I quickly learned to always filter results to &quot;past year&quot;. So for me &quot;modern&quot; SO in this area is much better than the &quot;archive&quot;. (Not SO&#x27;s fault, obviously.)

I think this is an incorrect assessment. The value doesn&#x27;t come from those that dedicate most of their time. The value comes from the sites ability to integrate the long tail both for answers and questions. Certainly it is valuable to have the super star posters with a million reputation. But the site was build by random people answering random questions.I also don&#x27;t believe in the value of &quot;community management&quot; at SO. Moderation is just senseless busywork which discourages people to participate. Closing questions as if there is any value in this instead of letting people play the game of asking and answering questions which matter to them and let Google do the filtering.

The problem with StackOverflow or any &quot;community-driven&quot; effort is that every single community is driven by those who dedicate the most time to driving the community.In the beginning, this isn&#x27;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&#x2F;developers will need to manage the business&#x2F;code of the thing. Your expert volunteers will have jobs and obligations to fulfill. Between them, there won&#x27;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&#x27;s a reason they have all that time to dedicate to the community. And hardly any of them are good. But that&#x27;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.

Well, you make it a game - people start playing. The disadvantage of gamification.I&#x27;m not sure that people giving good answers and help are well matched by a system designed for people who like &quot;leveling up&quot;. 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&#x2F;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 &quot;power&quot; and &quot;fame&quot; 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?

I actually find myself landing on a Github issue after a Google search to diagnosing an problem these days.&gt;But now the quality of the questions and answers is worseI see a lot of new users digging up 10 year old questions and cloning answers. They&#x27;ve really hit a spam problem that&#x27;s difficult to solve.

Yeah I see that too.Back when python 2.7 was out, the top-rated answer was a really great, python 2.7-specific solution. Now that python 3.9 is out, the top-rated answer is still a really great, python 2.7-specific solution.

Just take the extra 20 seconds and read through all the positive answers and commentary. Its not like you need to only look at the top ranked answer.

That depends. If it is a popular answer, people sometimes edit with latest version answer. For example, I answered something about Python&#x2F;Flask many years ago which became a very popular answer at the time (simple stuff). Now in Flask&#x27;s latest version, you don&#x27;t need to do it that way necessarily and the answer was edited accordingly.

Git is the poster child for this. Ignore any accepted answer to a Git question on Stack Overflow if it is older than two years old.This may also be a testament to Git&#x27;s terrific development, or to Git&#x27;s obtuse early versions.

The problem for me is that generally the highest ranked answers are the oldest, and in a fast moving tech stack this leads to really outdated advice.
I do a lot of Python programming and some of the answers only work in 2.7 for example.
Same as you, these days I&#x27;ll just look at the official docs.

Codidact is a community-controlled, open-source alternative to SO:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.codidact.com&#x2F;policy&#x2F;codidact-faq" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.codidact.com&#x2F;policy&#x2F;codidact-faq</a>

There are very few official docs for software that I find to be as useful as SO.  If there&#x27;s another site that is as good, I&#x27;m not aware of it.

For many years, SO has been an invaluable resource for me.At one time, I used it daily.I have about twice as many questions as I have answers. Been on the site for a long time; maybe close to ten years.I&#x27;ve learned to ask very good questions, but lately, I&#x27;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&#x27;ll see.

For me, SO has been an outstanding resource; I probably use it 2-3 times a day during the working week, and often on weekends for experimenting&#x2F;self-learning&#x2F;crunch time.It&#x27;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&#x27;s weak and dated for &quot;advanced&quot; full-stack types, but when I need to remember something about style sheets, javascript, HTML, etc., it&#x27;s just very quick and easy, especially with the &quot;try it&quot; interactive widget.Back in the day, usenet comp.lang.* and comp.os.* were like this -- terse, to the point, contributed by seasoned professionals. It&#x27;s like a crowd-sourced interactive user manual. I just hope this acquisition doesn&#x27;t mess it up :)

there are a lot more random sites, so you can Google most programming issues without checking SOThat&#x27;s because programming has exploded in popularity in the past decade, there&#x27;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&#x27;t mean SO is declining in quality.

&gt; you&#x27;re not really told what to do,I know, right, every stack exchange site should really write down a comprehensive how-to-ask page, and they should have a dedicated section just for what used to be called &quot;MCVE&quot; but has since been renamed to &quot;Minimal, Reproducible Example&quot; ... err I mean one day when they write up these guidelines they will eventually rename itThen people wouldn&#x27;t have all those &quot;it don&#x27;t work, what do&quot; questions closed and instead moderators can put in just as much effort as the asker didIn seriousness, I believe some of the miscommunication stems from the difference between &quot;I had my question closed for not following the published site guidelines&quot; versus an actively hostile &quot;get bent, n00b&quot; interaction

While its less useful for future people with problems, I have better luck on discord communities when they&#x27;re available.As an infrequent stack overflow user, I find the platform very user hostile, especially to new users. If you write a question that&#x27;s not great, it&#x27;s just locked, and you&#x27;re not really told what to do, often with a vague suggestion like &quot;lack of clarity or detail&quot; which are orthogonal concepts. Are you supposed to just leave a comment in a dead question thread and hope that someone responds? You&#x27;re mostly just left for dead.

I find Stackoverflow has gotten much worse, you don&#x27;t get any answers either (i.e. I guess the good people have moved on?), but also Google has gotten worse, and documentation sites aren&#x27;t helping either. Coding has just gotten harder when you rely on some complicated technology. The internet simply doesn&#x27;t work as well as it did 5-10 years ago...

Has anyone found any other Q&#x2F;A sites similar to Stack overflow or what it used to be?My experience with Stack overflow from early 2010s to now, is that it used to be an amazing, &quot;must-have&quot; 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&#x27;s no longer a &quot;must-have&quot;.But even with better documentation and more sites, old SO hasn&#x27;t been completely replaced.

The jobs feature is pretty valuable and brings in significant revenue, it’s not something to scoff at. Being able to target and screen developers is a great HR tool.There are likely a lot of companies with lower revenues and higher valuations.

This is the only correct answer, IMO.all the other pundits miss that if the deal was for existing source of revenue, it would have been priced as modestly as those are.

Is it though? Genuinely curious.It has been show time and time again that users of free websites likes this won&#x27;t pay and ads are only worth so much.

It&#x27;s in the top 50 websites of the world. Probably worth something. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.alexa.com&#x2F;topsites" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.alexa.com&#x2F;topsites</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;stackexchange" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;stackexchange</a>

Just wait till you have to pay big time for your programming answers. 1,800,000,000.- is a lot of benjamins to earn back.

search any programming related on google always have some stockoverflow links. stockoverflow rank pretty well with search engine. i think that alone is already worth a billion.

It’s because of their Teams product - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;03&#x2F;17&#x2F;stack-overflow-adds-a-free-tier-to-its-fast-growing-teams-service&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;03&#x2F;17&#x2F;stack-overflow-adds-a-free...</a>

Is there really so much money in SO to justify $1.8B? AFAIK they just run some some ads and show relevant job offers.

Agreed, it&#x27;s an interesting complement to Codecademy and SimilarWeb

They might have first class access to data that enables a powerful shift in integrated development.

&gt; The best thing would have been the status quo. SO has been running on its feet for many yearsYou forgot that there&#x27;s a bunch of VC&#x27;s who now want their investment back plus interest.

&gt; If anything else, Microsoft has left Github untouched so far.Actually, I think it has gotten better. I don&#x27;t like the consolidation of independents like GitHub to big corporations like Microsoft, but I can&#x27;t deny that thus far, it actually worked out pretty well.Stack Overflow is a difficult company&#x2F;website to manage though; it&#x27;s not &quot;just a website with a SaaS product&quot; and really requires a good understanding of the social dynamics and such to run well, much more than e.g. GitHub.

To me, it seems that Github has become more proactive (or hair-trigger) in pulling down content via DMCA in the recent years. This could be down to companies finally figuring out that you can DMCA code repos, but I can&#x27;t help thinking that the Microsoft acquisition was a factor.

I don&#x27;t see how giving money to Tencent has anything to do with the ability to steer SO.The best thing would have been the status quo. SO has been running on its feet for many years. This consolidation, while disputably better than Microsoft acquisition, is no worse than large companies buying out small ones usually guaranteing their demise.If anything else, Microsoft has left Github untouched so far.I am not convinced that this is &quot;absolutely phenomenal&quot;.

It&#x27;s crazy the kind of hero worship towards anyone who makes a ton of money. When you account for all the smart people hustling trying to make their startup work, you realize it boils down to luck. Which, of course, is not a great comfort to most people since we all want to believe we can achieve anything if we only work hard enough.

If I had access to their business network, data analysis, and knew in the end it wasn’t my money, society will just bail us out, sure why not make that choice?You’re making it sound like they had real skin in the game. If it fails they walk away with enough to retire on anyway.Let’s not make celebrities of the biggest grifters out there, emotionally coloring them in as possessed of magical insights. They’re people playing a game where the deck is stacked in their favor by that sort of fawning.It’s an unverifiable claim to suggest they were uniquely gifted. Uniquely positioned is not the same thing.

Yeah but why do those who survive survive?

I hate when people bring up survivorship bias about something like this. It&#x27;s such a negative outlook. It&#x27;s like a &quot;don&#x27;t even try because it&#x27;s just a fluke that happened to them&quot; type of mindset. It doesn&#x27;t help anyone.

Ja true, but don&#x27;t we Saffers all wish we bought more Naspers on the JSE before their gamble on Tencent.

&gt;ApartheidSure, 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 &amp; (white) sociopaths, it wasn&#x27;t so bad.

&gt; And remember, they were a bunch of nobodies based out of South Africa when that happened.Hard disagree - they weren&#x27;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.

What is good for the company is not necessarily good for developers or community.

Naspers might have made smart bets in past but I am not sure how this means they will run the community well.I would have been more happy with a Microsoft acquisition (although that ends up making them even more powerful) as it ties into Microsoft&#x27;s existing products well, so they don&#x27;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&#x27;s jobs platform to Linkedin one. This makes MS more powerful but it might have left SO largely untouched.

Anything beyond leaving SO alone is going to go poorly. Your prediction is this, my prediction is this is going to push SO toward expertsexchange.com, pre-hyphen.

I heard that the deal got closed by the mods

They invested in takealot.com which is the goto online site for non-food in South Africa.Revenue in 2020 was US$238-million up by 41% the previous year no doubt due to the lockdown.

can you substantiate more here.. it reads like they made one good bet on Tencent and you suddently regard them as &quot;the savviest and most forward-thinking players in tech investment &quot;. have you looked at their other bets?

&gt; would you have been smart enough to give Tencent all that money, way back when?Investing in China at the time seems like it would have been a valid strategy. They’re just incredibly lucky with the scale of their success.

This is absolutely phenomenal. Naspers&#x2F;Prosus are some of the savviest and most forward-thinking players in tech investment — would you have been smart enough to give Tencent all that money, way back when? And remember, they were a bunch of nobodies based out of South Africa when that happened.This is much more interesting than a monopolist like Microsoft buying SO, and I’d be keen to see what the growth strategy is here. This might very well be one component of a larger suite they will assemble to create something very interesting and valuable for the developer community. They’ve got the money and the brainpower to put it together.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.md&#x2F;IYMAm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.md&#x2F;IYMAm</a>

Here&#x27;s the article de-paywalled:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;IYMAm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;IYMAm</a>I&#x27;m guessing it&#x27;s the whole shebang. They renamed Stack Exchange to Stack Overflow back in 2015:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.blog&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;15&#x2F;were-changing-our-name-back-to-stack-overflow&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.blog&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;15&#x2F;were-changing-our-name...</a>Stack Exchange appears now to just be a brand for the whole network of Q&amp;A sites, but stackoverflow.com is the golden goose.

I can’t read the whole article, but did this deal include the entire Stack Exchange network or just Stack Overflow?

This have come now <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.blog&#x2F;2021&#x2F;06&#x2F;02&#x2F;prosuss-acquires-stack-overflow&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.blog&#x2F;2021&#x2F;06&#x2F;02&#x2F;prosuss-acquires-stack...</a>

Interesting that he seems to still believe that part of the value of StackOverflow was the software recommendation questions.&gt; 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.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;06&#x2F;02&#x2F;kinda-a-big-announcement&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;06&#x2F;02&#x2F;kinda-a-big-announ...</a>

A bit odd there’s no announcement on stack overflows site? There is just this meta question: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;408138&#x2F;what-will-happen-to-stack-overflow-now-that-it-has-been-sold-to-prosus-for-1-8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;408138&#x2F;what-will-ha...</a>Has anyone seen anything?

How would that work? A site to collect common code snippets?

Arguably, SO is already a Wikipedia for techie matters. It&#x27;s just very poorly maintained and quirky.

It&#x27;s debatable whether they achieved it, but at one time Stack Overflow explicitly stated that their goal was to be a middle ground between a transient Q&amp;A site and a wiki. That philosophy is why they allow everyone (even those without an account) to edit posts and why they close duplicate questions.

SO will never be wikipedia and that is OK.What we miss the the middle ground. And that is open for the taking! (hint)SO is transient and disposable. It is about the error message of the day and by chance hits the language&#x2F;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.

So like the ArchWiki but for all things tech, not just Linux?

As if Wikipedia never shoves banners in your face. I&#x27;d rather have the stackoverflow model than the Wikipedia one. As for collaborative, try the edit button on any question or answer. It&#x27;s already a wiki. If you have enough karma, you can put your words in anyone&#x27;s mouth; if not, it gets into a review queue. I&#x27;m one of the people with enough karma to process that queue, there is very very little abuse actually. You can even submit anonymously, on Wikipedia your IP is then published but on SO I just see &quot;anonymous user&quot;. Again, stackoverflow already has the better model. Finally I&#x27;d like to add one point to the two comparison points you already mentioned: the Wikipedia syntax is one of a kind, weird and you need to learn it specifically for Wikipedia (and other MediaWikis, but they&#x27;re not that common that everyone already knows it). Stackoverflow just uses markdown, which as a developer is not something you won&#x27;t already partially know. Let&#x27;s not turn it into Wikipedia.

I&#x27;d love to see SO be replaced by some collaborative ad-free solution like wikipedia.

If they own 200bn then 15bn is a small portion. It&#x27;s relative.

&gt; sold a small portion of its equity stake in Tencent in April for $14.6 billion.Personally I would never use “small” to describe anything worth 15B…Anyway, Tencent is worth 850B and these guys own approx. 200B of that, so they’re quite large.

I will admit the Prosus people seem more forward-looking (based on some wiki reading) than your usual run-of-the-mill PE acquirer.  So perhaps they can steer the ship competently.

&gt; As long as the new owner doesn&#x27;t make it &quot;pay to see&quot;, I can probably ignore them.There was a very similar site about a decade ago, that would absolutely dominate in the Google search results - but of course, the answers were behind a paywall. Today, I don&#x27;t even remember what their domain was called.

Was github worse, prior to the microsoft purchase? It&#x27;s still relatively recent and only a small chapter in the history of the company. I&#x27;m not sure you can say at this stage that it&#x27;s better than if Github had remained independent.

While I agree that it is annoying whenever one reads something put out by the actual SO people, I notice that (thus far) if I simply ignore that and go there to look up the answers to questions (and very occasionally ask or answer them), it still works fine. As long as the new owner doesn&#x27;t make it &quot;pay to see&quot;, I can probably ignore them.There is, of course, no guarantee in this. But, while I find what I hear about Mozilla&#x27;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&#x27;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.

It&#x27;s not. This person doesn&#x27;t like someone&#x27;s political beliefs, so they&#x27;re trying to denigrate them on a seemingly &quot;objective&quot; basis, which doesn&#x27;t hold up to scrutiny.

Stack Overflow suffers from a mismatch in expectations. The community is seen from the outside as &quot;a place to find answers&quot; so many people go there to ask questions. But in order for your question to be eligible to be answered (and not closed&#x2F;on hold) it must be: (1) objectively answerable (no opinions!), (2) completely specified (reproducible problems).#1: lots of people want answers to subjective issues. &quot;Should I do it like this or like that?&quot; &quot;What&#x27;s the best way to ...&quot;#2: many of the people who ask the questions just don&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t want indexed or shuffle them to a sister site. Pruning them without telling the user they&#x27;re &quot;closed&quot; or &quot;on hold&quot; would be a much more friendly experience.

It has nothing to do with social justice; Stack Overflow and Mozilla had a user base that scaled with network effects, but both in markets with low switching costs. They’re constantly vulnerable unless they can come up with products that are harder to dislodge. Thus the mission statements that are vague because they’re trying to find a way out of the corner they’ve painted themselves in.

Well, since you&#x27;re being deliberately obtuse - I&#x27;ll expound.My point is that these companies are moving focus away from the products that got them to where they are, to a set of vague handwavy concepts that are completely unquantifiable. And, in my experience anyways, this usually comes at a cost to the existing products.

&gt;The honeyed words of social justice are more important than great, well executed products, apparently.I like how all the other comments are pointing out that the forces behind an acquisition are never good for &#x27;focused products&#x27; and then there&#x27;s this comment that shows us the truth, it&#x27;s those damn kids and their social justice that ruins the products.

will somebody smarter than me please explain why this was downvoted? tia

TBF, the notion of community at least started off as more than marketing speak or social justice trend chasing. Arguably, it is a substantive basis of our inter-networked connectedness, even if it was later assimilated by the same marketing machinery that also spits outs empty (but apparently effective) buzzwords.

Since when is Stack Overflow dying, or focused on social justice? That&#x27;s not my experience at all. The purpose of the site (as well as the many, many sister sites) is to succinctly ask and succinctly answer questions. It does so admirably.Occasional drama is just what happens when you become the effective Wikipedia of everything that is possible to ask about any technical topic. The actual Wikipedia is also not free of drama or political struggles in the background. But, much like Stack Overflow, it&#x27;s also far from dead and continues to be a priceless resource to all of humanity.

One annoying reality of the business world is that to prevail there you need to drink the full BS cool aid. You have to start talking business lingo (growth, empowering, success) to even get access to the financial support to grow the business and hire others. If you&#x27;re down to earth and don&#x27;t stand the whole BS, your chances in that area are very slim.

&gt; Now their products are withering. Dying a slow death.What is SO business model? Is it ads-based?Just hope it won&#x27;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&#x27;s value is tied to the intensive community moderation effort, hope this would not be discounted in any future roadmap (wonder if there&#x27;s anysuch).

Sounds like it is merely a dialect of &quot;suit-speak&quot; for the 2020s, aka &quot;lip-service.&quot;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.

I find parallels between Stack Overflow and Mozilla. Both started with fairly focused products that were best in class. The user base grew and the network effect multiplied. Both were started and largely staffed by engineers.Then both companies started focusing on &quot;bigger&quot;, 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.

Stack Overflow sold to Prosus for $1.8B