Stack Overflow sold to tech investor Prosus for $1.8 billion:
Legendary programming Q&A site Stack Overflow is being acquired by Prosus N.V., Europe's largest tech investment firm. According to a press release on Prosus' website, the two companies entered into a definitive acquisition agreement yesterday.
[...] In 2001, Prosus' parent company Naspers bought a 46.5% interest in Tencent for only $34 million— but earlier this year, Prosus liquidated a 2% Tencent stake for $14.6 billion, retaining a 28.9% interest valued at roughly $200 billion. Prosus chairman Koos Bekker said the Tencent liquidation will "fund continued growth in Prosus' core business lines and emerging sectors" and create "some headroom for acquisitions."
Stack Overflow co-founder Joel Spolsky blogged about the purchase, and Stack Overflow CEO Prasanth Chandrasekar wrote a more official announcement. Both blog posts characterize the acquisition as having little to no impact on the day-to-day operation of Stack Overflow.
[...] Spolsky went into more detail, saying 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 entire company is staying in place: we just have different owners now."
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 04 2021, @05:25AM (1 child)
StackOverflow had their Jew moment when they did something with a CoC with all those stupid pronouns and shit, lots of people quit, and the most amusing aspect of it all was that a Jew was at the center of it.
Really took the "oomph" out of it, like every other really great ruined crowdsourcing forum out there ruined by control-freak Jews, then like Reddit it was sold to Jews. Jews ruin everything.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Subsentient on Friday June 04 2021, @07:08AM
I'm not supposed to tell you this, but there's a Jew hiding under your bed. Sssshhh, careful, don't let him know you know!
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 04 2021, @06:09AM
It's Kaliyuga.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Subsentient on Friday June 04 2021, @07:04AM (10 children)
Same thing I said on the green site: And nothing of value was lost.
Stack Overflow has been useless for the entire time I've been programming, so over a decade.
Ask a question, it's closed as a duplicate even though there are no questions asking the same thing, or closed as not-constructive when it's a perfectly legitimate technical question, etc etc etc.
Stack Overflow's moderation is a hydraulic anal rape machine with a 12 inch spiked steel cock that cums battery acid. Only masochists of the highest order would willingly subject themselves to it.
I haven't asked a single question on Stack Overflow in several years, because I know it's completely futile 99% of the time. And besides, if I'm desperate enough to ask in a place like that, you can be damned sure nobody else is going to know the answer either. And sure enough, when I get desperate enough to click on one of the Stack Overflow results in my DDG search, there's always some poor bastard who asked the question and got it immediately closed, or at least got zero replies.
Death to Stack Overflow. Reap what you sow.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 5, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Friday June 04 2021, @07:38AM (1 child)
I tend to disagree. I am not active on Stack Overflow nor have I ever asked a question there. Yet, searching for an error message or just a programming problem, more often than not, I end up on Stack Overflow with a good explanation/solution.
BTW, I believe it is not Stack Overflow but Stack Exchange that was sold (TLDR). There is more than just programming on Stack Exchange and again for example, many of the Q & As on mathematics and statistics are very helpful.
I would still call it a bad business decision though (Softbank levels of incompetence) which does spell trouble for the site. 1.8 bln are not easily recovered from the site and once the investor realizes that, the nasty "synergies"/advertising/spying will creep in.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 04 2021, @02:42PM
There is a whole group of sites that grew out of Stack Overflow. They are all the same.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 04 2021, @11:11AM (2 children)
It also killed many a proper topic-specific programming forums in the process. So it wasn't just useless, it was openly harmful to the internet --- like all platforms.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 04 2021, @11:13AM
*forum
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 04 2021, @02:52PM
Like CMCrossroads. Gone now, posts deleted, ancient history.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday June 04 2021, @01:07PM (1 child)
If you look at it like a serious technical resource its a fail.
But as a clickbait site to show ads to people trying to troubleshoot something, its a win.
The fact that nobody expects anything from SO means they don't have to even try, in fact they can implement stuff designed to destroy community and productivity and nobody will be able to tell the difference.
One thing you did miss is because it encourages locked down groupthink the answers are a snapshot of history from, sometimes, decades ago and have not been updated with the times. Linux kernel runs 32 bit only, mysql doesn't have transactions...
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 04 2021, @01:39PM
what are these ads you talk about?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by arubaro on Friday June 04 2021, @01:31PM
As someone else pointed out, stack overflow is not only related to programing.
mathoverflow is very useful for mathematicians: good questions, good problems, good answers.
math.stackexchange is for undergraduate and graduate math students, and it is also a nice place for them to ask questions (often answered by profesional mathematicians)
i do not know if these work as in the software related parts of the site (it seems it is not), but at least in the math case, it would be a pity if things go bad.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 04 2021, @02:49PM
Not sure. My experience is if a question is closed, there is a link to related that answered it already. It's mostly people that don't bother looking for an answer and post duplicates or opinion questions.
Secondly, I've also never asked a question on Stack Overflow. Twice I almost did, but by the time I managed to type one and provide a small example to illustrate the problem, I came up with the solution and didn't need to ask the question anymore.
If you questions are immediately closed, it generally means they are poor quality or ambiguous. Often, contributors will try to edit them for clarity but others they can be closed if it's just a general question that's been asked and answered 10 times already. The people that close it are the people that answer and ask questions too, so ....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 05 2021, @12:19AM
stack overflow is useful due to the masochists that post there, but i don't contribute there because their moderation is ridiculous.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Dr Spin on Friday June 04 2021, @09:48AM
Translation: "No change will go unspent"
Stand well back while I shoot this incoming flying pig!
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 04 2021, @11:54AM (5 children)
Stack Overflow isn't worth 1.8¢. It's mostly idiots quoting manuals to other idiots for social reputation points, and when answers are offered that aren't directly ripped from a manual, the answers are invariably totally wrong.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 04 2021, @01:45PM
SO account names+scores are something east indian software folk love including in their CVs. I also heard they bully people into upvoting their answers. What ever will they do now?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 04 2021, @05:40PM (2 children)
When you look at StackOverflow answers, the odds are 50/50 that the answer marked as "correct" isn't. There is frequently a newer answer posted somewhere below it that explains why the chosen "correct" answer is wrong or deficient and offers a better answer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 04 2021, @10:33PM (1 child)
There's no incentive for the question-asker to go back later and change the accepted answer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @02:22AM
that would deprive someone of points and lower their status causing angst
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by kazzie on Sunday June 06 2021, @05:05AM
Mod parent up!
(It's okay, AC can't receive karma.)