I always thought Microsoft would be a natural buyer given the tech stack and Microsoft's support for developers.
Unrelated story, I have a day one Stack Overflow account. I don't remember how I found it but I'm sure it was posted on digg or slashdot or something at the time. I had a lot of posts in the first few years about some generally broad concepts, and completely inactive since.
In spite of this, I am in the top 7% of accounts on the site, which is a nice reminder on the power of compound interest!
Same for me. Day 1. I'm user 25 on the site as I listened to the podcast about them making it. Just for answering a few questions early I'm in the top 0.76% overall.
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's somewhere.
Edit: I'm in the top 2%. Most of my rep. comes from interest earned on questions/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.
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.
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 " ?
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.
I'm in the top 0.35%. For a while around 2010ish I was answering a lot of questions. I've barely even logged in in many years. I don'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'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.
Interesting. I've barely posted/commented — in particular I've only made seven posts since 2012 (and zero since 2018) — but I guess because signed up in 2010 I'm in the top 17% of users.
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.
Hmmmm ... Waited almost the gestation period of a human baby before I joined, mostly to raise the quality and quantity of Perl answers. Haven'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
The compression of the top end of the ranking among active/once-active users is pretty extreme (or rather, I guess it's probably more a factor of just how many people are at the low end of the scale): I have around 1/4 your reputation but that's still good for "top 0.91% overall".
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.
Something about how mean people are with voting keeps it this way. It'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.
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'm always reminded that I don't have the privilege of upvoting.
I suspect it's because so many people use SO for work. When I'm at work I'm not thinking about being a good SO user and upvoting a good question or answer, I'm focused on getting my answer and getting back into the flow of my work.
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.
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.
Not completely true. I’m active on SO and other stack exchange sites as a consumer and bookmark tons of questions. They sync with https://Larder.io for me too. I can’t upvote though.
It looks like GitHub Discussions is sort of filling a similar niche--I'm guessing they're banking on being able to build that out for less than $1B--since they already have GitHub, they don't benefit as much from the StackOverflow user network / brand. I think that makes sense.
I'm actually glad MS would not also own SO. Github has been basically fine under MS ownership so far, but it seems like we're headed into a period of massive corporate consolidation, and I'd be happy if not all the developer tools are controlled by one interested party
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.
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'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?
I played Stack Overflow years ago and have a ~0.3% ranked account, despite not really posting in years. It's amazing how little the ranking seems to have changed in the last 10 years, wavering around in the top half percent whenever I've peeked. I don't know whether the number is dishonest, or whether the new stars and new signups just happen to hold it in status, never sending it to 0.03% or 3%.
Same. I think what happened is that the early users answered all the most frequently occurring questions, and the questions honestly haven't changed much. I think my most popular answer is like how to diff with git. People are using git even more than they were when SO started, so it gets upvoted regularly.
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.
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.
Don't be too hard on yourself, it's next to impossible to guess which things are going to be transformational and which aren'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.
> 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'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.
It'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.
*power of compound interest + first mover advantage. If you're the first to ask a silly question that is a common stumbling block for beginners, you're bound to get a steady stream of reputation for life. There's diminishing returns for those arriving later, as low hanging fruit are depleted. For example, see https://stackoverflow.com/q/927358
> In spite of this, I am in the top 7% of accounts on the site
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.
I asked a question on math.stackexchange 8 years ago and that question got really popular and now I'm in the top 34% ranking of folks on the Math site. I don't really know a lot about math but people really like the TREE(3) function.
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.
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't put much stock in the score.
Microsoft or Salesforce. Most of the value over the past few years has shifted from general programming topics to platform-specific StackExchange communities.
I'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'd really have almost the entire worldwide developer community in their hands.
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?
I doubt it. I'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.
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.
While I'm happy for the people who made a lot of money in this transaction, I always read these announcements with a bit of angst.
From a user point of view, I expect this to go like Reddit has, for example. Everyone building that value saw high use value, returns on their investment in the form of information they need, lean, easy to find, high signal to noise.
Now there is a debt to be paid. The new owner needs to extract the purchase price, and whatever additional additional returns they intend. Everything costs something.
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.
>> The entire company is staying in place: we just have different owners now.
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."
>Reddit seems like an example of a successful acquisition
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.
>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
...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...
> Conde Nast managed not to destroy Reddit after buying it.
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.
I sold a company to Naspers once (the parent company of Prosus). Their philosophy is to let their portfolio companies continue to operate independently.
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 ;)
That’s interesting and sounds positive you had autonomy.
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?
They'll double-down on the enterprise offer I would think. I don't think jobs was the money-maker they planned on, and the public individual site doesn't have a lot of revenue approaches that justify ~2B purchase price. I'm sure they original VCs made money but not sure it's their typical unicorn multiple.
They already make money by having a job board (probably one of the best around for hiring devs, so probably costs a bomb) and they sell an internal version of SO for enterprise customers.
I think this will not happen immediately because people would panic and run. It will be more subtle and over a couple years, but it will fade away in time.
StackOverflow was successfully expanding their service even before this purchase. I'd imagine stackoverflow jobs is a valuable area - sure it's not linkedin but it's still really good. SO also has really strong community following so there's always room for easy expanding.
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!
I'd imagine Stackoverflow for Teams will be a big part of it too. We use it a t work and I'm sure lots of big enterprises would be happy to pay good money to build in-house QA and knowledge sharing.
This is why we societal debt > equity, for ownership is like a debt that can never be paid back.
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!"
Fun fact and one of my dinner party anecdotes; I have the accepted answer for one of Ross Ulbricht’s (Silk Road’s Dread Pirate Roberts) SO questions that got him busted.
CodeIgnitor. What a blast from the past. I was able to read the entire code base and then again and grok all of it fairly quickly. That gave me a lot of confidence then and helped with imposter syndrome
Not exactly on topic but I click on this link and it's been a long time since I went on SO...it popped up the cookies choice thing...except it remembered my choices from last time so there was no reason to...I think it was just hoping i'd mistakenly hit 'accept all'.
Did it really remember all your choices or did your choices just match with the default settings (strictly necessary = on, everything else = off)?
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.
His questions have 444 upvotes, so he should actually have 4400 rep. He lost some to users being deleted. Looking at the reputation log he actually has less than he should have, but I'm not an expert.
This is absolutely phenomenal. Naspers/Prosus are some of the savviest and most forward-thinking players in tech investment — would you have been smart enough to give Tencent all that money, way back when? And remember, they were a bunch of nobodies based out of South Africa when that happened.
This is much more interesting than a monopolist like Microsoft buying SO, and I’d be keen to see what the growth strategy is here. This might very well be one component of a larger suite they will assemble to create something very interesting and valuable for the developer community. They’ve got the money and the brainpower to put it together.
> And remember, they were a bunch of nobodies based out of South Africa when that happened.
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.
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'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.
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.
It'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.
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 don't see how giving money to Tencent has anything to do with the ability to steer SO.
The best thing would have been the status quo. SO has been running on its feet for many years. This consolidation, while disputably better than Microsoft acquisition, is no worse than large companies buying out small ones usually guaranteing their demise.
If anything else, Microsoft has left Github untouched so far.
I am not convinced that this is "absolutely phenomenal".
> If anything else, Microsoft has left Github untouched so far.
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.
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't help thinking that the Microsoft acquisition was a factor.
can you substantiate more here.. it reads like they made one good bet on Tencent and you suddently regard them as "the savviest and most forward-thinking players in tech investment ". have you looked at their other bets?
I hate when people bring up survivorship bias about something like this. It's such a negative outlook. It's like a "don't even try because it's just a fluke that happened to them" type of mindset. It doesn't help anyone.
I ended up losing access to my ancient account (it was using the OpenID providers that they don't even support anymore and the provider I used isn't around). I had gone fairly inactive, but recently wanted to contribute some content.
This was on the DIY stackoverflow, there's a fairly common problem on my stove, but an easy, low/no cost fix, it's just very involved. The DIY SO had a good discussion of the problem. To contribute back, I spent ~3 days making an instructional video on the replacement. Posted it to Youtube. Then went over to the SO to post it there as well, and realized it'd take like a month of dicking around to get a new account up to the point that I could post a response in the thread.
I reached out to site support about getting back into my old account, but have never heard back. <shrug>
Didn't they have some way to transfer your account over from OpenID? Pretty sure I used it at the start as well, but now my account is a normal SO account.
Yeah I've very often had something of substance to contribute but lacked the "merit" (or points or whatever). I wonder how common that is and how it could be handled - i.e. differentiating against spam
> 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
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.
Maybe I misunderstood what it would take, but one of the first things I saw was "account at least 30 days old". At this point, I guess I probably have that one covered, but at the time I didn't want this on my mind for a month.
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.
You can bet your ass if one of these obscenely funded startup takes on the same problem, you are going to see all of that microservices, event sourcing, reactive patterns, service mesh jazz all over the place when they are dealing with like 100k users. And throw in the obligatory machine learning for intelligent ranking or some shit like that.
What is wrong with event sourcing? We also built our app without any microservices but event based processing is actually quite good pattern. Basically the state of the application can be replayed with the events.
thank for the link. its really interesting. my boss want to use micro services and all the latest buzz but i'm like we only have two programmers and we don't create any app. all the code that we have is to integrate our on premise software with third party SaaS. we are a mid size company.
Since switching almost completely to JavaScript, Node.js and React I noticed that my time spent on Stack Overflow dropped significantly. I found my answers in API docs and GitHub issues most of the time.
I never created an account. Once I had listed most recent Redux and React questions, had an answer to one that was pretty tricky within one minute since posting and while I was typing out the answer in my editor somebody already had their answer posted and accepted. With code formatting and everything.
What's left is the unanswered questions that look like really specific, obscure, and unpaid debugging sessions to me.
Github issues have also replaced most of my stack overflow usage. Part of it is that I'm now more experienced, so most of my questions are about edge cases or potential bugs and not "How do I call system()?". But it also feels like stackoverflow took off because it was lower friction than mailing lists and experts exchange, but has been overshadowed as projects migrated to github and most developers already having a github account, rendering it lower effort. This changed things by (a) having stuff in google results from other sites and (b) encouraging developers to write better docs to reduce the rate of support requests in github issues.
> I found my answers in API docs and GitHub issues most of the time.
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.
I think it's a virtuous cycle of modern development that popular SO questions make their into the official documents. And things people find super annoying just get fixed and disappear. I had some issues with a popular framework a few years back and got answered by the creator directly.
JavaScript is consistently in the #1 spot on their yearly developer survey, and remains as one of the most common tags on questions, so your experience certainly doesn't translate to the average JS developer.
Most of these are very successful businesses, just not as fashionable as the SV ones you know. If this is their complete list of investments their hit rate is insane.
If anyone is aware about the numbers, how are their ecommerce and fintech ones doing in their markets? That space is quite competitive and a lot of well funded players.
Also, are the food ones profitable or loss making like most other food delivery startups?
Takealot Group (subdivided into Takealot, Superbalist, and MrD) is basically a trinity of Amazon, [insert fashion e-tailer here], and UberEats, for South Africa.
Readit News
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!
https://stackoverflow.com/users/25/codingwithoutcomments
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:
So, the site has 14+ million users with no real activity and the percentile ranking is based on users with 200+ points.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.
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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.
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My questions seem lame and my top answer is my own question: https://stackoverflow.com/users/108512/andrew-johnson?tab=pr...
The heyday of SO is long over and all the serious Q+A takes place on GitHub, which MS already owns.
From a user point of view, I expect this to go like Reddit has, for example. Everyone building that value saw high use value, returns on their investment in the form of information they need, lean, easy to find, high signal to noise.
Now there is a debt to be paid. The new owner needs to extract the purchase price, and whatever additional additional returns they intend. Everything costs something.
So what will it be?
Subscription access?
Less favorable signal to noise?
But I agree with you overall. I'm a bit nervous too. Stack Overflow is so good, and its fate is now entirely in the hands of the purchaser.
EDIT: In the other announcement post (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2021/06/02/kinda-a-big-announ...):
Today we’re pleased to announce that Stack Overflow is joining Prosus. Prosus is an investment and holding company, which means that the most important part of this announcement is that Stack Overflow will continue to operate independently, with the exact same team in place that has been operating it, according to the exact same plan and the exact same business practices. Don’t expect to see major changes or awkward “synergies”. The business of Stack Overflow will continue to focus on Reach and Relevance, and Stack Overflow for Teams. The entire company is staying in place: we just have different owners now.
I wonder how true this will be over time.
I'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
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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!"
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https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9563675/destroying-a-spe...
* https://web.archive.org/web/20140705203439/http://www.slate....
* https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/199353/did-the-stac...
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.
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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).
This is much more interesting than a monopolist like Microsoft buying SO, and I’d be keen to see what the growth strategy is here. This might very well be one component of a larger suite they will assemble to create something very interesting and valuable for the developer community. They’ve got the money and the brainpower to put it together.
Hard disagree - they weren't nobodies, Naspers was already a media juggernaut by 2001 (print and TV). Naspers was founded in 1915 (as De Nasionale Pers Beperkt - National Press) to promote Afrikaner Nationalism in the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer war. One of Naspers founders was also the founding president of the National Party (you might know them from their hit - Apartheid) and the mutually-beneficial, cozy arrangement between the NP and Nasionale Pers lasted until the very end of the Apartheid government in 1992.
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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.
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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.
This was on the DIY stackoverflow, there's a fairly common problem on my stove, but an easy, low/no cost fix, it's just very involved. The DIY SO had a good discussion of the problem. To contribute back, I spent ~3 days making an instructional video on the replacement. Posted it to Youtube. Then went over to the SO to post it there as well, and realized it'd take like a month of dicking around to get a new account up to the point that I could post a response in the thread.
I reached out to site support about getting back into my old account, but have never heard back. <shrug>
There's a wealth of knowledge in old questions on that site, but UX for occasional users is poor!
If you made a whole video just post it as an answer. That takes 1 rep (the lowest it can possibly be). If you wanted to post it in a comment ...well you needed 15 rep which is also pretty easy to get.
I don't understand this criticism of SO as if it is some walled garden and it's so hard to participate you may as well not.
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Discussions are discouraged.
There are clearly people commenting here who don’t understand how the SO works, and haven’t bothered to read the FAQ.
This is exactly why SO needs restrictions on new accounts.
Summary: simple as possible, maintainable, no micro-service hell - just a bunch of boxes serving with the cache and highly optimized SQL queries. Know your storage engine.
This is yet another example that not getting bogged down in cargo cults, micro-services, and instead solving problems you have will result in a smaller, more agile team, leaner infrastructure bill and burn rate, and a higher chance of a successful exit.
I never created an account. Once I had listed most recent Redux and React questions, had an answer to one that was pretty tricky within one minute since posting and while I was typing out the answer in my editor somebody already had their answer posted and accepted. With code formatting and everything.
What's left is the unanswered questions that look like really specific, obscure, and unpaid debugging sessions to me.
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.
E-commerce - including its subsidiary, OLX (100%)
Takealot.com (96%) Fintech - including its subsidiary, PayU (98.8%)
Food delivery - including its subsidiary and associates, iFood (54.8%), Delivery Hero (22.3%) and Swiggy (38.8%)
Etail - including its subsidiary, eMag (80.1%)
Travel - including its associate, Ctrip (6%)
Mobility - Bykea
It is also the largest shareholder of social Internet platforms:
Tencent (28.9%)
Mail.ru Group (28% in 2019)"
Doesn't sound to good for me.
First, buy a site with 14 million+ accounts, all guaranteed to be developers of some sort. It even has a job board apparently, already!
Next, bring in synergy. Mine the data to find out who does what. Make a "better linkedin".
Doh.
(They clearly want to "monetize" it somehow, so... how I wonder? The above?)
Also, are the food ones profitable or loss making like most other food delivery startups?