SO sale to private equity

The sale of Stack Overflow to private equity is widely viewed by the community as the culmination of a long-term shift where management prioritized monetization and engagement metrics over the platform’s core mission and moderation health. Many commenters express a sense of betrayal, arguing that the $1.8 billion acquisition was a perfectly timed "sellout" by leadership that cashed in on the community's unpaid labor just before the site's utility began to decline. This disillusionment has been deepened by recent pivots toward AI deals and the erosion of the "social contract," with users lamenting that the once-authoritative resource is being sacrificed for data-scraping profits and experimental features that ignore the objections of long-term contributors. Ultimately, the sentiment reflects a bleak outlook where the site's original spirit has been replaced by corporate interests that many feel have permanently damaged the quality and culture of the community.

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Shog9 was probably the best person on staff in terms of awareness of the moderation problems and ability to come up with solutions.

Unfortunately, the company abruptly stopped investing in the Q&A platform in ~2015 or so and shifted their development effort into monetization attempts like Jobs, Teams, Docs, Teams (again), etc. -- right around the time the moderation system started to run into serious scaling problems. There were plans, created by Shog and the rest of the community team, for sweeping overhauls to the moderation systems attempting to fix the problems, but they got shelved as the Q&A site was put in maintenance mode.

It's definitely true that staff is to blame for the site's problems, but not Shog or any of the employees whose usernames you'd recognize as people who actually spent time in the community. Blame the managers who weren't users of the site, decided it wasn't important to the business, and ignored the problems.

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Blame the managers who weren't users of the site, decided it wasn't important to the business, and ignored the problems.

This always cracks me up. I've seen it so many times, and so many books cover this...

Classic statement is "never take your eye off the ball".

Sure, you need to plan ahead. You need to move down a path. But take your eye off of today, and you won't get to tomorrow.

Maybe they'll SCO it, and spend the next 10 years suing everyone and their LLM dog.

You know, I wonder how the board and execs made out suing Linux related... things. End users were threatened too, compelled to pay...

SO could be spun off into a neat tiger, nipping at everyone's toes.

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But was “today “ that profitable? Stack overflow always struck me as a great public good and a poor way to make money. If the current business makes very little money, it may not be worth the work.

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> However the answerers on So are not paid. Why should tyhy waste their time on a user who has not shown they have put any effort in and asks a question that they have already answered several times before?

This is kind of a weird sentiment to put forth, because other sites namely Quora actually do pay their Answerer's. An acquintance of mine was at one time a top "Question Answerer" on Quora and got some kind of compensation for their work.

So this is not the Question-Asker's problem. This is the problem of Stack Overflow and the people answering the questions.

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That would entail a significant redesign of the underlying display engine... and an agreement of that being the correct direction at the corporate level.

Unfortunately, after Jeff left I don't think there was that much upper management level support for "quality before quantity" After the sale it feels like it was "quantity and engagement will follow" and then "engagement through any means". Deleting and hiding questions or answers that aren't high quality... really would mean making most of the site hidden and that wouldn't help engagement at all.

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> What I always appreciate about SO is the dialogue between commenters.

Stack Overflow is explicitly not for "dialogue", recent experiments (which are generally not well received by the regulars on the meta site) notwithstanding. The purpose of the comments on questions is to help refine the question and ensure it meets standards, and in some cases serve other meta purposes like pointing at different-but-related questions to help future readers find what they're looking for. Comments are generally subject to deletion at any time and were originally designed to be visually minimal. They are not part of the core experience.

Of course, the new ownership is undoing all of that, because of engagement metrics and such.

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It doesn't have anything to do with LLMs. It has to do with shifting one's focus from doing good things to making money. Joel did that, and SO failed because of it.

Joel promised the answering community he wouldn't sell SO out from under them, but then he did.

And so the toxicity at the top trickled down into the community.

Those with integrity left the community and only toxic, selfcentered people remained to destroy what was left in effort to salvage what little there was left for themselves.

Mods didn't dupe questions to help the community. They did it to keep their own answers at the top on the rankings.

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How did Joel sell out? Curious as I’m not aware of any monetary changes. I watched Joel several times support completely brain dead policies in the meta discussions which really set the rules and tone. So my respect there is low.

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They literally sold: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/stack-overflow-sold-...

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The first actually insightful comment under the OP. I agree all of it.

If SO manages to stay online, it'll still be there for #2 people to present their problems. Don't underestimate the number of bored people still scouring the site for puzzles to solve.

SE Inc, the company, are trying all kinds of things to revitalize the site, in the service of ad revenue. They even introduced types of questions that are entirely exempt from moderation. Those posts feel literally like reddit or any other forum. Threaded discussions, no negative scores, ...

If SE Inc decides to call it quits and shut the place down and freeze it into a dataset, or sell it to some SEO company, that would be a loss.

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Seems like the exit was very well timed.

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/408138/what-will-ha...

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Another plausible explanation is that the new owners didn’t develop the community in a good way. Instead of fixing the myriad of issues that were obvious to almost all contributors they instead basically let it die?

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The new owners (well, not really new any more) are focused on adding AI to SO because it's the current hotness, and making other changes to try to extract more money that they're completely ignoring the community's issues and objections to their changes, which tend to be half-assed and full of bugs.

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Love this comment [1] under the post

> $1.8 billion? So do those of us who contribute get any of that?

1. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/408138/what-will-ha...

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Apparently it was removed to reduce the load on the database see [0], [1].

The top voted response points out that SO are [2]:

> destroying a valuable feature for users.

Kinda wild they allowed it. As that answer also suggests, perhaps rather than remove it entirely, they could just compute those stats at a lesser frequency to reduce load.

[0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/399661/389220

[1] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/437862/5783745

[2] https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/400024/389220

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Yup. This, to me, provides another explanation for why the social contract is being used as toilet paper by the owner class. They literally see the writing on the wall.

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Seems like the sharp decline started shortly after they were sold to a private equity firm.

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The founders made the right move selling it when they did. No way that site is worth $1.8 billion now.

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Spolsky and co. sold SO in 2021 - timing IS everything.

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Looks like they sold right before the end. Wonder whether the AI deals they've struck make up for the difference

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Acquired in June 2021 for $1.8 billion usd. Hurts but acquirer Naspers is a prolific tech investor, its stake in TenCent is worth > $150B usd today.

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StackOverflow was immediately dead for me the day they declared that AI sellout of theirs.

Pathetic thieves, they won't even allow deleting my own answers after that. Not that it would make the models unlearn my data, of course, but I wanted to do so out of principle.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/399619/our-partners...

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I mean, I kinda of miss it. But man it was a hostile place for newcomers.

Only ever asked one question and I tried to answer more than a handful but never really clicked with the site.

I do wonder if it would have faired better under the original ownership before it was sold in 2021-06-02.

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Now the real question is...

Which AI company will acquire whats left of StackOverflow and all the years of question/answer data?

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It is already acquired.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/399619/our-partners...

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