Everyone is saying how 1.8B is a ton, but I’m kinda surprised that it’s “barely” more than the Depop acquisition today at 1.6B.
But in the case of StackOverflow it really must be a large schism. SO really did help the world. Count me++.
And almost every single bit of it is due to community work, not the people inside company. (That is not to say the company is irrelevant - but seeing how consequently stackexchange dropped bricks on everybody's feet two years ago and the community still carried on gives you some perspective on what is keeping the site alive).
For example, if you simply want an answer, Google itself will extract the top 1-3 answers and present them to you without ever opening SO.
Further, SO has explicitly avoided the most intrusive advertising, further limiting their monetization potential.
The one area where I think SO could have done a lot better was building a better social network out of their website.
Depop already makes solid revenue and showed growth of 100% last year. Stackoverflow is still struggling with revenue.
It is not about how many users you have, or how much value you offer to those users. But all about how much money you make off them.