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Comment by ddingus | Hacker News Reader

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.

So what will it be?

Subscription access?

Less favorable signal to noise?

View on HN

I dunno. Reddit seems like an example of a successful acquisition. Conde Nast managed not to destroy Reddit after buying it.

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.

Conde Nast also owns Ars Technica, which personally is my favorite tech-news site and has high and consistent quality.

I don't think the Reddit transition has gone very well. But there is still a lot to be seen on that front. Ars is an example of a successful acquisition. I totally agree.

> I don't think the Reddit transition has gone very well.

I would agree, although I do not think it has been particularly bad either. If they had broken apps the enhance reddit and removed old.reddit.com, then I would think otherwise. For the most part, I am still able to use the site as I have since 2011.

To me, and I'm in the same scenario as you, that's mostly bad.

old.reddit.com isn't going to last, is it?

For what it's worth, even i.reddit.com aka reddit.com/.compact is still working.

Yes and no. Article comment can be toxic downvote brigades to anyone who does not adhere to the hive's opinion and Ars is a mala fide Apple boot licker to the bone. Ars forums have gone to hell in this regard.

Not sure the fourms are caused by acquisition.

I do see the UX experience being more thick, less favorable signal to noise happening due to acquisition. There may be editorial conflicts of interest too. I do not notice at present.

If you don't like downvotes then make your own subreddit and attract like opinions. I personally don't think posts should be voted more negative than -1.

That's really mature, bravo.

If you ever want to see thee Ars community dogpile on a certain topic, read any article on cryptocurrencies. You will get the following comments at the top of the heap:

Crypto means I can't buy a graphics card

Crypto is a ponzi scheme and should be banned

It is immoral to own Bitcoin, and governments should punish people who do

Would you like to buy my new XCoin ha ha ha.

Elon Musk is amazing, but this crypto thing makes me a little unhappy with him.

Ad nauseum. I have been visiting that site less and less, because I think the audience has become an echo chamber.

I think the downvotes on my comment show I have hit a nerve. I did not disagree with any of the points I listed, I am simply pointing out a fact. Downvoting this comment does disprove not my point.

The downvotes without engaging with my post are what is wrong with commodified community participation (comment/post points); exactly what harms Stack Overflow in the long run.

You posted a tangential rant disparaging the comment section of another website. The voting system is the most appropriate response to flamebait.

>> 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."

Naive indeed. I flew to meet a company we had just acquired and I personally promised them that nothing would change. Even though I believed it at the time of course it didn't pan out that way and to this day I regret saying that.

Wow, yeah, never say that. Even if you believe it's true, saying nothing will change is sort of like waving a red flag in front of the bull. Of course things will change over time, they always do!

Its like fixing the wifi router for your parents and then having them call you to complain that their emails now have a signature at the bottom... "I didnt do that", "Well, you were the last one to touch the internet"

Except that in this situation, you really did put the signature on those emails.

Well to be fair that is how my coworkers (and I) think too. The one with the latest commit get a ping when the top break.

I agree.

Why buying a company if you don’t want to make any change? Investment firms make profits by buying low and selling high, and it is hard to sell higher than the purchase price if things are kept the way it is.

SO being SO has increased it's value year over year. There's no need to change anything, just ride those coat tails to profit.

If the total accumulation of year to year profits was higher than 1.8B, then the current owners of Stack Overflow would've never sold.

Perhaps they want liquidity, a more diverse portfolio, etc.

Also keep in mind that the public SO doesn't even have to change much for there to be "big changes". SO Jobs is where the money is made and they have private Q&A sites for businesses.

Maybe they wanted the cash in hand rather than a high variance company valuation. Or just wanted to transition their money and attention to something else. There are plenty of reasons to want to sell a company in a way that both sides come out ahead.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

If 1.8 billion in the hand is worth more than 1.8 billion year to year, then Prosus would've never bought.

The only way this deal is advantageous for both parties is if something changes, and unfortunately that something is probably Stack Overflow.

Or you can pump it, promise lots of new technology and "synergies" and profits and then dump it for a huge sum to VC or Big 10 company while it's still promising but you're pretty sure it's time to dump.

Which leaves bigger debt for users to overcome and work past to continue to see even the original value prior to all of this financial activity.

If the burden gets too big, people won't believe it's worth it, and the whole thing dies.

When they do a valuation of a company they also take into account future profits. So all of it should be included in the price.

> Why buying a company if you don’t want to make any change?

because it keeps printing money which you can use to acquire other companies. That is what Buffett does.

> Why buying a company if you don’t want to make any change?

To collect its revenue.

I read this differently -- I think there's a ceiling on just how much money SO will make, and the SO team has realized there's no future in which they are a company that makes $1B or so per year. Which is fine, but hard if you want to play in vc land or go public.

There definitely are companies that will buy something like this to operate it essentially as an annuity.

The risk to the employees there is if SO essentially becomes done and the owners want to put it in maintenance mode and operate it as a run-out.

Also, it's been 12 years. There's probably a bunch of employees that would like some liquidity.

Yep. At best this holds true for 12-18 months. The founders/execs play dumb in the interest of minimizing attrition.

While somewhat rare there are holding companies like Jonas Software that buy lots of smaller software companies in various markets then effectively let each subsidiary run without too much interference. Their philosophy seems to be own most or all of the competitors in a vertical market, sell the software for a reasonable (read: non-Oracle) price with ongoing maintenance, and collect the cash. I only know about them because a relative was Director of Engineering at the time they were acquired and is now CEO.

They don't expect any massive changes in revenue with the companies they acquire. They're willing to hire and invest in revamping/improving their products. Their goal is stable revenue by making customers happy enough to keep paying the maintenance.

They seem to be doing OK with that business model.

Thanks for the context. It's crazy that this sounds like a radical investing approach these days. Prosus seems more promising than most potential buyers, so hopefully this isn't the beginning of the end for SO.

Berkshire Hathaway has an exactly the same approach: an acquired company keeps operating in the way which made it successful.

I won't say this approach turned out bad for Berkshire or Mr. Buffett personally.

This approach requires

1. a _huge_ amount of trust and respect for the acquired team to not meddle/interfere, and

2. a huge amount of restraint to not force the acquired team into conforming to whatever standards and norms are present in the acquiring team.

Both of these are exceedingly rare.

I'd say this is accurate for the most part but they bought the first company I worked for out of college and they really tightened the screws on our benefits packages under the guise of "unifications" with their existing stuff. They ended up moving me to a high deductible insurance plan which was absolute nads

I feel like this is basically a cookie cutter declaration you make as part of an acquisition nowadays, not too dissimilar to “sorry we can’t provide feedback for why we rejected you as a job candidate.”

My employer is owned by private equity companies. Every few years there's a sale and we get told nothing will change... and every time I've seen (which is I think 2-3, over ~13 years) nothing noticeable has changed.

I used to think the same, until the last layoff wave took me out.

Why is it naive? If you buy distressed assets, sure, but why would you necessarily want to change a working business?

it's naive because it's a common claim that pretty much never plays out that way after a year or two. as to why, i'd say the reasons are poor, but it's because of ego, desire for power and influence, greed

I don’t think holding companies are famous for that.

As a financial buyer there are only 3 ways to make money: 1) higher multiple (buy low, sell high), 2) improve cash flow, or 3) lever-it-up with debt (like when you buy a house with a big mortgage). #2 is the only method that really changes the operations and probably the majority of financial buyers are too busy/lazy to be bothered with it. OTOH, some might hire a new CEO 'with something to prove' give him a lot of options/equity and who know what that person will do. But, basically, if the CEO doesnt change, and the CEOs compensation scheme doesnt dramatically change, and no mergers occur, then the company probably wont change.

Reddit's managed that on their own.

> Conde Nast managed not to destroy Reddit after buying it.

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.

Their app is 2x slower than their mobile site and their new mobile site is 4x slower than their old site. Why do these brands feel the need to make everything a fucking SPA.

Plus the constant nag to install the app on mobile, and sometimes even downright blocking access and "see in the app". (For now there's still "old." subdomain which works if you enable desktop emulation on mobile, but it can shut down any day).

The fact that "old." still works is a pretty strong indication that the new redesign is to ensure new users will tolerate manipulation while retaining a large portion of the old users. Looking at the ratio of old/new site users is probably a very powerful analytics tool for predicting ad revenue for a given subreddit.

In my occasional interactions on Reddit it seems a very large proportion of users are on the "new" Reddit, the mobile site, or an app. I'm sure it varies by community though (especially ones that heavily use custom CSS and things that don't work on the new site).

Just as one example I can recall, you can do things that are kind of like "quote retweets" with the cross-post feature that don't really make sense on the old site (on "new Reddit" when you crosspost the original post/title are displayed in a little window so you'll see people make titles that are actually commenting on the original post and not on whatever the link actually is). On old Reddit these just show up as links to whatever the original post linked to, but with the "meta-commentary" title. More than once I've encountered one of these with confusion until a comment explained, or I thought to check the tab that shows where else the same link has been posted.

> In my occasional interactions on Reddit it seems a very large proportion of users are on the "new" Reddit, the mobile site, or an app.

Same. And many of them message me directly via chat when they have a question about a subreddit I moderate. Chat which I check about every two months, which is for some reason fully distinct from both the regular messaging functionality (which to be fair, is very well hidden) and the two methods of contacting the moderators.

i.reddit.com is mobile-optimized while still having the old.reddit.com sensibilities.

TIL!

The entire field of front-end engineering needs to take a step back and think about the user instead of overengineering every problem and constantly changing things just to justify their job existing.

As a front-end engineer I don't feel any pressure to justify my job. The issue of "constantly changing things" tends to be completely out of our hands, so work is pretty abundant.

That said, I agree with you in principal. In this field I feel like I'm constantly fighting to keep the code simple and lean, while others think it's okay to import an entire bloated library just to make a button shine a certain way.

If you look at the past 30 years of frontend, I don't think you'd find a place where you would want to pause the change. The IE 6 era? The Flash era? The jQuery era?

fwiw, I use a third party app, and can't really imagine using the web-based interface or their official app.

I agree.

old.reddit.com + RES is still the best Reddit experience.

by FAR

I don't think a SPA is the problem, in fact a well-made (end to end) SPA should be faster after an initial, cacheable load. It's the fact that it isn't well-made and it's bloated with god knows what.

They should ask slashdot how the redesign worked out...

And Digg.

This actually just proves OPs point. When CN bought reddit, reddit thrived. They gave us a bunch of money and no constraints.

When reddit recapitalized is when all the monetization stuff really started. Once they brought in outside investors and had people to answer to.

Yes. That is what I intended and did not articulate as well as you just did.

> Conde Nast managed not to destroy Reddit after buying it.

Reddit is simply dying a slow death. I wouldn't touch the place now.

> 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.

Where can I find links to these discord invites?

https://disboard.org/servers/tag/darknet

That subreddit was started after the acquisition. In fact, every subreddit was, because user created subreddits were paid for by Conde Nast. As was self posts and pretty much every major innovation.

It was after they brought in outside investors that they were pressured to monetize.

Reddit itself didn't exist in the early 2000s wtf is this

/r/darknetplan itself is from late 2010

You're just bullshitting wtf

These are verifiable facts (go to /r/darknetplan and cmd-f for "community for" and then select that text).

> Reddit seems like an example of a successful acquisition. Conde Nast managed not to destroy Reddit after buying it.

Ehhhh not so sure on that one.

>Conde Nast managed not to destroy Reddit after buying it.

That.... is a very positive view of Reddit. I'd say everything on Reddit is way worse now and going downhill fast.

That was after Conde Nast sold.

Also before. It isn't something new. I'm amazed it can still become worse but it does.

No it isn't.

Are we really at YES NO YES NO discussion levels?

> Stack Overflow is so good, and its fate is now entirely in the hands of the purchaser.

I wonder how much of it is Google making it look good by providing laser-precise results for the vaguest search queries.

>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.

Now Bon Appetit on the other hand...

>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.

old.reddit.com it's the only way to browse Reddit. Not sure for how long, but it's there. That way you don't have to deal with any of the new nonsense that has become Reddit.

3rd party apps are a better experience than old.reddit.com to be honest. Rif, sync, boost, relay, etc.

All of those are mobile-only though.

And for mobile stick ".compact" at the end.

> For whom?

Well, most people right?

Power users are by almost by definition an insignificant (but over represented in discussions and noise making) cohort right?

If the platform keeps quality content, gets more users over time and maintains both a good DAU and RPU, then, well, what objective metric of success do you want to measure?

Number of happy power users?

I really think most people don't care about that metric.

With SO it remains to be seen...; the power users there are the mods, and they contribute tangible value to the platform... but... you know, the writing is already on the wall. Whether this does it, or it was coming anyway, it's hard to say.

I addressed the fact that there is little to no quality content on Reddit anymore with the exception of a few niche subs (and they tend tend to be quality for long.). This was actually the main point I made.

Objective metrics (like user engagement and active users per day) are probably more relevant than your opinion of “quality” content.

Not really, we aren’t talking about user engagement in fact quite the opposite. The whole point of this comment chain is that SO may go the same route where they sacrifice quality for such engagement to turn a profit. It’s true quality isn’t something that is easy to quantitate but user engagement sure isn’t equal to quality at all. Facebook has ridiculously high user engagement and multiple times (almost 10x) the users that Reddit does and if you try arguing that it is full of quality content you’ll be laughed out of pretty much any room.

Just so we’re clear and to further my point, the website you’re posting on exists because over a decade ago people said that Reddit had dropped significantly in terms of quality of discussion. I’m not the only one saying this you find it here and even on Reddit anytime the subject of quality of content on Reddit is brought up.

On the upside I think reddit's search team has done a good job. It is not the joke it once was at least.

Have you found an online community filling the niche of old reddit?

> The entire company is staying in place: we just have different owners now.

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.

> Reddit seems like an example of a successful acquisition.

In relation to money, or to users?

Reddit is awful now, forcing everyone to an app and privacy out the window

"You've read 3 of your 5 free answers this month"

Sadly, I think you probably nailed it. Back in the day, “experts exchange” was the place to get answers to questions, and look where they’re at.

2 billion dollars. That’s a LOT of money even by 2021 standards. You better believe the investors will be looking for their ROI.

Experts exchange was NEVER the place to get answers. They just perfected the SEO so that Google would point to them first. But everything was behind paywalls and it was never useful.

That wasn’t my experience, but I’m referring to the mid to late 90’s timeframe before “paywall” was even a thing.

SO is CC at the moment IIRC - time to download it all and stick the historic stuff on a static site

Seems to be the case of now https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing .

One of the more recent features added to SO was a timeline of activity and within the timeline you can see which license each the question is under. Here's an example for a random question https://stackoverflow.com/posts/49083680/timeline .

It's kind of weird that while the questions have a license declared the answer don't ... not sure what that's all about.

They're already periodically sending a snapshot to The Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/stackoverflow.com

They can’t legally retroactively change the license on existing content though - and as soon as they change their EULA to say “You irrevocably assign copyright on your postings to us” then they’ll lose their thought-leader users - and the rest tumbles.

All StackOverflow answers are Creative Commons by now. That won't be possible.

> "You've read 3 of your 5 free answers this month"

The content was created by the contributors for free, it would be (legal) theft to do so.

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?

Only if you’re able to discuss, obviously.

Our company had just transitioned from social networking to social commerce, and was starting to build out features like a shopping cart, product listings, etc. So the valuation was mostly hand-waiving based on the fact that we were the most recognized e-commerce brand in the region, despite not really being an e-commerce business yet.

We were doing about half a billion in annual GMV but none of it monetized yet.

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.

Great take. You're very likely to be proven in that observation.

"Log in to see 8 answers on Qu^H^HStack Overflow!"

Yes, could very well be that. However I wrote a bit of angst because maybe they'll be smart about it and this will be okay.

You saw it with their latest April fools joke - Premium Copy & Paste

The whole point of creating Stack Overflow was to not have subscription access like Experts Exchange. Doing that would be suicide for SO.

That was a long time ago. SO has the network effects to pull this off

SO can be cloned very easily nowadays. Network effects are actually getting worse with time; fewer and fewer people actually hang around SO, and it's increasingly spammed by students looking for free homework and people gaming for reputation.

As soon as SO vacates the free tier even a little bit, someone else will jump in.

SO is already cloned - every few months another new SO content farm comes along and clogs up the Google search results.

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'll just be happy if they keep their Creative Commons licensing.

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.

>I expect this to go like Reddit has

"Download the app to see the answers!"

Subs, ads or something else to monetize. You can't spend $1.8b and expect things to stay the same.

I wonder if these acquisitions are like the new art collections of the super wealthy.

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!"

On the other hand, it could lead to a decline of infamous "SO programming style" which is not that bad.

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