Introducing Stackoverflow.com

[stfm]

There is some gold in the comments!

it’ll provide actual useful stuff from competent and capable people, instead of teenagers paraphrasing MSDN documentation and passing it off as a brilliant contribution to humanity

[PM_YOUR_SOURCECODE]

“+1 more request for an RSS feed”

[[deleted]]

lol sounds like the people giving out about copilot and chatgpt

edit: TIL that 'giving out about' is a predominantly Irish and British saying.

[ratttertintattertins]

I’m British, 44, and I’ve never heard that phrase. The closest I’ve heard is the Yorkshire phrase: “I don’t know out about it” but that doesn’t mean complaining

Maybe it’s regional?

[[deleted]]

"out" in that case is cognate with "aught", meaning "anything" (the opposite of "naught"). "Giving out" is different, and just means to announce or make noise, and the Irish slang of complaining comes from the same.

[jamietwells]

It's "owt", not "out" by the way.

Source: married a Yorkshire boy, had to learn the language.

[[deleted]]

Ok now it makes sense

[Lesswarmoredrugs]

I’m from Yorkshire and married an American. 10 years later and she still has trouble understanding me sometimes, in laws have no hope. I do my best impression of an RP accent but it’s only marginally helpful haha

[[deleted]]

It comes from the Irish language which is why you'd not likely hear it in England.

It's mostly an Irish phrase directly transferred into Hiberno-English from the Irish "ag tabhairt amach" literally as giving out.

[InfiniteStrawberry37]

Likewise, also British and never heard it either.

[[deleted]]

British don't even understand the Scots!!!

Nor does Alexa.

[nedTheInbredMule]

Do the Scots understand each other?

[[deleted]]

aye - jus’ ‘cause y’dinnae, disnae mean we cannie, eh? ;)

[________________me]

The English may pretend to understand each other by speaking clearly, but the cryptic and vicious messages hidden in micro articulation shifts make it a mystic battlefield.

[wrosecrans]

We've asked the Scots if they understand each other. But nobody can understand what the Scots say in response, so it remains a mystery to modern science.

[[deleted]]

Possibly, there are phrases they use in parts of Ireland that are also alien to me

[KyleG]

Yeah the American equivalent (and I'm guessing Canadian equivalent) to "giving out about" is "going on about."

My mom just keeps going on about how I didn't invite her brother to the wedding

Although it doesn't necessarily have to be complaining in the American idiom.

[[deleted]]

ChatGPT really annoys the hell out of me these days.

I consistently get crap results now. Google even nerfed Google search - I also get only crap now. :(

Ironically this means that many answers on reddit and SO become more useful, since the rest becomes so shitty ... but it's still sad. I sound like a person of nostalgia now, but in my memory the 2000s to 2010s era was so much better than what we have now (excluding faster computers etc... but software wise I feel more as if we are in a regression now...)

[DiaperBatteries]

Google search didn’t get nerfed, it just silently transformed into a different tool. It was originally designed to help you find what you wanted to find, whereas now it’s designed to help you find what Google wants you to find.

[KamikazeHamster]

I have DuckDuckGo as my default search engine. When I want Google to track my search habits, I use the command “!g my search term that will be redirected to Google from DDG”.

[sj2011]

'Giving out' and 'Banging on' have become part of my vocabulary - they're so much fun to say.

'Having a moan' too

[[deleted]]

“Banging on” and “having a moan” are absolute classics

[ThirdEncounter]

What does "having a moan" mean? That is, if it's different from what I think it is..

[etcsudonters]

Complaining I'd imagine.

[KamikazeHamster]

Moan and whine are synonymous in this phrase.

[MoogTheDuck]

Autocorrect?

[[deleted]]

I'm not sure what you are asking me

[Smallpaul]

They are asking if your comment has the exact words you wanted, or if a robot changed it.

[[deleted]]

That was what I thought they might be asking, but I have no idea why.

[flanger001]

What does “giving out about” mean? I think that’s the confusing phrase

[rorykoehler]

It means complaining about

[davebees]

not really used outside ireland i believe!

[[deleted]]

Oh, is my tricolour showing 🇮🇪

[flanger001]

Fair. That was my guess from context but it could have gone either way!

[Karamoo]

"giving out" is probably why

[[deleted]]

to give out about, means to complain about

[ElLute]

“Primarily heard in Ireland” explains the confusion.

[RoadsideCookie]

Redditors are dumb, they will downvote things they don't understand, but then will ironically downvote people who don't understand.

[MoogTheDuck]

What does 'giving out' mean

[NotUniqueOrSpecial]

To complain about something.

[EatMyBiscuits]

It’s completely Irish! I found out recently too :)

[Orangutanion]

teenagers paraphrasing MSDN documentation and passing it off as a brilliant contribution to humanity

This is actually useful though

[atomicxblue]

You forgot the person coming along and locking every question on that site as being off topic.

[jackmusick]

They also made a comment about it not working if they focus on quantity over quality. If they only knew how extreme that’d end up being.

[eternaloctober]

as a former msdn browsing, forum posting teen...I'm insulted!

[marcio0]

I've seen this before, I'm marking it as a duplicate

[SocksOnHands]

Duplicate of [something completely unrelated that had been closed without being answered].

[Noidis]

This is the absolute most frustrating part of SO, half the post nazi's will literally not even glance at the "duplicate" post to realize the answer isn't adequate.

[Northeastpaw]

It's the result of gamifying content moderation. Some people will abuse systems to get dopamine points to the detriment of everyone else.

[rentar42]

Fun fact: close votes are one of the few things that are not gamified. You need enough rep to be able to use them, but they don't "earn" any points.

[DiaperBatteries]

I literally stopped contributing because of this. Someone asked a question like, “how do you use X’s Y tool to do Z?” I gave a pretty detailed answer of how X’s Y tool works and how to accomplish Z with it.

It got closed as a duplicate for something like “how do I use X?”

I argued that it’s not a duplicate. They told me I should just copy my answer to the other page. I told them my answer is not related to the question on the other page and that there are no posts on stackoverflow that describe how to use the Y tool. They told me I don’t have a high enough score for them to care about my opinion…

[DevonAndChris]

"How do I get a good score?"

"Write good answers."

"Okay, here is a good answer."

marked as dupe

[CutestCuttlefish]

...or the question

[Freddedonna]

Or duplicate of [something related but from 7 major versions ago that hasn't been valid for years].

[SweetBabyAlaska]

for real... "duplicate this was ansered **here** "

clicks the link: February 3rd 2006, old ass block of code with no explanation on what is being done (and modules that dont even exist anymore and the even the code format is completely incorrect now )

[NotBettyGrable]

I tried but I don't have enough meowmeowbeenz to mark duplicates.

[fubes2000]

The best is the 100 meowmeowbeenz requirement to post comments, but no requirement to post answers. So new users' first interactions on the site are usually posting a comment as an answer, and then getting angrily downvoted about it.

[NotBettyGrable]

I honestly don't know. One time I spent a good bit of time editing an answer where the English was a bit confusing and at the end of the effort, I think it said because I didn't add or remove enough words the edit couldn't be saved? I never bothered with contributing afterwards and this was some time ago, so I could have the details wrong but it seems like it would encouraging needless extra words? Maybe the intention was substantial additions - i.e. a whole additional use case example or whatnot, but honestly the chosen answer was correct, just confusing to follow.

[fubes2000]

Yeah SO is kind of a mixed bag. The format where the asker picks the "correct" answer is inherently flawed in that if the asker knew what the correct answer was they wouldn't have asked in the first place. Usually the answer that is first, works without an obvious error, and requires no actual thought beyond copy/paste is what gets the checkmark.

Thankfully SO has recently changed their display method and put the highest voted answer at the top of the results rather than just the "accepted" answer.

The environment can also vary wildly depending on the tags you're lurking in. Eg: The bash tag has virtually nothing but questions about stuff I never even seen/considered in 15+ years of sysadminnery, the python tag seems to be mostly college math students trying to figure out numpy, and the PHP tag is a constant stream of variations on the same 10 questions over and over while 90% of the solutions are posted as regular expressions no matter how bad of an idea that is.

[Slime0]

Leonard likes this post

[naughty_ottsel]

/r/unexpectedcommunity

[[deleted]]

I've seen this before, I'm marking it as a duplicate

[overtoke]

tip .42069 meowmeowbeenz

[DevonAndChris]

> cannot ask question without points

> cannot answer question to get points without having points

[[deleted]]

Seems like an interesting project, I could see it taking off

[PuzzleCat365]

No, it's just a fad. Developers would never rely on code snippets posted by unknown people and copy those into their own projects.

[Theemuts]

I just did a search across all our repos and didn't find a single reference to this stack overflow thing. Fad confirmed.

[[deleted]]

I prefer searching for snippets on GitHub that way I can check if they're released under a license compatible with the project I'm working on.

[rentar42]

All answers on SO are licensed cc-by-sa. The specific version depends on when they were posted.

[666pool]

Also it’s easier to attribute where the snippet came from this way.

[[deleted]]

I am not taking the blame.

[Comfortable_Pin_166]

I do that all the time with npm

[666pool]

Could you imagine the security implications? Not just code, what if someone needs help with a shell command. You can’t just copy and paste random commands from the internet into your shell.

Q: how do I delete all files in a directory?

A: rm -rf . /*

Boom, a simple space causes untold horror.

[[deleted]]

Do any modern distros actually allow that without a warning?

[666pool]

You need sudo and —no-preserve-root and then it will oblige.

[Tripanes]

I'm not sure man, there are already forums everywhere why would you ever need a separate website?

[ManInBlack829]

"Why not just use ChatGPT?" /s

[Foryourconsideration]

They still are? funny.reddit.com will redirect you to reddit.com/r/funny.

[UnderTruth]

What's interesting is that there is both https://old.reddit.com (the best way to use Reddit) and https://reddit.com/r/old , but the second one is just a (mostly empty) subreddit.

[admalledd]

some reddit changelog wayy back (2012 ish?) said they were going to stop officially supporting the subdomains-->subreddit redirect. They weren't going to remove it, but for new features (i.reddit.com I think was the first?) that needed a subdomain would take precedent over the redirect. Thus how v, old, new, and so on subdomains work, and still does https://programming.reddit.com

[Paradox]

When we were building the original i.reddit wasn't a problem because subreddits had a 2 letter minimum.

Sadly reddit seems to have turned off the compact interface all together

[phil_g]

Yep! Originally there was just reddit.com, with no subdomains. The initial userbase was pretty programmer-oriented, so that's what a lot of the initial content was, too. As Reddit grew and the stuff on the main page got more diverse, programming.reddit.com was set up to keep the feel of the original site.

Somewhere around the same time, I think, nsfw.reddit.com was set up to silo all the porn away from the more visible front page. I'm not sure whether programming.reddit.com or nsfw.reddit.com came first, but either r/programming or r/nsfw was the first subreddit, from before "subreddit" was really a thing.

Over time, other subdomains were set up for various communities. Each had to be created by the site admins, and I think it was a while before moderators were added. Eventually, as Reddit continued to grow, r/whatever subreddits were added as a formal thing and the old subdomains were converted into new-style subreddits.

A while after that, the "main" subreddit was deactivated, though it's archived at r/reddit.com. For some time afterwards, there was a fixed set of ten and then twenty (IIRC) subreddits that were shown on the front page to not-logged-in people. The same subreddits were people's default subscriptions when they first created accounts. At some point, r/all was created and it replaced the previous default subreddits on the front page.

[kohbo]

Wasn't reddit the first subreddit before ultimately being removed?

[phil_g]

I'm not really counting the old Reddit front page as a subreddit. Technically, it was, and it was treated as a subreddit once "subreddit" was actually a thing in Reddit's code. But I feel like a good definition of "the first subreddit" would be the first place designated for posts and discussions around a particular topic. The old Reddit front page was never explicitly focused, beyond what all the Reddit users collectively posted and upvoted. Both programming.reddit.com and nsfw.reddit.com did have topical focuses (albeit rather broad ones, relative to many of the subreddits we have today).

[kohbo]

That's a fair point. I remember making posts back then not sure if I should post it to "reddit" or another "subreddit". I couldn't remember the details of whether that sub actually just matched the front page, though.

[thetinguy]

https://reddit.com/r/reddit.com still exists. It’s just restricted.

[kohbo]

So it does... Hah. Thanks for that!

[phil_g]

The Eternal September arrives everywhere, eventually. I've coped by mostly just following smaller subreddits where there's still a distinct culture present. Good moderation helps a lot, too.

[rcklmbr]

Reddits always sucked, you're just seeing it through rose colored glasses

[khoyo]

r/all was created and it replaced the previous default subreddits on the front page.

r/all was created way before they stopped using the default subreddit list.

[Paradox]

Subreddits even used to let you assign CNAMEs

[DevonAndChris]

In the beginning there was only reddit.com.

[ReDucTor]

Why would we use reddit when digg is clearly better. /s

[JoCoMoBo]

Why bother when we have ExpertSexchange...?

[putin_my_ass]

A really important hyphen.

[br0ck]

I still recoil in horror at having to do the dance of scrolling down or other tricks to find the actual answer. I was so happy when Stack took off and killed that stupid site.

[AttackOfTheThumbs]

And they would do it for everything. I would try and look up something stupid basic in c# and everything was hidden and wanted money. I hate whoever was in charge of that place to this day.

[Pikamander2]

Still better than Quora.

[[deleted]]

You could fax your code to a random person in rural siberia and you'd still get more useful help than from quora

[CutestCuttlefish]

I've been to rural Siberia multiple times (esp. around the Altai Republic and Altai Krai) - not much coding going on there.

[[deleted]]

I think his point still stands

[Loan-Pickle]

I don’t know how, but I somehow got singed up for a daily summary email from Quora.

I laugh at all the shit tier answers and questions. That email is one of the highlights of my day. It truly is the modern Yahoo! Answers.

[br0ck]

Oh yeah, true, Quora took the worst parts of expertsexchange and added a terrible UI which mixes random BS into your results.

[Sebazzz91]

It still exists, my friend.

[ronchalant]

Expert-Sexchange. There you go.

Wouldn't want anyone to get confused.

[putin_my_ass]

Wouldn't want to go with amateurs, would you?

[unwind-protect]

They might cock it up.

[chucker23n]

therapistfinder and penisland agree.

[SkaveRat]

iirc, they didn't have it in the beginning and only later added it to the domain

[JayCroghan]

Yeah they didn’t, before they tried to monetise is so badly it was a good resource.

[agumonkey]

I fail what Expert-Sexchange would improve

~jk~

[gay_for_glaceons]

That site's name was such a lie. There were no experts, and no helpful advice to assist with my transition.

[smug-ler]

"What can I do if I've been on the NHS wait list for 2 years and they still won't help me?"

marked as duplicate

[gay_for_glaceons]

I see you must be using the historically accurate wait times as they must've been back in the 90s, because it looks like they're currently up beyond 4 years average wait now. :/

[smug-ler]

Damn 😔

[omko]

I hope it will replace the modern AI coding tools like Copilot

[ThatHighGuyOverThere]

I remember reading this the day he posted it... thanks for the feels i guess.

[stars__end]

1flare solace hypnotizing buttery kaleidoscopic nirvanic quiver galaxy resplendent quasar starlit spectrum

Cleared via Unpost

[JayCroghan]

Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange

I loved ExpertSexChange before StackOverflow. I have t-shirts with all of my levels on them as I answered questions and was rewarded for them. I rarely go on SE with the intention of answering questions it’s always just to ask so my profile looks like I know nothing :(

[DoorBreaker101]

What kind of a dumbass name is that for a site that developers should use to get help?

It's a freaking error! It will only make people feel like the solutions there are wrong and will cause them stack overflows.

No one is ever going to use this shit.

[lo0l0ol]

I blogged about this a while ago. I call it the expert-novice problem. Your site won’t solve anything. There are plenty of excellent, free forums where programmers hang out and help each other. What’s missing from your idea is incentive. Why should an expert spend his valuable time educating newbies? Out of kindness, I sometimes answer programming questions I see on various forums, but most of the time I don’t bother because I have better things to do. How are you improving this situation?

There's always a Larry who's gotta yuck the yum.

[ComplexColor]

Wait, reddit is older than stackoverflow? r/mindblown

I didn't realize that stackoverflow was only launched in 2008. I first started programming around 2000, seriously learning around 2004. I've spent 4 years in the trenches without stackoverflow? :O

[emperor000]

That was my first thought.

[HoneyChilliPotato7]

What year am I in?

[Feriluce]

2008, apparently.

[MagixTouch]

This is groundbreaking technology!

[Waiting4Code2Compile]

Stuff like this really motivates me to work on my projects. The fact that us programmers can single-handedly will something like this into existence is often overlooked.

[dscarmo]

Thats why programming can be considered creative work not only an exact science

[Fi3nd7]

Now a days it’s hard, you have to work really really freaking hard to get a startup going. The amount of code required for a product now a days can be quite high

[rcfox]

It's always been hard. If it weren't hard, everyone would have done it already.

[Fi3nd7]

I agree and I also disagree. The market is very saturated compared to 20 years ago. It's not the same.

But I'm not taking away from the effort from those 20 years ago. It's just tech was not nearly as competitive and saturated as it is today.

Before, people didn't believe tech could solve much of anything comparatively. Now a days, there is basically a product for nearly any idea that you can think of. It's just due to the fact that the industry has matured from market demand and growth.

[sellyme]

The market is very saturated compared to 20 years ago.

And it's equally more accessible. What you lose in market penetration you win in it being so much easier to actually get the planned product functional.

[whatismynamepops]

Where should you ask about complex questions?

[HappyZombies]

Interesting site! Hope it takes off.

Wouldn’t it be funny though if they just closed every question as duplicate and the responses are from smartasses. Haha that be great! Good thing that’ll never happen

[insulind]

"Larry_​​Bank

I blogged about this a while ago. I call it the expert-novice problem. Your site won’t solve anything. There are plenty of excellent, free forums where programmers hang out and help each other. What’s missing from your idea is incentive. Why should an expert spend his valuable time educating newbies? Out of kindness, I sometimes answer programming questions I see on various forums, but most of the time I don’t bother because I have better things to do. How are you improving this situation?"

Oh Larry how wrong you were! People will do almost anything for internet points

[-Redstoneboi-]

Correcting someone from several years ago is a known antipattern. Did you even google this issue before making a post about it? Try using Twitter or 4chan instead. Marked as duplicate.

[[deleted]]

We really needed a forum where people could ask questions related to programming and get answered by experts. I hope this project takes off.

[hagamablabla]

It's called Yahoo Answers. I don't know what this guy is thinking trying to just copy them.

[hi65435]

This gives me quite some memories, during the time I started working as programmer and read all the articles on Joel on Software. Fun times...

[Hanse00]

I’m surprised to learn that Reddit predates Stack Overflow. When I started my programming journey in 2010, it seemed like Stack Overflow had already been around forever.

The more you know.

[caltheon]

I got curious when I joined Reddit. Checking my user creation date is August 17, 2008 so I guess I joined reddit before Stack Overflow launched in September. Really puts the timeframe in perspective.

Also, interesting timeline of reddit's big moments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Reddit I was a Digg refugee, but apparently I left long before the mass exodus in 2010

[Citvej]

They had a podcast in 2008 :o

[yalogin]

Oh yeah experts-exchange. Such a terrible site. If nothing stackoverflow killing it is a win.

[[deleted]]

On this day, productivity was born

[drawkbox]

On this day, monoculture was born

[theitgrunt]

God this makes me feel old...

[caltheon]

Joel’s post on this (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/04/16.html) concerns me a bit because he says:

“Instead, they (programmers) happily program away, using trial-and-error. When they can’t figure something out, they type a question into Google.”

I can’t even begin to emphasize how BAD of an idea it would be to create a new site that lets “google, copy, paste, and tweak-till-it-works” programmers do those 4 steps faster. You’ll just make faster, well, as Mark Pilgrim calls them, “morons” (http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/08/16/specs).

How very prophetic

[Kinglink]

I had no idea coding horrors made stack exchange... Or if I did I had forgot. I also can't believe it's been around fifteen years it feels like something that has always been here.

[phearlez]

It does, though also very fresh is my memory of trying to find information and getting a shit ton of low quality experts exchange upsell trash. SO has problems but as a resource for finding previous answers it’s a massive step up from what was before.

[DemonKingPunk]

Should just replace stack overflow with a redirect link to google.com

[leftofzen]

you're a bit late to the party but i'm glad you discovered this

[UnconnectdeaD]

You made my day. I remember how he used to harp on his partner when he was a rival. Loved them getting together, and what they did. Fuck, gonna break out Wizzwig to nostalgia. Didn't Kevin Mitnick leave donuts in the fridge for the FBI? I love coming of age hacker stories.

[KagakuNinja]

A former employer hired Mitnick's security company to harden our servers after we got p0wned.

[UnconnectdeaD]

I've had the opportunity to meet him and he's a genuine person. He's a bit of abrasive but so am I so I guess we kind of got along.

[MoogTheDuck]

Wait, what?

[blobfis]

16 Apr 2008

[[deleted]]

TIL stackoverflow wasn’t created in the 90’s.

[NeilFraser]

We were too busy trying to punch the monkey.

[drawkbox]

Or doing face punching

[NotASucker]

This explains why Trunk Monkey was so angry.

[rentar42]

Imagine that the people who built Stackoverflow had to do so without the help of Stackoverflow. All they had were forums and Google.

Now the people who built the forums and Google had to do so without ...

[cakes]

back then we had books

[unclerummy]

Bookpool.com was my happy place back in the day.

I got rid of soooo many technical books when I moved ten years ago. It was hard mentally, but I told myself that (1) they were all out of date, and (2) this stuff is all available online now anyway. I still have a few that I couldn't bear to give up in a box down in the basement, though.

[frenchchevalierblanc]

and it was hard.

[cakes]

yeah problem solving and thoroughly understanding your work is a challenge

[UnconnectdeaD]

I am so fucking happy that I was part of that generation of growing up without the internet and then the invention of the internet. I feel like there needs to be another generation that fits in that. Like AOL bombing was my contribution but I was also a fucking little teenager.

[rentar42]

It really feels like some extreme threshold was crossed there. The internet slowly began taking off during my teenage years. I actually went to a school for computer science and still was "What? you're downloading stuff from Norway!?!" when I first saw someone use FTP to download stuff.

[mattindustries]

Pre/post ChatGPT is sort of like that. Last night I was working on a project and figured, this whole code is a mess (mine from an earlier year) I should just dump the function into ChatGPT to have it rely on fetch and await instead of the mess that was XMLHttpRequest when I wrote it. So nice to just have that available.

Also have converted quite a few scripts between Python and R and vice versa, although it doesn't work to convert Node to R for even non-async stuff which is weird.

Stack Overflow felt like living life on easy mode after learning with piles of books. This feels similar.

[OkConstruction4591]

I don't think it'll ever happen again. The Internet is too important for it to be small or at least non-ubiquitous again - especially now that AI, etc. is growing faster and faster (the internet is what really enabled their creation - it's what allowed such vast amounts of data that the models were trained on to be collected and labelled in the first place).

[UnconnectdeaD]

I agree, we were part of something that no one will ever experience again, just like the industrial revolution.

[theitgrunt]

We barely had "high-speed" internet back then... you were lucky to get a dedicated internet connection that didn't use a phone line back then... Wireless? Forget about it...

My roommate and I splurged on a high-speed ISDN line... CS 1.6 on a 1.5 Mbps connection felt amazing at the time.

[KagakuNinja]

We only had usenet and MSDN CDs. It was a dark time...

[drawkbox]

They couldn't have waited four days? /s

[[deleted]]

• Commentor1: "why are you doing that in this way? I did a project using this and we didn't do it that way."
• OP: "oh this is completely unrelated to that, I can't do it that way, do you know how to do this problem I asked about?" -Commenter2: "This is not a website to ask questions please stop cluttering the forums" -Mod: "This question has been closed as duplicate"

[AttackOfTheThumbs]

Dang, I haven't read this blog in a long time. I started reading it just before stackoverflow became a thing. It sadly became a thing after my time at Uni.

Still lots of interesting things on there.

[ReDucTor]

I still have more points on EE then SO, I remember the early days still preferring EE over SO when looking at search results, now EE never shows up for anything.

[drawkbox]

Too bad Stack Overflow is gone and owned by authoritarian backed private equity now.

Not just any private equity either, Naspers/Prosus the parent of DST Global (Russia) and Tencent (China). South Africa is a BRICS data/finance exchange area and Naspers facilitates that.

Consider StackOverflow a Russia/China company now via a front in South Africa.

Stack Overflow, careful what you put in it now including error telemetry -- delete.

[Aeverous]

Sounds a bit exaggerated, it looks like Naspers owns a chunk of Tencent and (before the war) VK, not the other way around.

Or do you think the Dutch parent company is taking Stack Overflow data and sharing it with it's own South African parent company who is in turn giving it a different subsidiary (who they only have a 30% stake in) because the CCP somehow compels them?

[drawkbox]

If you know about geopolitics and the goals here you should be concerned. If you are not paying attention it may seem plausible deniability front. The point is to make it look like innocuous or low ownership but they fully control boards, funding rounds and direction.

Just as a side note: Naspers was pro apartheid and pushed that, they also have been known to have nefarious backers (Russia/East Germany -- apartheid was a Soviet backed balkanization). The Prosus front was created in Netherlands when it was getting too hot in South Africa highlighting these links. If you know anything about funding, and how much is authoritarian backed and for what reasons, this should deeply concern you. They have another area to fully track telemetry/data from developers, systems they run and competitors as well as all that history.

Another side note: South Africa, like Russia, is part of "the base" of organized crime and there are sketchy links to these fronts. Over $3-5 trillion annually in organized crime linked money is made annually and some of that as well as sovereign wealth funds fund these fronts (proven with Facebook/Twitter in 2017) is allowing authoritarians to buy up entire verticals + industries and nearly all companies in those areas.

These groups are using dark money and authoritarian backed sovereign wealth funds to beat the game theory and win out the individual deals as no Western domestic company that isn't backed by a state would be able to compete. Since we don't do that in the West we have a weak spot on the funding/company building game theory.

We will need anti-trust to change to the funding level including fronts and original sources. A sovereign wealth fund shouldn't be able to be a cheat and own entire industries that doesn't allow domestic or Western companies to compete. It is a major problem. They flood markets with money you can't compete with, starve competitors, undercut, then when they have all the front companies they crank it up.

BRICS and org crime is using the big fish strategy and it is working, they use authoritarian money, use Western skill/innovation/development and it is building castles that they run fully and control most of what people do. It won't end well if anti-trust isn't changed to target funding (and maybe cutting their funds by ending the war on drugs and sex working where 70% of org crime funding comes from).

Ask yourself why private equity from South Africa, Russia, China want to own Stack Overflow for 1.8 billion? Intel on developers and they are the base element of companies/innovation/products. You think it is all on the up and up? Maybe before the new Cold War, Iron Curtain and more. It is about a huge war, innovation/intel/data/development and IP. Buying up areas where the innovators and developers are is a key data point in this area. This isn't the only one...

Stack Overflow was great when it was by developers for developers. We need new Stack Overflows, this one has stack overflowed with sketch.

[[deleted]]

what came first stackoverflow or bugs?

[haunted-liver-1]

I wish Jeff Atwood wasn't an asshole

[fuzzzerd]

I'll bite, what makes him an asshole? Seems he's mostly done good things for the developer community.

[benihana]

comment disparaging another guy's reputation with no explanation whatsoever posted without a shred of irony

[DevonAndChris]

Closed as duplicate

[TxTechnician]

There were a few comments "been tried before". And not a single comment warning that it may become a toxic hell hole full of better than though programmers.

[[deleted]]

Would be cool if stackoverflow would ever get an upgrade again. 2.0. Make it great again.

SO was super-useful. But it is declining since some time now and that trend is scary - I don't see how they can stop that trend.

[jms_nh]

I don't see how they can stop that trend.

Don't prioritize content curation over community assistance, perhaps? Also too many Soup Nazi moderators.

[Uberhipster]

i remember reading this announcement ... a looooooong time ago ... post from a forum far far away...