
Stack Overflow gets series E funding for $85M - shagie
https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/07/28/ceo-quarterly-blog-post-3-series-e-funding/
======
the_jeremy
As a pretty avid answerer on SO (>5k rep, >100 answers), it's surprising how
much money people are willing to throw at this. The staff's apparent inability
to interact positively with the community is a huge red flag[0], especially as
the primary value they have as a brand is the size and quality of the
community. I would switch sites easily if there was a compelling alternative,
but I haven't heard of one.

0: [https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-
mods-...](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-and-
forced-relicensing-is-stack-exchange-still-interested-in-cooper)

~~~
rcar
Part of the difficulty SO faces is that there's sort of two similar but
distinct problems that it's meant to solve, and as such there is no one
"community". It's simultaneously a place to ask programming questions and get
answers to them, and it's a repository of commonly asked programming questions
with curated answers. The heavily engaged section of the community represented
by your linked thread tends to focus on the latter goal, and the things they
do to benefit the site for it (e.g., the aggressive closed-as-duplicate
patrol) tend to be the things that makes it a hostile feeling place for the
"long tail" community of new question askers and occasional answerers.

~~~
rzwitserloot
A trivial solution to this dilemma seems to be to consider stack overflow a
place for the former, and have a system in place where you can vote
specifically to elevate a question to the latter category. (god knows they
don't mind adding stuff, with comments, votes on comments, votes on questions,
on answers, votes on closing questions, votes on reopening them... – surely
yet another kind of vote wouldn't bother them!)

Such an elevation may require some small edits. This adds all sorts of
benefits:

1\. Given that it is now clear that the question is moving from 'this answers
the question asked by the original poster' to 'this is now like a blog post,
generally useful information that should score highly on google', it is
completely fine to edit the question and turn it into something that no longer
entirely matches the original asker. I'd even go so far as to clone the
question, and leave the real question unmolested.

2\. The question (or, better yet, an answer) can be marked as obsoleted or
outdated. There are huge swaths of questions on SO that have a ton of votes
and an answer that was fantastic in the past, but is now flat out misleading
or wrong, but it seems both onerous to begin the path of finding a few
thousand people to downvote it, as well as 'mean' to the poster of that
answer, and tricky for the historic purposes of the internet (imagine a fix in
some source code has a comment that links to this answer!) - and for similar
reasons, editing the answer so that it is nothing like the original answer is
also flat out bizarre. It'd be so much better if it was possible to vote an
answer as 'obsolete' or 'outdated'. But that doesn't work if SO is at odds
with itself and at once a repo of common questions AND a specific
question->specific answer forum.

3\. Given that an SO community now has a presumably much smaller set of
questions-with-answers that have been elevated to 'commonly asked question
with great curated answers', they can 'police' their fiefdom of curated
general knowledge vastly better, with mods and random passersby invited to
ocassionally inspect one of these curated answers and see if it still seems
useful, applicable, and correct in the current day and age. It also becomes
far more feasible to browse through the entirety of the curated questions
list.

~~~
dmurray
This already exists as "Community wiki" [0], which is almost exactly what you
describe, at least in theory.

It seems like a useful feature that often has a positive effect. It's not
clear to be that it's improved the general attitude of the community or of
management.

[0] [https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11740/what-are-
comm...](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11740/what-are-community-
wiki-posts)

~~~
the_jeremy
The community wiki is strange to me because it completely removes the
gamification aspect. If your post becomes a community wiki, you stop getting
reputation. If you edit a community wiki, you get no reputation.

------
rubber_duck
I can't pinpoint the exact moment but I noticed I've been finding more and
more answers in the official documentation, GitHub issues and project source
code. Maybe Google got better at indexing docs or people started writing
higher quality documentation but where I used to land on SO multiple times a
day I will now visit it a few times a week at most. Also when the mentioned
sources hit a search result it's almost always better quality (SO has gems for
sure, but I often encounter outdated, incorrect or half solution answers and
the format is not structured so that you can share your process which makes it
hard to examine how someone got to that point and where to take it from there
- unlike say GitHub issue thread).

~~~
dgb23
One of the documentation sites that were decent since a long time but have
_massively_ increased over the last years is MDN [0].

It's just incredibly well designed and their tutorials and documentation pages
are friendly but thorough.

[0] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/MDN_at_ten/History_...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/MDN_at_ten/History_of_MDN)

~~~
rubber_duck
This - unfortunately Google rarely lands there - but I use it exclusively when
I need to lookup JS stuff.

~~~
dgb23
Tip for those who use DDG:

You can prefix your query with '!mdn' (plus a space). To search in MDN
directly.

------
ghiculescu
> An Inflection Point to Accelerate the Realization of our Mission

It makes me sad to think that someone wrote this headline and thought it
really meant something.

Congrats to the SO team, I guess.

~~~
mattbee
Which is, of course, to immanentize the eschaton.

~~~
teh_klev
Hail Eris!

------
schwinn140
Congrats to the SO team. That said, I'm struggling to understand how/why a
they could possibly need to raise now a total of $153MM.

All the content is community generated so there's no costs there.

The core Exchange product is extremely templatized and I would assume be quite
scale-able to spin-up as they need additional ones.

I don't believe they have much in the form of paid outbound marketing
initiatives.

I'm assuming that I'm completely missing something here. Educate me. ;)

~~~
mikestew
_That said, I 'm struggling to understand how/why a they could possibly need
to raise now a total of $153MM._

Gotta make the work of those digital sharecroppers pay off _somehow_ :
[https://blog.codinghorror.com/are-you-a-digital-
sharecropper...](https://blog.codinghorror.com/are-you-a-digital-
sharecropper/)

No, the fact that the blog post was written by a SO founder is not lost on me.

~~~
tghw
> This is a topic that I've spent a great deal of time thinking about, because
> we happen to run a site chock full of user generated questions and answers.
> The last thing I want to do is exploit Stack Overflow users for corporate
> gain, even accidentally. That's horrible.

Yikes. Right on the nose...

~~~
schwinn140
Yikes is right. Seems like they said the quiet part out loud.

~~~
JeremyBanks
Jeff Atwood had principles, which is why the current morally bankrupt
leadership wants to erase him. Stack would have been in a much better place if
he’d been left in charge.

------
3pt14159
It's just a shame that programmers like myself can't invest randomly in the
tools we love. GitHub, StackOverflow, and DigitalOcean all would have had at
least $10k from me years ago. I get the reasons why, it's just frustrating to
see obviously good companies grow just like you expect them to and 100x their
valuation over a decade.

~~~
adverbly
I actually really like this idea. The model sort of reminds me of a
cooperative. There is a cooperative for Outdoor Clothing in Canada and it had
a reasonable amount of success.

~~~
dgb23
These types of organizations tend to be _very_ resilient and stable [0].

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative)

------
bgorman
This concerns me. I doubt the product will actually become better with more VC
money thrown at it. We will probably see things like premium content now.

------
eric4smith
What’s the endgame with SO here? A series F investment? Going public? Selling
to Microsoft?

I would assume selling to Microsoft would be the thing to do.

But whoever buys it has no revenue model so that’s tricky. Unless they’re
doing it for altruistic purposes.

Don’t get it twisted I love SO.

~~~
latk
At this valuation an acquisition is less likely. I would have rather expected
an acquisition by Microsoft than a series E, but I guess it's too late now.

That would leave an eventual IPO as the only way out, but they'd need to break
even first (or at least have a very compelling vision to break even soon). I
don't see that happening with their current Teams product, which is an
uncompelling entry in a crowded market.

Also, whether Teams eventually succeeds is largely unrelated to SO's unique
value: the community. Teams is not valuable _because_ of the community, it's
just a spin-off from their public platform. They really need to find a better
path to success, because wasting $85M on the status quo is not going to get
them there. Their Careers product was more interesting in this respect, but it
seems they failed to achieve sufficient scale there.

------
turnerc
> This is an exciting inflection point in our company’s history as we
> accelerate the realization of our mission

If your first line of a financing announcement is this, then I do wonder if SO
has lost touch with who their target audience is.

I also struggle to see where the value actually comes from, if tomorrow all of
the top 1% of posters stopped then their leverage to promote other lineups is
dead.

It's a shame to say it but its another case of VC overvaluation

------
dyeje
Bit concerning they haven't been able to build a sustainable business off a
website that has become more or less a canonical resource for software
engineers by now.

------
knowhy
Looking at the answer-rate-over-time[0] SO benefits from the Corona pandemic.

0:
[https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/303570/an...](https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/303570/answer-
rate-over-time#graph)

~~~
Flenser
wow, it looks like the answer rate is going down significantly. It looks like
it slipped a bit in 2014/2015 but there's a big decrease in 2019 around the
time of the Monica Cellio incident.

------
thrownaway954
remember that the database to SO is released under CC.

[https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2015/10/how-to-download-
th...](https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2015/10/how-to-download-the-stack-
overflow-database-via-bittorrent/)

------
moralestapia
Oh boy, Series E.

If you raise Series E it means either you are doing extremely well or your
business is drowning and you need a lifesaver. A business that is doing really
well typically raises much more than 85M, so I'm going to go with the latter
option. In which case, also, an 85M lifeline at this stage means you are not
worth that much alive ...

IMO I can see in a very clear way the downfall of SO happened, they undermined
the community that made them rise in the first place. Their most valuable
asset _IS_ the community, way more than the knowledge base they have accrued.
People no longer feel comfortable going there. I wouldn't be surprised if
their MAU is going down.

Too bad for Atwood which I think is responsible for the culture that SO
initially had, and which lured many of us to contribute. Since he left, it's
hard to put it in words but _something_ changed. I don't think he's happy with
how the site turned out to be down the road.

tl;dr; what this series E means is that SO will become the new experts-
exchange sooner than later.

------
jypepin
SO is over 10 years old now and hasn't changed much - I'm wondering what makes
the investors think that profits will come and now is a good time to invest
more money.

------
bobobob420
Stack Overflow is the greatest programming resource ever made and the people
who answer questions in a manner that helps also teach the OP are the true
heroes.

------
quaintdev
How difficult it would be to build a decentralised SO?

I know it's the valuable knowledge base and contributing users that will be
missing in our new service but we gotta start somewhere.

I guess it would be easier to onboard Software developers on a decentralised
service than general public.

Some ideas for this service:

1\. Users can choose to keep knowledge base locally for topic of their
interests

2\. A terminal based interface for quick answers

~~~
dusted
I guess the difficult part is not the technology, it's not like SO is doing
anything too fancy on that front. But the community, growing and getting
people to answer questions, that's something we'd have expected FSF to grow,
but somehow that community couldn't.

~~~
dehrmann
I agree that building a community is very hard, but at least there are success
stories to look at. I can't name any successful, Google-accessible
decentralized system.

------
easton
I wonder if they have received any buyout offers lately. Their business model
doesn't seem to be as successful as it should be (given how much their site is
used), but it seems like they'd be an ideal candidate for a company that
wanted to make inroads with developers, like Microsoft. And the site does
already run on IIS. Perhaps I should start a Bureau of the Atomic Scientists-
esque doomsday clock[0] for the minutes until Microsoft buys Canonical and
Stack Overflow and completes their trifecta of modern dev tooling companies
with GitHub.

0:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock)

~~~
shagie
I want to say "with the direction that SO Teams took - no."

Its not that SO Teams is a bad thing, just that it isn't the thing that the
other companies want to buy.

Look at Microsoft - its got a large work productivity suite (MS Teams, Office,
Sharepoint) - all of which are more more mature than Stack Overflow in terms
of developer experience. And then there's GitHub and its got GitHub
Discussions (
[https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/104](https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/104)
) on its roadmap for the near future. SO would be conflicting with that... and
then there's the rest of the SE network that has nothing that a hypothetical
MS buyer would want. And SO Jobs competes with LinkedIn. At best it would be
an accuhire... but a lot of the developer knowledge has either left or been
fired.

Google is the other option. But then... Google is trying to do its own venture
into worker productivity. SO (and the SE Network) would kind of help that and
making it searchable... but its really not that interesting of a target beyond
all that content (and Google doesn't really like managing content of their
own). And elsewhere on HN today you can see what Google thinks of maintaining
information... why would they want to buy it when they can get search clicks
for free? Google has no need to buy SO as an accuhire... and again, most of
what is there seems to be sales rather than engineering (look at job postings
[https://stackoverflow.com/company/work-
here#positions](https://stackoverflow.com/company/work-here#positions) )

The blog post seems to suggest that SO wants to go up head to head with Zoom,
Atlassian, Slack and Microsoft for the team productivity area. That feels like
a "too little, too late" for the direction that they're looking at.

As an aside - look at the benefits on
[https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/companies/stack-
overflow](https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/companies/stack-overflow) \- the free
lunch from in house chef and proclaiming great chairs feels (at least to me)
more of a startup that is spending money because it got it.

------
user00012-ab
A dystopian science fiction story where Yahoo buys Stack Overflow, destroys it
like all their other products, and in the doing so, no one knows how to
program anymore and society collapses.

------
dusted
"The next generation of digital applications" buzzbingo!

------
ram_rar
SO is an amazing product. I learnt a lot from it. But in the last few years, I
have been directed more towards Github, whenever I face issues with a
particular library or tech stack. I see those questions already being
asked/answered via github Issue.

I am not sure, what is the endgame for SO. But, Github could become a strong
competitor in this space. Its become lot more easier to copy paste troublesome
code/error and see resolution in github.

------
Vysero
I prefer using forums. They feel more personal, inviting, and calm. My
bookmarks include top forums for every language I use. I would rather wait a
few hours for an answer than bother with SO when I have questions that don't
seem to have been asked before. SO is hostile even after years, and years of
use I still always feel as though I am walking on eggshells when I post
questions to SO. That's not okay.

------
Fire-Dragon-DoL
To me the problem with stackoverflow is the same. It's a useful place to find
examples and simple answers to almost-documentation kind of thing, but all the
hard questions without a clear possibile answer is not allowed. This made the
website less and less useful over time.

------
jiofih
Haven’t used SO at all for over five years now. Eventually I’ll look up some
weird edge case answers, but the trust I had on the site and it’s content is
long gone.

This smells like a corporate move to get more money on executive’s pockets,
nothing more. A shame that SO was allowed to get to this state.

------
dude01
Congrats to them. Let's hope it doesn't destabilize the product too much.

~~~
devmunchies
one the bright side, if it's destabilized _enough_ then someone would be
incentivized to build a better one.

~~~
erikbye
How do you make a better one? It's a human problem, a social interaction
problem, not a tech one. Novices want to ask all the didn't-even-read-the-
official-docs and don't-want-to-do-my-own-homework questions they want, and
the more experienced users don't want to see those kinds of low-bar questions.

In my not so humble opinion, the mods on SO gets a lot of shit, but I think
they're not strict enough. SO is absolutely brimming with low-bar questions
and answers. Best case that is all noise, worst case, the wrong and
misinformed answers (by people portraying expertise) ends up in production
code.

~~~
devmunchies
much like how there is a feature for linking to duplicates, there should be an
official feature to link to a section in the official docs.

It should even be in your face when answering a question. A culture of posting
sources/references.

------
bawana
What about all the other stack exchange sites? Are they separate and not
deserving of support because they are not about software? Is it because
software makes money so a public support group for software is monetizable?

I miss usenet.

------
deedubaya
I've stopped contributing to SO.

SO is simply going the same route as Experts Exchange (if you're old enough to
remember it). It has amassed a significant amount of knowledge (for free!)
that they'll some day hide behind a paywall and sell to desperate seekers of
that information.

~~~
coronadisaster
EE used to be the top search result for a long time... Hope SO don't go out in
the same way.

------
mathattack
Congrats. Despite all the complaints about the nastiness of their mods,
they’ve generated billions of dollars of programmer productivity to the world.

~~~
jasode
_> complaints about the nastiness of their mods,_

I didn't downvote your comment but I think it would be better if we don't
phrase it in a _" us vs them"_ manner such as _" their mods"_.

The mods are _us_. The mods are mostly unpaid fellow users that passed a
points threshold[1] to do certain admin tasks. E.g. 3000 points to cast "close
votes" isn't that high.

If we don't like what the "mods" are doing, maybe that old saying is relevant:
_" we've met the enemy and the enemy is us."_

[1]
[https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges](https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges)

~~~
Quarrelsome
its mildly more complex. As someone that never enjoyed the moderation angle
that SO took (forgoing community for correctness and generally tending towards
librarian stuffiness), to me the mods are most certainly not "us".

~~~
erikbye
If the mods on SO were more lenient than they already are SO would be
completely useless, as opposed to barely useful, as it stands today.

So many of the low-effort questions and answers belong in forums or IRC
channels, or just ask your colleague, FFS. Or, you know, read official
documentation? Get an understanding of the subject before you start making
posts and just wait around for an answer. But I guess people could actually
learn something, then.

Learning is not what many developers seem to use SO for, they just want a
quick fix. Something to copy-paste. It leaves them with no understanding and
increases the shittyness of code everywhere.

We need a higher bar for programming. If you can't get your work done without
SO, you should be fired.

~~~
Quarrelsome
Way more people are on SO than venture into IRC or are now split up on
discord. SO had the opportunity to be that community and to be that helping
hand, the community were willing (people like me!) but due to the attitudes of
some, like yourself (j'accuse!) we closed ourselves off to that because we
thought being "correct" was more important than helping.

SO could have easily been both but people just overly fixated on the concept
of building a perfect library of knowledge.

------
dvh
I thought it was bought by Microsoft but I guess it's just Mandela effect
playing trick with my mind.

