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by busterarm 978 days ago
The way we measure success is different. The history of the web is littered with companies that had a big exit and died/became-irrelevant.

SO destroyed itself several times over (first by its own moderators and then by the company itself). ChatGPT just nailed the lid shut.

Success to me looks like a lot of real users paying a lot of real money. SO never really had that. It tried to be a VC unicorn and was acquired by Prosus. Most of Prosus' other investments also look really questionable if we're headed for a global recession like it looks like we are...
2 comments
bhouston 978 days ago
> The way we measure success is different. The history of the web is littered with companies that had a big exit and died/became-irrelevant.

Given a long enough timeline every companies dies or they pivot so extreme that they resemble nothing that they were to begin with.

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xmprt 978 days ago
That might be true but it's a very nihilistic way to look at things. I believe SO had many more successful years ahead of it but decisions taken by the company and moderators sped that process up.
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mywittyname 978 days ago
I don't think it nihilistic. The world changes; it changes rapidly; it changes dramatically. Successful businesses pivot, and as a result, often don't resemble the company that they used to be.

The end game of successful businesses is to become a conglomerate of sorts. Once a company owns enough brands/products across enough markets, they can shed the under-performers and expand into new segments and industries.

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xmprt 977 days ago
I think we're in agreement. But the original commenter was stating that all companies die or change given a long enough timeline so criticizing a company for dying/changing is pointless since that happens to everyone.
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wizzwizz4 978 days ago
Criticism of the company has been done to death, but I'd be interested to hear criticism of the moderator actions. (I'm not even sure which actions you and the grandparent are referring to.)
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busterarm 978 days ago
The moderators seemed to collectively go insane with maintaining the purity of their individual fiefdoms.

Questions and answers both got moderated out of existence with high frequency with it being clear that the moderator didn't understand either. I remember this behavior becoming rampant throughout the community around 2012 and the moderators being incredibly toxic in Meta SO. I removed my profile and never looked back then.

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mschuster91 978 days ago
> Success to me looks like a lot of real users paying a lot of real money. SO never really had that.

Or you follow the lean engineering model, like Whatsapp did. Millions of users paying a $ each are still millions of $, and Whatsapp prior to FB acquiring them had very very low operating costs - similar to Stackoverflow by the way. Both engineered their systems to run on incredibly low resources.

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