[jonas21]

The author labels COVID and the launch of ChatGPT on the graph, but fails to mention that Stack Overflow was acquired in June 2021 by Prosus, a Dutch private equity firm. That looks to me like it matches pretty well with the entire downward trend.

[bhouston]

> Stack Overflow was acquired in June 2021 by Prosus, a Dutch private equity firm.,

That is great to hear. I am glad that the original creators of StackOverflow got their liquidity event and are well off financially I suspect.

[chiph]

That would be Joel Spolsky (Fog Creek Software) and Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror), mostly. Jeff has gone on to make several large philanthropic gifts. Joel probably has too but I don't have info on them.

[TiredOfLife]

Joel sold his projects to various investment firms that essentially killed them all.

[selcuka]

Joel Spolsky sold Trello to Atlassian in 2017, so he was already rich before the Stack Exchange exit.

[andomar]

A firm is sold when its owners believe they will get the best price. The selling itself is more of a symptom than a cause.

[mathattack]

It’s not necessarily the sale. Some private equity companies move from “Let’s invest like we’re shooting for the moon” to “Let’s invest like we want to improve margins and flip this on 3-5 years”

It’s not inherently wrong but it is a different model, and sometimes companies suffer as a result.

[lokar]

And some (Broadcom) see a product in decline, but with some amount of stickiness/lock-in. They cut R&D and extract value as it withers away.

[mathattack]

Yes. And gut support too. The only consolation is that the software still exists.

[senordevnyc]

Businesses (and any other kind of asset) are sold for all kinds of reasons, and trying to time the market to maximize the price is only one of them. Probably not even the most common one.

[selcuka]

Correct. I believe the desire to start a new company or to retire would be higher on the list.

[rich_sasha]

I always associated SO issues with the unpaid moderators, who were not "bought" but rather inherited I suppose.

[zamadatix]

What did they change?

[yolo3000]

1.8bln

[IshKebab]

I don't think so. StackOverflow itself didn't really change for any of that period. Any changes in users must have been due to external factors.

[dorgo]

hmm, I got rid of WhatsApp the day it was sold to Facebook and never touched it since. I don't think anything in the app changed that day.

[echoangle]

You think a significant number of people started boycotting SO after the sale?

[ruebencoleslaw]

I'd disagree that the site wasn't changing. I think they were already trying to sideline job portal possibilities because it wasn't making a high enough worth calculation compared to entirely unrealized estimates. However my reaction to changes was forgiving for the old firm while feeling transactional was basically doom to my using the site as I didn't really need anything from interactions.

[IshKebab]

I agree that ditching the job adverts was a super weird move. But it didn't actually affect users at all.

[ruebencoleslaw]

It had the possibility of surfacing employers or coworkers with a little more comfort about their ~support competence. The enterprise stuff seems more like the stealing an OSS contributor who can't deny competence to work on internal Jira from now on..