Blog: June 2021

Most of these posts were originally posted somewhere else and link to the originals. While this blog is not set up for comments, the original locations generally are, and I welcome comments there. Sorry for the inconvenience.

The future of Stack Overflow

Yesterday Stack Overflow was bought by Prosus, a tech company based in the Netherlands, for a jaw-dropping $1.8B (yes billion). In the world of recent tech acquisitions that might be small change, but it's about three times what I thought their current valuation was. It's kind of a mystery what Prosus (yeah, I'd never heard of them before either) is getting out of this.

I might have more to say about this later, but for now I'm going to post here what I wrote on Reddit (which I joined for other reasons a couple months ago but hadn't posted on before), in response to a comment referring to "SO’s bonkers relationship with its moderator community" and suggesting that getting bought by a mega-corp would make that even worse.


I don't know how the sale will affect their disastrous relationship with the people they rely on to donate and curate content for their financial gain. Often a new owner doesn't understand what it's bought and makes things worse by meddling. On the other hand, the claim is that Stack Overflow will still operate independently and make its own decisions. In the acquisition of a successful company that would be good news (they can keep doing what they're doing), but in a declining company that shouldn't keep doing what it's doing because it's not working, pressure from the new owner could help, if Prosus will actually apply that pressure.

Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network have been in decline for several years (since at least 2017 by my reckoning, some say longer). Some of that decline is due to outside factors and a lot is due to the company's actions. The good news is that most of the architects of those bad decisions are gone now, so the company could take the opportunity to say "y'know, we've been doing it wrong and we need to fix that" without anybody still there having to eat crow. The bad news is that, historically, this is not what Stack does; they double down on bad decisions, I assume because admitting mistakes is embarrassing. Several people still there who weren't part of those decisions now appear to be endorsing them -- whether due to internal pressure or because they drank the kool-aid I don't know.

Thus, the future is pretty unclear to me when it comes to how Stack Overflow treats its moderators and users. If Prosus allows them to operate independently, I expect they'll keep mistreating people even though they no longer have to placate departed leaders. If Prosus takes a closer look at what they've bought, they could make things either worse or better depending on what they decide and how well they execute it. On the current trajectory, I would expect the community, people's willingness to become moderators, and the quality of content to continue their current decline, and the invasiveness of ads and promotion of their Teams and Enterprise products to accelerate. SO is the gateway to the company's for-sale products; it doesn't matter to them independently. The company doesn't need quality and it does need to overcome SO's reputation of hostility, so they're willing to sacrifice the former to attempt the latter. The sad thing is that they could end up with neither even though it's actually possible to get both.

Oh, for crying out loud (thank you Javascript)

We have a widget on our site that displays the current Hebrew date. We're using HebCal's REST API to get the data, which comes back a month at a time -- JSON blob that has one entry for each day, with the secular date, the Hebrew date, and some other information. We use the Javascript Date class to get today's date, extract a string of the right format from that, and look up "today" in that returned collection. Easy, right? The API documentation for Date makes a point of saying that it uses local time, not UTC, which is what we want.

(Because the Hebrew day actually starts at sundown the previous day, we've got some "best effort" code in there that starts the day at 8PM. Not ideal, but we're not looking up local sunsets and suchlike... We also display something like "22 Sivan (Tuesday night and Wednesday)" to make it clear.)

Yeah ok, so we have the local date, and we need to look up an entry in the calendar data. Dates there use ISO format (YYYY-MM-DD). So we get our Date object, which is supposed to be local, and call toISOString() on it.

Guess what. Date.toISOString does not use the local time. FFS. I've been banging my head against a wall for two hours thinking it was something more esoteric, maybe having to do with that "start at 8PM" code (which I had actually commented out to eliminate that possibility). I finally went to an online Javascript tester, one of those sites where you can type in code and run it, and confirmed that right now today.toISOString() says it's June 2 but today.getDay() says it's June 1.

So now I have to write Google for code that constructs the proper format for the local time, which is down to padding numbers with leading zeros if the month or day number is less than 10 and string-munging and...ugh. (Found it easily enough, but sheesh!)