> In the formative years of StackOverflow, Joel and Jeff took huge pains to structure the service in such a way that there wasn't a time/money equivalency to pa

> In the formative years of StackOverflow, Joel and Jeff took huge pains to structure the service in such a way that there wasn't a time/money equivalency to participating. There always is, they just choose to pay in terms of company scrip. And they can -- and have -- arbitrarily remove karma from the system. It's great for them, because they convert user time into dollars for StackOverflow.