The same could be said about the general idea behind Stackoverflow, except it's wrong. Sure, it's "free labour for internet points" but so is posting a project

The same could be said about the general idea behind Stackoverflow, except it's wrong. Sure, it's "free labour for internet points" but so is posting a project to Github and wanting stars. You're forgetting that it genuinely helps other people in your industry. Stackoverflow is an amazing resource for programmers, pretty much every question I type into google relating to a library or some software comes up with 3 or 4 stack overflow links that actually help me. If they can take the masses of questions which basically form ad-hoc documentation for tonnes of projects and put them in a cohesive place then how is this a bad thing? Because people don't get paid $0.01 per post or something? Perhaps any advertising revenue from the docs site could go towards something good, would this be better?