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Well, before SO, you had sites like 'Expert Sex Change' (expertsexchange.com) which would purport to answer your question, but gray/blur out the actual text. Th
by grkvlt 10y ago
Well, before SO, you had sites like 'Expert Sex Change' (expertsexchange.com) which would purport to answer your question, but gray/blur out the actual text. They then required payment to expose the answers, which often turned out to be non-existent.
On the other hand, I've had a lot of success with SO, both asking and answering, and while there are occasions where I find questions closed as duplicates or off-topic, they are pretty rare. I frequent the Java, Docker, Kubernetes, jclouds and similar categories, and they are generally very good.
It may be down to the choice of topic? Perhaps PHP and .NET have more first-time users, and a lower quality of questions? I don't know; although since the SO data is all freely available [1] it might make a nice research project to discover [2] what causes these questions to be closed!
[1] https://archive.org/details/stackexchange https://archive.org/details/stackexchange
[2] https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/540597/overall-closed-deleted-status-of-all-questions https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/540597/ov...
- speedkills 10y agoI always remember scrolling down past the blurred out section and reading the actual answers without signing up. I wonder how many people ending up getting past that old school dark pattern.
- grkvlt 10y agoCould you? I thought they didn't make the answers available, and just always showed the grayed out text even if there was no real answer after you paid up? There were several incarnations of the site though, and of course I may well be mis-remembering, it was a long time ago...
- lokedhs 10y agoYes you could. I'm not sure it always worked that way. My guess is they added that after being dropped by Google once Googlebot got smart enough to know you were hiding content.
- parrellel 10y agoEventually, Google threatened to delist them if they didn't provide the content somewhere on the page.
- dingaling 10y agoOr just "View Source" and there was the raw text of the answer... What Experts Exchange had going for it was a lot of corporate-domain programming knowledge, stuff like COBOL and IBM Visual Age that are basically unknown on Stack Overflow.