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How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

578 points by ocoster 10y ago

lucb1e 10y ago
StackOverflow is an extremely valuable resource for all programmers. I've not seen the option anywhere, but a yearly donation would definitely be something I'd do for a substantial amount (substantial to me as a student, so it's not the moon but not a beer either).
- subhobroto 10y ago
  My following suggestion is a very unpopular one, but it is this: If you are a student, use the money you would have donated to StackOverflow to purchase a book or a tool that will help you to learn better and become an expert. If you are an expert, contribute your time to StackOverflow (instead of money). Money is easy to get compared to content. What helps StackOverflow grow is quality content. I am also interested how they approach the subject of money: > How much money we make is a direct proxy for how much we are helping our users. We focus on maximizing how we help users in order to make a great business. Very few companies have done this successfully, and we take great pride in the fact that we’re one of them. Personally, I would love to see how this works out and I wish them well. Hopefully they can prove this model works well. Users need this model to work well for other businesses to adopt.
  - user837387 10y ago
    >>book or a tool that will help you to learn better and become I've tried that before, many times. Unfortunately when you are trying to do real work those books are many times useless. Example, I kept trying to build a newtonian physics simulator so I got a Statics and Dynamics mechanical engineering book. The book was a text book for Mechanical engineering students and yet the examples they teach you are for toy problems. I could not generalize them to real world scenarios. To actually build the physics simulator I had to scour the internet until I found something that actually explained what I needed in an easy to understand manner [1]. And that still was not enough. I still had to use more online sources to find out all the other pieces, like the separating axes theorem for collision detection. So no, I would not rely on books anymore, at least not exclusively since they often do not provide a full picture. One last thing, books seem to be getting progressively worse in my experience. All of this is anecdotal of course. [1]http://chrishecker.com/Rigid_Body_Dynamics http://chrishecker.com/Rigid_Body_Dynamics
    - lucb1e 10y ago
      I have the same experience with books. I don't buy non-fiction for learning purposes* because it never worked. I tried with an IPv6 book which I read a few chapters of; I tried with another book or two that I don't even remember; I was gifted two books, one about making games and the other about programming paradigms, neither of which I ever read more than a few pages of... and yet I'm perfectly proficient by just playing around in spare time and looking up stuff I need and stuff I run into. * I do buy non-fiction for amusement and casual interests though, like Predictably Irrational.
    - Bartweiss 10y ago
      As an aside, buying a print reference book frequently feels counterproductive. Even if I'm going to get a formal reference text, instead of online resources, I probably want a digital copy. Otherwise, I find myself going "I wish I could do text search for this thing..." and wondering why I didn't get the version that actually allows that. When I read for pleasure I enjoy the physicality of books; when I read for technical reference I demand the interface of a computer.
      - johncolanduoni 10y ago
        For books without ebooks from the manufacturer but for which I can find an illicit PDF or djvu, I usually buy the print one and read the digital version.
  - lucb1e 10y ago
    > Money is easy to get compared to content. What helps StackOverflow grow is quality content. I do, >10k rep on the security.stackexchange.com site. I just think it's an amazing platform that I'd like to support with hosting and development costs.
    - subhobroto 10y ago
      > I do, >10k rep on the security.stackexchange.com site That's amazing! Thank you for your contributions. I meant to imply that donating money is usually the least fruitful way to contribute, in my experience. It should be your last resort; definitely not the first one. Example: One way SO can really gain from your security expertise is for you to think about how anonymous answers can be supported. That will be far more valuable than $$$. I posted about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12961447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12961447 I would love to read your opinions about this crazy idea!
      - Nition 10y ago
        I have to agree. This happens on forums as well. I've Google searched something before and found people discussing my problem on some random forum. Maybe I know something that might help, but its a hassle to create an account to post. I bet that happens on Stack Overflow too. People who'll never bother to create an account find a page about a problem through Google and they have something valuable they'd add it if didn't prompt them to sign up first. I wonder how much trouble it'd actually cause spam wise.
        brazzledazzle 10y ago
        I suspect there would be a lot of challenges with it but perhaps letting high rep users validate anonymous contributions would help with the spam. Reveal them only to authenticated users and you remove the incentive for SEO spam.
  - tikhonj 10y ago
    I've contributed a fair amount to Stack Overflow, but it's actually pretty hard in the niches I care about. Not because the questions are hard, but because people answer them so quickly: it's hard to find a question I can answer that hasn't been addressed well. That's a great problem for Stack Overflow to have, of course, but I do wonder if there's some easy way to monitor specific tags without having to constantly refresh the page...
    - lucb1e 10y ago
      Well if there is no work left to be done, so be it I guess? I don't think you should feel bad about that :)
    - isxek 10y ago
      There is, if you use an RSS reader. There are feeds associated with each tag. Try clicking any tag, and you should see a link where you can get an RSS feed of all the new questions that come in for that tag. It's been there for a long time. ;-)
  - 0xmohit 10y ago
    Contributing is wonderful, but those internet points (reputation) screws it up. An edit would give you 2 points if you have a rep < 2000, and contributes towards badges anyways. People would make pointless edits to a post. See http://stackoverflow.com/posts/21023161/revisions http://stackoverflow.com/posts/21023161/revisions for example. There is no change between the original answer and the latest revision after 3 edits.
    - subhobroto 10y ago
      Excellent insight. I am hopeful SE will figure out a way to stop/reduce this arbitrage opportunity.
    - slavik81 10y ago
      That example is all on Emil Vikström, who unilaterally accepted a bad edit from Akshat (with minor corrections of his own) after two reviewers had already voted to reject. That's two edits. The third edit was undoing the bad change they accepted. The undo was also contentious, with 2 votes to reject and 3 to accept. But, Akshat has only 18 points. Even if you're lucky enough to have worthless suggested edits accepted, it's not a very good way to earn points.
- Paul-ish 10y ago
  It is probably better that stack overflow can support itself. Donations would put them at the mercy of others whims. A donation model doesn't make sense when a company can sustain itself while still preserving its core values.
  - lucb1e 10y ago
    > Donations would put them at the mercy of others whims. Yes, which is why I assume they didn't even bother putting up a donate button. The thing that convinced me to post anyway is that it's probably very clear to a lot of people that it is definitely worth supporting. Much more than the Archive project or the Tor project, this is something I know people use so much every day and get tremendous value from. That's why it might just work in this case, similar to Wikipedia. It's also not exclusive, they can totally put up donations and try to attract some attention for it by posting it to their own ad system, and at the same time continue with all the current efforts.
- jaydles 10y ago
  We're humbled hearing from folks like you - your willingness to give back is what makes it all work. Keep your money. But here's how you CAN help, right now: Sign up if you haven't, create a developer story, and when you ARE job-hunting, try Jobs. We I think you'll find it to be the most developer-friendly offering on the planet.
  - lambda 10y ago
    Can vouch for it. I found my current job through SO Careers, and now that we're trying to hire more people, we're finding a good number of our better candidates coming through our SO Careers posting.
  - tedmiston 10y ago
    Just an anecdote from my experience — I am really enjoying the new Stack Overflow Developer Story. Mine is at [1] for example. While I do appreciate jobs, I'm a full-time independent contractor and not looking for a traditional job right now (though I have seen quality offers through SO Jobs). That said, Developer Story / CV has been instrumental for me and has become my canonical resume. I'm a huge fan. If I could make one feature request... it would be a way to indicate conference attendance. It's something I give extra credibility to, for both employers as sponsors / presenters and employees as attendees / speakers / volunteers, as not everyone is willing to put in the effort to give back. [You can see on my CV that I've tried to incorporate this as an "other" at the bottom, but it feels a little out of place.] [1]: http://stackoverflow.com/cv/taylor http://stackoverflow.com/cv/taylor
    - rla4 10y ago
      I'm a dev in the Developer Story/CV team and we appreciate the love <3 The conference attendance item idea is great, discussing it internally with our team right now. Thank you!
  - ohstopitu 10y ago
    I would like to suggest a feature request... I would love to use developer stories but more importantly, would like to integrate my dev story with my website (as this would also keep the "recommended reading" section up to date as well). If there was some way to do this (we can discuss options) without using an iframe, I would LOVE to do so. Just to mention...I want this on my website & stackoverflow. Updating recommended reading is of a lower priority than having it on my website in the first place.
- tedmiston 10y ago
  I consider the time that I give to the community answering questions to the best way to help. While I have no idea how to value that in dollars, it's something I put an effort into regularly.
- edblarney 10y ago
  "a yearly donation would definitely be something I'd do for a substantial amount" There's a word for this, it's called 'subscription' : ) They provide a service, you pay for it. It's how most of the world works. I think the underlying issue is price discrimination: how to get the large numbers of those unwilling/unable to pay some value, while providing value to the higher order users as well. It's a paradox that people will pay more for a coffee than they will something that can help them substantially :)
  - lucb1e 10y ago
    > There's a word for this, it's called 'subscription' : ) I avoided that word because it's the wrong word. A subscription implies I get something that normal users don't get. I don't want that. I hate services like Dropbox where the free users get benefits for installing it on their Android or from referrals (shitty stuff) and live off of the backs of paying users. Yet here I think it's much more akin to something like open source software, which is for the general good and is worth supporting for those who are able to afford it. Edit: There is no need to downvote the person, though. To me he seems to be contributing to the conversation.
    - edblarney 10y ago
      "A subscription implies I get something that normal users don't get." Fair enough - but there are very, very few value creating engines that can feasibly exist in such a context. Wikipedia is one. Stackoverflow probably could not. Someone mentioned it creates 'billions' in value, well, that's probably not too far off. There's nothing wrong with people paying for things. But to your point - it would be nice to find a way to do intelligent price discrimination. Students, hobbyists get it free, other entities can pay. etc.. I don't think that would work for Stackoverflow either because there is an inherent 'open-ness' that it needs ... that said, again, there's nothing wrong with paying for things.
- mehrdada 10y ago
  You can also buy a beer for folks who actually wrote an answer you used if you ever meet them IRL. I bet direct revenue from users would be negligible by the other revenue streams Stack Overflow Inc pursues.
amelius 10y ago
Upon reading the title, I thought they made it possible for users to make money on Stack Overflow.
- ProAm 10y ago
  They did with job placement potential.
  - jimlawruk 10y ago
    Good point.
chollida1 10y ago
Interestingly, this article was flagged on the new page. I had to vouch for it. Weird that a previously flagged article made it to the top slot:)
subhobroto 10y ago
Thank you for submitting this on HN. I am really happy to see the site grow. > I am extremely protective of our users. You can ask anyone who works here. It’s is my very strong belief that we have a built up a trust with the community that is not easily earned and is impossible to replace. I want to work for a company that respects that trust, and I do. > How much money we make is a direct proxy for how much we are helping our users. We focus on maximizing how we help users in order to make a great business. Very few companies have done this successfully, and we take great pride in the fact that we’re one of them. I can see that they believe in this. As I wrote in my Quora answer https://www.quora.com/Is-Stack-Exchange-still-growing-in-2016/answer/Subhobroto-Sinha-1 https://www.quora.com/Is-Stack-Exchange-still-growing-in-201...: "They are gaining a lot of goodwill because they have committed to attach a high value to user experience over monetary gain (they learnt from sites in the past that lost their community because they plastered the site with ads. Needless to say, those sites eventually failed)" I remember other sites that did something similar but they got lost on the way and sold their users away and ultimately fell to disrepair because no one came back. I hope they continue to stay true to this course. > We don’t because if we don’t have anything even remotely good to show you, we shouldn’t. > And we don’t want to use an automated system that selects some ads for us. We looked at this. It didn’t allow us the control we required to maintain the level of quality we want to maintain. We have intentionally left a lot of money on the table. Sacrificing quality is not what we want to be known for. We believe there are better ways. In my limited experience with online advertising, one metric that almost all advertisers ask for are page views. I believe this is a fundamentally flawed metric. It can be gamed easily and ultimately targeting ads by page views lead to a suboptimal user experience. I would rather not show an ad than show an irrelevant ad. SE is bigger than just page views. It’s a successful ecosystem that has a vibrant community behind it that will grow and nurture itself. It's great to see that their management would rather not show an ad than show an irrelevant ad. > If you have time though, I’d appreciate if you told me why in the comments so I/we can do better. Introduce anonymous answers. I know of very talented developers who would like to answer questions without setting up (throwaway) accounts. Spam is a non-issue here unless spammers model answers like good answers (of which we have a pretty large set to train from)
- jc4p 10y ago
dtnewman 10y ago
TLDR: They make money through ads, job postings and their enterprise product. The author believes that they can make money and serve users at the same time.
- blowski 10y ago
  In my opinion, they do a pretty good job of balancing the needs of users and advertisers.
  - BipolarElsa 10y ago
    I ask a lot of question, and thus get banned from asking more... I wish they would have a "luxury" option for like 49.99 a year where students could ask like unlimited questions. Is this crazy?
    - finnh 10y ago
      How many questions does it take before you are banned?
      - Latty 10y ago
        There is no limit - the only issue is if your questions are marked as bad. If you ask questions that are answerable and work on StackOveflow, you can ask as many as you like.
      - 0xmohit 10y ago
        If they started banning users for asking questions or even for asking poor (read extremely poor) questions, then the overall traffic would reduce significantly.
        Shog9 10y ago
        I wish. We've been doing this for 5-6 years now, and it hasn't. Quite honestly, if we could get rid of the worst 20% of questions instantly, life would be a lot better for the remaining 80%... But, identifying those 20% when often SO is their only option is... Brutally hard. I've seen the same person try to post variations on the same question dozens of times before finally getting around the quality checks... Only to have it sink like a rock because of course it was still unintelligible after all that.
brianzelip 10y ago
Great answer to a related FAQ in a post[0] linked from this article, about why !SO doesn't care about ad blockers: > The truth is: we don’t care if our users use ad blockers on Stack Overflow. More accurately: we hope that they won’t, but we understand that some people just don’t like ads. Our belief is that if someone doesn’t like them, and they won’t click on them, any impressions served to them will only annoy them-- plus, serving ads to people who won’t click on them harms campaign performance. [0] https://stackoverflow.blog/2016/02/why-stack-overflow-doesnt-care-about-ad-blockers/#we-don%E2%80%99t-care https://stackoverflow.blog/2016/02/why-stack-overflow-doesnt...!
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  And a great explanation in the piece of how SO works to serve only quality ads. Good enough, in fact, that I'm whitelisting Stack Overflow from my adblocker. I don't do it often, I don't even do it for sites I like; the reality is that anyone using an automated ad network is at significant risk of serving malware, and I don't approve even if I'm protected. I don't visit Forbes at all anymore, ever, because they broke their users basic faith in "see our ads, and we won't destroy your machine". But a promise to serve relevant, low-impact ads, chosen by actual humans? That's something I'm willing to support.
  - arjie 10y ago
    Did you only do it today? 8 months after the announcement, because someone happened to mention it in a comments thread? Doesn't speak very much to that approach's effectiveness. Especially since you've got a strong opinion on it.
    - yuhong 10y ago
      The fun thing is that I think Reddit once used both types of ads. I don't think they do that anymore though.
  - cerved 10y ago
    Just because an ad network is automated doesn't mean you can serve malware through ads. Just because an ad network uses manual bidding doesn't mean it's malware free.
vlunkr 10y ago
Another good article linked from this one: https://stackoverflow.blog/2016/02/why-stack-overflow-doesnt-care-about-ad-blockers/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2016/02/why-stack-overflow-doesnt.... Stack Overflow is IMO the site to look to if you want to do ads correctly. So many big sites have incredibly trashy ads, SO shows that they care to not subject their users to that junk.
- criddell 10y ago
  I'm actually surprised ads work at all on StackOverflow. I would have guessed that most of their visitors are blocking ads.
  - nicky0 10y ago
    Most of the ads are served to non-logged-in visitors who come to specific question pages through a web search. SO actually shows you fewer ads the more reputation points you have.
    - criddell 10y ago
      I think I would expect logged-in users to be more likely to have whitelisted the site than random Google visitors.
      - nicky0 10y ago
        But there are a lot more of the random Google visitors than active participants. SO is effectively a machine for getting smart people to create specific, targeted searchable content to run ads against.
    - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
      What's the flow there for a user? They're researching an answer ... do they ignore the issue and run off and buy something? I sometime have poor focus but when you're problem solving it seems the least likely time to distract yourself with shopping. I did once follow a Google ad about 10 years ago, but in my defence I was just surfing cool tech and the image looked interesting. Of course I didn't buy anything, who lets advertisers tell them what to buy? I digress.
eanzenberg 10y ago
Re: 'Why we make money' Is it now shameful to make money, so you have to defend it when you do?
- dbancajas 10y ago
  yeah. it's crazy. it costs money to run the servers itself. We are lucky they haven't made the site subscription based or something.
jack9 10y ago
> And we don’t want to use an automated system that selects some ads for us. So they do direct deals mostly, which is antiquated and probably to preserve their branding as a "tech site". > Did you know we have a lot of unpaid inventory on Stack Overflow every month? This is what trying to guess your avails with direct ends up doing. Leaving inventory unmonetized. Typically, you get paid less for less of your inventory trying to do monthly manual trafficking. All they do is display, so it's rather silly to quibble about CPMs in the 25 cent range...until you look at the traffic and realize that translates to real money.
- ocoster 10y ago
  What you are missing is that there is a cost associated with monetizing the full inventory with automation. You lose control over what is being shown, you are diluting your brand and you are at risk of alienating your users. At Stack Overflow we are not willing to make this trade off.
  - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
    Surely you can automate everything but keep manual curation?
  - jack9 10y ago
    > What you are missing Automation costs are actually administrative costs (platform fees), which have recently increased via unmonetized opportunity cost models (opportunity being a specific technical term in advertising). SO is not fully or optimally monetizing, probably because they prefer to keep the old tech they are using and/or the staff that has been there since early days. It's also possible they want some dejour/nonstandard controls. Saying they are making an informed tradeoff is simply incorrect. Saying they are making a (unspecified) choice, then not really talking about that choice, is what the article skirts. Sub 10k/mo for platforms at 2 billion opps per day is AOL and SpotX. That schedule doesn't matter at the volume SO works with. Fees and Opp costs are not the issue with the unmonetized inventory.
- Latty 10y ago
  Except for all the crap about "targeted advertising", it turns out that if you run a site like StackOverflow, you can more accurately target adverts to your average user by curating the adverts than by letting some system try and guess based on whatever they have managed to sniff. More importantly, the automated stuff is a huge security risk, and will generally annoy your users when someone puts out something they shouldn't, even if it's not a security issue. Sure, they could saturate the pages with more crap adverts no one wants, and they would sell for less (because they would be less effective), and they'd piss off their user base. SO has long been one of the very, very few on my adblocking whitelist. I don't dislike adverts as a core idea, but 99% of advertising online is invasive, annoying and useless.
lordnacho 10y ago
So is it cash flow positive? I hope so, because it's hands down the most useful site for programmers. I even got the gold medal for using it every day for a long time.
- marxidad 10y ago
  They make over 10 million dollars a year.
  - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
    Between 300 people cited elsewhere that's only $30k. Presumably they pay for hosting, facilities. Doesn't sound like it leaves a lot of pre-tax pay unless they're using primarily overseas workers in low-cost countries?
    - oblio 10y ago
      None of their locations seem to be that cheap, if you look at the remote workers. Not Silicon Valley expensive, but not working for peanuts either.
    - cjlm 10y ago
      $300k, surely?
      - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
        10,000,000 ÷ 300 = 1,000,000 ÷ 30 = 100,000 ÷ 3 ~ 33,333 (commas for grouping) Or 1e07/3e02 = 1e05/3.
        cjlm 10y ago
        Whoops...
0xmohit 10y ago
Does somebody has a clue about what % of the revenues come from ads and jobs? I understand that there might be other sources too (documentation and such).
Alupis 10y ago
Perhaps it's time they consider paying Moderators for their time and effort. It doesn't need to be anything large, even a small stipend will suffice. Moderators are the real lifeblood of StackExchange. They spend countless hours ensuring their respective Sub Exchange hums along. Yes, it's a volunteer "job", but it's a job none-the-less - especially since once you become a Moderator, it's more-or-less expected you have certain responsibilities and obligations. Given StackExchange makes a pretty healthy profit off the efforts of the "volunteers", and given StackExchange is a for profit company, it seems fitting they should have to pay for the labor that creates their profit. Currently, StackExchange kicks back and rakes in money via various avenues, but then doesn't have to pay staff to actually manage the growing plethora of Sub Exchanges. We all give companies grief for underpaying or mis-classifying employees, but somehow everyone overlooks StackExchange. I believe it an accurate statement to say, StackExchange would not be a thing today, if it were not for the innumerable hours worked for free by a growing army of "volunteers".
- prdonahue 10y ago
  Are you a moderator?
  - Alupis 10y ago
    > Are you a moderator? No, and have never been. I have no dog in that race - but as a long time Stack Exchange user, I witness these people's hard work every day.
- collyw 10y ago
  Overzealous moderators are the worst part about Stack Overflow.
- Latty 10y ago
  I mean, sure, but I'm not sure why you say '"volunteers"' - they are exactly volunteers. Yes, extracting labour for free from volunteers can be the sign of something shady, but with SE I don't really see that evil intent. Moderators not being staff means that the community has more say in how the sites function, which is a thing people want. It's hard - communities want to police themselves, not be dictated unto by a controlling body. As soon as you start paying the moderators, they are under your sway. I also don't think it'd be easy to create a fair remuneration system that didn't incentivise the wrong thing, or create pressure on moderators that they don't currently have.
dolguldur 10y ago
Stackoverflow is the prime example for how a company can generate tremenduous value without making that much money. It's difficult to estimate its contribution to the world economy quantitatively, but I'd definitely say billions, many many billions.
- chubot 10y ago
  How do you know they don't make that much money? I didn't see that anywhere in the blog post. I agree that they make an enormous contribution to the world economy. Joel really did knock it out of the park -- remember expertsexchange? His goal was to get rid of that and it worked.
  - fredley 10y ago
    Or as Joel likes to call it 'that hyphenated site'
  - codinghorror 10y ago
    Joel, eh? Think you might be forgetting someone in there, somewhere? ;)
    - ocoster 10y ago
      You may be gone, but not forgotten, never that, Jeff :)
    - mattmanser 10y ago
      Correct me if I'm wrong, but I always got the impression from the podcasts that while you both designed it, it was more you actually programming it. I could be mis-remembering after all this time! Didn't you quit your job and program it while Joel was still mainly focused on Fog Creek day-to-day?
      - codinghorror 10y ago
        Yes, it was Joel's famous "servant leadership". We brainstormed ideas once a week on weekly calls (which became the podcast) and he trusted me (and Geoff and Jarrod, the first two people at the company after the founders) to build Stack Overflow as we saw fit. Community feedback was a huge part of that feedback cycle once the beta was live.
overcast 10y ago
At this point, I have no desire to participate in or help stackoverflow. The attitudes there are such hostile, elitist garbage, where someone is incapable of asking a question, because it will instantly be closed by the mods. God forbid they are a newbie to the site. Responses essentially amount to go RTFM. This sums it up well. https://hackernoon.com/the-decline-of-stack-overflow-7cb69faa575d#.oyn9b1aoz https://hackernoon.com/the-decline-of-stack-overflow-7cb69fa...
- maaaats 10y ago
  Wow, what a hostile post. What would you think people would think of HN reading your stuff?
  - overcast 10y ago
    This isn't my stuff. Though myself, and others share the same sentiment. Read the comments below the article.
- sosborn 10y ago
  > Responses essentially amount to go RTFM. Let's be honest, reading the docs should be everyone's first step before posting a question. So many questions follow the template of "I want to know how to do this but I don't want to put in any effort." The volume of those kinds of questions are what drove me away - not the moderation.
  - EpicEng 10y ago
    And, on the flip side; people who do RTFM will only ask relatively esoteric questions looking for help on a difficult problem. Good luck getting any answers to that. It happens, but it's pretty rare. Everyone jumps on the latest "why is my hash map implementation crashing?" (It's a bad pointer) in the race for rep. I am still pretty highly ranked on SO (top 1%), but I haven't been active for nearly two years now.
    - bostik 10y ago
bluedino 10y ago
Ads. Of course. And over half their staff is marketing/sales. http://stackoverflow.com/company/team http://stackoverflow.com/company/team
Pica_soO 10y ago
Would it be thieving, if i made a NN-Crawler, that condensed the Stack overflow-Conversations into a query able chat bot?
- ocoster 10y ago
  Did you know that we provide the complete set of questions and answers (from all sites, including Stack Overflow)? No need to crawl anything. You can find it on the internet archive: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange https://archive.org/details/stackexchange
  - aalear 10y ago
    And there's also the API - http://api.stackexchange.com http://api.stackexchange.com
    - ocoster 10y ago
      And the Data Explorer (use SQL in the browser to query the Stack Overflow database): http://data.stackoverflow.com http://data.stackoverflow.com
      - Pica_soO 10y ago
        Thanks, thats great..
weeblywoo 10y ago
Not very diverse, SO. Shame! Shame! Shame!
tedmiston 10y ago
> We are in the process of sending out an email now announcing Developer Story to the larger community in the hopes that we can help some percentage of developers. If that email is rejected, we’ll unsubscribe you. If you’re unresponsive to emails we send, we’ll unsubscribe you. If you mark it as spam, we’ll unsubscribe you. How great it would be if every site would subscribe to such high standards. Bravo, SO.
- rbobby 10y ago
  > If you mark it as spam, we’ll unsubscribe you. How would they know?
  - skizm 10y ago
    They probably assume if you make as spam, you will also be unresponsive to the email. If you are responsive they can say that overrides the marking as spam action.
  - clay_to_n 10y ago
    In the comments, they explain that Sendgrid gets notified of spam marks, and Sendgrid gives SO a webhook whenever someone marks as spam. So they then unsubscribe that user.
  - breakingcups 10y ago
    You can include a header in your email message where, if a user marks a message as spam, Gmail / Hotmail / whatever will let you know.
    - tgb 10y ago
      Why do they do that? Seems great for this use-case but terrible information to give bad actors.
      - TheHegemon 10y ago
        Would make sense to prevent themselves to be marked as spam in the future.
mrfusion 10y ago
I'm so happy we have stack overflow. Do you guys remember experts exchange.com?
- abraae 10y ago
  That site made me wish I could set up a "exclude from search results forever" on Google.
  - jnky 10y ago
    https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist-by-goo/nolijncfnkgaikbjbdaogikpmpbdcdef?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...
    - TorKlingberg 10y ago
      Chrome only, has be installed on each PC, not on mobile. Bleh.
  - jeffasinger 10y ago
    I installed a firefox plugin to specifically remove those results from Google.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago
  It was pretty good and usually useful IME until they got greedy and hid the content from all but subscribers. It made me quite angry when they locked up my content. I switched to posting solutions on my blog then. Now I tend to stick stuff on Stack rather than blog it.
motoford 10y ago
I always thought they earned a nickel for every time they closed a question as "not constructive"
dep_b 10y ago
I like Stack Overflow, but I seriously don't know how all these answers end up there. I think about 80% of all my questions are answered sooner or later by myself. And some of them are quite massively upvoted too afterwards, so they weren't always niche problems.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
cdnsteve 10y ago
A reminder that you don't need to use the latest or fanciest tech stack to achieve success in business. In the case of SO, boring wins, it's proven and seems like it allows them to focus on their product and to create new value for users.
- dudeget 10y ago
  what's their stack?
  - ocoster 10y ago
    Web Server: IIS, Database: SQL Server, Web framework (backend): ASP.NET/MVC. Additionally: Redis, Elasticsearch, HAProxy (all on Linux). jQuery on the front end (with some TypeScript) and LESS -> CSS.
  - Nick-Craver 10y ago
    If curious, I did a post on that a while back. I'm settling into a new house and will pick this series back up soon. https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-architecture-2016-edition/ https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar...
DeBraid 10y ago
tldr: Display Ads and Talent. > We help companies build their brand and source technical talent through our business products: Display Ads and Talent.
chiph 10y ago
> Every new email, except for transactional emails like “Forgot your password?”, sent through this system will have three links at the bottom: a one-click unsubscribe, a direct link to manage all categories, and feedback. It's terrific that they're doing this. The first two links are what the CAN-SPAM Act requires. The "feedback" link is not a result of complying with CAN-SPAM, but is a good idea for any online business. https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can...
greggman 10y ago
I would pay to get bugs fixed. The snippet editor has been broken for about 6 months. Funny that a site about code would have a buggy code editor.
Hydraulix989 10y ago
What do you think is the purpose of this piece? Seems like it came straight from PR land to me.
otar 10y ago
I have tweeted about SO several minutes ago before I discovered this topic on HN: https://twitter.com/otarch/status/798647799411675136 https://twitter.com/otarch/status/798647799411675136 StackOverflow is so powerful resource on the Internet, alongside with Wikipedia and Internet Archive. I wish I could donate two ways: 1) Yearly or monthly (subscription) donations, like on Wikipedia 2) I would be extremely happy to donate authors of some great, life-saving answers. I feel so excited when I find the right answer after searching a solution for hours. Just shut up and take my money!
- skolsuper 10y ago
  SO intentionally does not want to integrate payment of any kind for answerers because of Motivation Crowding Theory[1], the idea that intrinsic motivations like altruism can be crowded out by extrinsic motivations like profit, which is problematic because intrinsic motivation is generally stronger and effective for longer than extrinsic motivation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation_crowding_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation_crowding_theory
cerved 10y ago
It's great you are making money. If only there wasn't so many terrible answers ranking no.1 on Google.. :-/
jorgec 10y ago
I love Stack Overflow but its community is right now poisonous that i don't want to participate anymore but to be a lurker like many others. My 2cents.
kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
Seeing their salary calculator makes me depressed what a 1-year experience 1x developer in the NYC metro makes.
- pcurve 10y ago
  Consider how depressed developer salary is in Japan, I'm surprised how well Stackover pays... I'm guessing their Japanese office is tiny.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
latchkey 10y ago
I paid a good amount of money for the jobs listings because it is Stack Overflow. The sales person was very persistent and available while the negotiations were happening to use their service (yes, you can get discounts). As soon as I paid, she disappeared and was never to be heard from again. No follow up at all. I also got zero good jobs references for an extremely profitable tech business in the heart of downtown financial district in San Francisco. All the people who applied were basically spam and that wasn't any better than just posting on LinkedIn or HN for free. Not really a complaint, just one small data point to consider.
shiftoutbox 10y ago
We don't ; vc baby !!

578 points by ocoster 10y ago

StackOverflow is an extremely valuable resource for all programmers. I've not seen the option anywhere, but a yearly donation would definitely be something I'd do for a substantial amount (substantial to me as a student, so it's not the moon but not a beer either).

subhobroto 10y ago
My following suggestion is a very unpopular one, but it is this: If you are a student, use the money you would have donated to StackOverflow to purchase a book or a tool that will help you to learn better and become an expert. If you are an expert, contribute your time to StackOverflow (instead of money). Money is easy to get compared to content. What helps StackOverflow grow is quality content. I am also interested how they approach the subject of money: > How much money we make is a direct proxy for how much we are helping our users. We focus on maximizing how we help users in order to make a great business. Very few companies have done this successfully, and we take great pride in the fact that we’re one of them. Personally, I would love to see how this works out and I wish them well. Hopefully they can prove this model works well. Users need this model to work well for other businesses to adopt.
- user837387 10y ago
  >>book or a tool that will help you to learn better and become I've tried that before, many times. Unfortunately when you are trying to do real work those books are many times useless. Example, I kept trying to build a newtonian physics simulator so I got a Statics and Dynamics mechanical engineering book. The book was a text book for Mechanical engineering students and yet the examples they teach you are for toy problems. I could not generalize them to real world scenarios. To actually build the physics simulator I had to scour the internet until I found something that actually explained what I needed in an easy to understand manner [1]. And that still was not enough. I still had to use more online sources to find out all the other pieces, like the separating axes theorem for collision detection. So no, I would not rely on books anymore, at least not exclusively since they often do not provide a full picture. One last thing, books seem to be getting progressively worse in my experience. All of this is anecdotal of course. [1]http://chrishecker.com/Rigid_Body_Dynamics http://chrishecker.com/Rigid_Body_Dynamics
  - lucb1e 10y ago
    I have the same experience with books. I don't buy non-fiction for learning purposes* because it never worked. I tried with an IPv6 book which I read a few chapters of; I tried with another book or two that I don't even remember; I was gifted two books, one about making games and the other about programming paradigms, neither of which I ever read more than a few pages of... and yet I'm perfectly proficient by just playing around in spare time and looking up stuff I need and stuff I run into. * I do buy non-fiction for amusement and casual interests though, like Predictably Irrational.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    As an aside, buying a print reference book frequently feels counterproductive. Even if I'm going to get a formal reference text, instead of online resources, I probably want a digital copy. Otherwise, I find myself going "I wish I could do text search for this thing..." and wondering why I didn't get the version that actually allows that. When I read for pleasure I enjoy the physicality of books; when I read for technical reference I demand the interface of a computer.
    - johncolanduoni 10y ago
      For books without ebooks from the manufacturer but for which I can find an illicit PDF or djvu, I usually buy the print one and read the digital version.
- lucb1e 10y ago
  > Money is easy to get compared to content. What helps StackOverflow grow is quality content. I do, >10k rep on the security.stackexchange.com site. I just think it's an amazing platform that I'd like to support with hosting and development costs.
  - subhobroto 10y ago
    > I do, >10k rep on the security.stackexchange.com site That's amazing! Thank you for your contributions. I meant to imply that donating money is usually the least fruitful way to contribute, in my experience. It should be your last resort; definitely not the first one. Example: One way SO can really gain from your security expertise is for you to think about how anonymous answers can be supported. That will be far more valuable than $$$. I posted about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12961447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12961447 I would love to read your opinions about this crazy idea!
    - Nition 10y ago
      I have to agree. This happens on forums as well. I've Google searched something before and found people discussing my problem on some random forum. Maybe I know something that might help, but its a hassle to create an account to post. I bet that happens on Stack Overflow too. People who'll never bother to create an account find a page about a problem through Google and they have something valuable they'd add it if didn't prompt them to sign up first. I wonder how much trouble it'd actually cause spam wise.
      - brazzledazzle 10y ago
        I suspect there would be a lot of challenges with it but perhaps letting high rep users validate anonymous contributions would help with the spam. Reveal them only to authenticated users and you remove the incentive for SEO spam.
- tikhonj 10y ago
  I've contributed a fair amount to Stack Overflow, but it's actually pretty hard in the niches I care about. Not because the questions are hard, but because people answer them so quickly: it's hard to find a question I can answer that hasn't been addressed well. That's a great problem for Stack Overflow to have, of course, but I do wonder if there's some easy way to monitor specific tags without having to constantly refresh the page...
  - lucb1e 10y ago
    Well if there is no work left to be done, so be it I guess? I don't think you should feel bad about that :)
  - isxek 10y ago
    There is, if you use an RSS reader. There are feeds associated with each tag. Try clicking any tag, and you should see a link where you can get an RSS feed of all the new questions that come in for that tag. It's been there for a long time. ;-)
- 0xmohit 10y ago
  Contributing is wonderful, but those internet points (reputation) screws it up. An edit would give you 2 points if you have a rep < 2000, and contributes towards badges anyways. People would make pointless edits to a post. See http://stackoverflow.com/posts/21023161/revisions http://stackoverflow.com/posts/21023161/revisions for example. There is no change between the original answer and the latest revision after 3 edits.
  - subhobroto 10y ago
    Excellent insight. I am hopeful SE will figure out a way to stop/reduce this arbitrage opportunity.
  - slavik81 10y ago
    That example is all on Emil Vikström, who unilaterally accepted a bad edit from Akshat (with minor corrections of his own) after two reviewers had already voted to reject. That's two edits. The third edit was undoing the bad change they accepted. The undo was also contentious, with 2 votes to reject and 3 to accept. But, Akshat has only 18 points. Even if you're lucky enough to have worthless suggested edits accepted, it's not a very good way to earn points.
Paul-ish 10y ago
It is probably better that stack overflow can support itself. Donations would put them at the mercy of others whims. A donation model doesn't make sense when a company can sustain itself while still preserving its core values.
- lucb1e 10y ago
  > Donations would put them at the mercy of others whims. Yes, which is why I assume they didn't even bother putting up a donate button. The thing that convinced me to post anyway is that it's probably very clear to a lot of people that it is definitely worth supporting. Much more than the Archive project or the Tor project, this is something I know people use so much every day and get tremendous value from. That's why it might just work in this case, similar to Wikipedia. It's also not exclusive, they can totally put up donations and try to attract some attention for it by posting it to their own ad system, and at the same time continue with all the current efforts.
jaydles 10y ago
We're humbled hearing from folks like you - your willingness to give back is what makes it all work. Keep your money. But here's how you CAN help, right now: Sign up if you haven't, create a developer story, and when you ARE job-hunting, try Jobs. We I think you'll find it to be the most developer-friendly offering on the planet.
- lambda 10y ago
  Can vouch for it. I found my current job through SO Careers, and now that we're trying to hire more people, we're finding a good number of our better candidates coming through our SO Careers posting.
- tedmiston 10y ago
  Just an anecdote from my experience — I am really enjoying the new Stack Overflow Developer Story. Mine is at [1] for example. While I do appreciate jobs, I'm a full-time independent contractor and not looking for a traditional job right now (though I have seen quality offers through SO Jobs). That said, Developer Story / CV has been instrumental for me and has become my canonical resume. I'm a huge fan. If I could make one feature request... it would be a way to indicate conference attendance. It's something I give extra credibility to, for both employers as sponsors / presenters and employees as attendees / speakers / volunteers, as not everyone is willing to put in the effort to give back. [You can see on my CV that I've tried to incorporate this as an "other" at the bottom, but it feels a little out of place.] [1]: http://stackoverflow.com/cv/taylor http://stackoverflow.com/cv/taylor
  - rla4 10y ago
    I'm a dev in the Developer Story/CV team and we appreciate the love <3 The conference attendance item idea is great, discussing it internally with our team right now. Thank you!
- ohstopitu 10y ago
  I would like to suggest a feature request... I would love to use developer stories but more importantly, would like to integrate my dev story with my website (as this would also keep the "recommended reading" section up to date as well). If there was some way to do this (we can discuss options) without using an iframe, I would LOVE to do so. Just to mention...I want this on my website & stackoverflow. Updating recommended reading is of a lower priority than having it on my website in the first place.
tedmiston 10y ago
I consider the time that I give to the community answering questions to the best way to help. While I have no idea how to value that in dollars, it's something I put an effort into regularly.
edblarney 10y ago
"a yearly donation would definitely be something I'd do for a substantial amount" There's a word for this, it's called 'subscription' : ) They provide a service, you pay for it. It's how most of the world works. I think the underlying issue is price discrimination: how to get the large numbers of those unwilling/unable to pay some value, while providing value to the higher order users as well. It's a paradox that people will pay more for a coffee than they will something that can help them substantially :)
- lucb1e 10y ago
  > There's a word for this, it's called 'subscription' : ) I avoided that word because it's the wrong word. A subscription implies I get something that normal users don't get. I don't want that. I hate services like Dropbox where the free users get benefits for installing it on their Android or from referrals (shitty stuff) and live off of the backs of paying users. Yet here I think it's much more akin to something like open source software, which is for the general good and is worth supporting for those who are able to afford it. Edit: There is no need to downvote the person, though. To me he seems to be contributing to the conversation.
  - edblarney 10y ago
    "A subscription implies I get something that normal users don't get." Fair enough - but there are very, very few value creating engines that can feasibly exist in such a context. Wikipedia is one. Stackoverflow probably could not. Someone mentioned it creates 'billions' in value, well, that's probably not too far off. There's nothing wrong with people paying for things. But to your point - it would be nice to find a way to do intelligent price discrimination. Students, hobbyists get it free, other entities can pay. etc.. I don't think that would work for Stackoverflow either because there is an inherent 'open-ness' that it needs ... that said, again, there's nothing wrong with paying for things.
mehrdada 10y ago
You can also buy a beer for folks who actually wrote an answer you used if you ever meet them IRL. I bet direct revenue from users would be negligible by the other revenue streams Stack Overflow Inc pursues.

amelius 10y ago

Upon reading the title, I thought they made it possible for users to make money on Stack Overflow.

ProAm 10y ago
They did with job placement potential.
- jimlawruk 10y ago
  Good point.

chollida1 10y ago

Interestingly, this article was flagged on the new page. I had to vouch for it. Weird that a previously flagged article made it to the top slot:)

subhobroto 10y ago

Thank you for submitting this on HN. I am really happy to see the site grow. > I am extremely protective of our users. You can ask anyone who works here. It’s is my very strong belief that we have a built up a trust with the community that is not easily earned and is impossible to replace. I want to work for a company that respects that trust, and I do. > How much money we make is a direct proxy for how much we are helping our users. We focus on maximizing how we help users in order to make a great business. Very few companies have done this successfully, and we take great pride in the fact that we’re one of them. I can see that they believe in this. As I wrote in my Quora answer https://www.quora.com/Is-Stack-Exchange-still-growing-in-2016/answer/Subhobroto-Sinha-1 https://www.quora.com/Is-Stack-Exchange-still-growing-in-201...: "They are gaining a lot of goodwill because they have committed to attach a high value to user experience over monetary gain (they learnt from sites in the past that lost their community because they plastered the site with ads. Needless to say, those sites eventually failed)" I remember other sites that did something similar but they got lost on the way and sold their users away and ultimately fell to disrepair because no one came back. I hope they continue to stay true to this course. > We don’t because if we don’t have anything even remotely good to show you, we shouldn’t. > And we don’t want to use an automated system that selects some ads for us. We looked at this. It didn’t allow us the control we required to maintain the level of quality we want to maintain. We have intentionally left a lot of money on the table. Sacrificing quality is not what we want to be known for. We believe there are better ways. In my limited experience with online advertising, one metric that almost all advertisers ask for are page views. I believe this is a fundamentally flawed metric. It can be gamed easily and ultimately targeting ads by page views lead to a suboptimal user experience. I would rather not show an ad than show an irrelevant ad. SE is bigger than just page views. It’s a successful ecosystem that has a vibrant community behind it that will grow and nurture itself. It's great to see that their management would rather not show an ad than show an irrelevant ad. > If you have time though, I’d appreciate if you told me why in the comments so I/we can do better. Introduce anonymous answers. I know of very talented developers who would like to answer questions without setting up (throwaway) accounts. Spam is a non-issue here unless spammers model answers like good answers (of which we have a pretty large set to train from)

jc4p 10y ago

dtnewman 10y ago

TLDR: They make money through ads, job postings and their enterprise product. The author believes that they can make money and serve users at the same time.

blowski 10y ago
In my opinion, they do a pretty good job of balancing the needs of users and advertisers.
- BipolarElsa 10y ago
  I ask a lot of question, and thus get banned from asking more... I wish they would have a "luxury" option for like 49.99 a year where students could ask like unlimited questions. Is this crazy?
  - finnh 10y ago
    How many questions does it take before you are banned?
    - Latty 10y ago
      There is no limit - the only issue is if your questions are marked as bad. If you ask questions that are answerable and work on StackOveflow, you can ask as many as you like.
    - 0xmohit 10y ago
      If they started banning users for asking questions or even for asking poor (read extremely poor) questions, then the overall traffic would reduce significantly.
      - Shog9 10y ago
        I wish. We've been doing this for 5-6 years now, and it hasn't. Quite honestly, if we could get rid of the worst 20% of questions instantly, life would be a lot better for the remaining 80%... But, identifying those 20% when often SO is their only option is... Brutally hard. I've seen the same person try to post variations on the same question dozens of times before finally getting around the quality checks... Only to have it sink like a rock because of course it was still unintelligible after all that.

brianzelip 10y ago

Great answer to a related FAQ in a post[0] linked from this article, about why !SO doesn't care about ad blockers: > The truth is: we don’t care if our users use ad blockers on Stack Overflow. More accurately: we hope that they won’t, but we understand that some people just don’t like ads. Our belief is that if someone doesn’t like them, and they won’t click on them, any impressions served to them will only annoy them-- plus, serving ads to people who won’t click on them harms campaign performance. [0] https://stackoverflow.blog/2016/02/why-stack-overflow-doesnt-care-about-ad-blockers/#we-don%E2%80%99t-care https://stackoverflow.blog/2016/02/why-stack-overflow-doesnt...!

Bartweiss 10y ago
And a great explanation in the piece of how SO works to serve only quality ads. Good enough, in fact, that I'm whitelisting Stack Overflow from my adblocker. I don't do it often, I don't even do it for sites I like; the reality is that anyone using an automated ad network is at significant risk of serving malware, and I don't approve even if I'm protected. I don't visit Forbes at all anymore, ever, because they broke their users basic faith in "see our ads, and we won't destroy your machine". But a promise to serve relevant, low-impact ads, chosen by actual humans? That's something I'm willing to support.
- arjie 10y ago
  Did you only do it today? 8 months after the announcement, because someone happened to mention it in a comments thread? Doesn't speak very much to that approach's effectiveness. Especially since you've got a strong opinion on it.
  - yuhong 10y ago
    The fun thing is that I think Reddit once used both types of ads. I don't think they do that anymore though.
- cerved 10y ago
  Just because an ad network is automated doesn't mean you can serve malware through ads. Just because an ad network uses manual bidding doesn't mean it's malware free.

vlunkr 10y ago

Another good article linked from this one: https://stackoverflow.blog/2016/02/why-stack-overflow-doesnt-care-about-ad-blockers/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2016/02/why-stack-overflow-doesnt.... Stack Overflow is IMO the site to look to if you want to do ads correctly. So many big sites have incredibly trashy ads, SO shows that they care to not subject their users to that junk.

criddell 10y ago
I'm actually surprised ads work at all on StackOverflow. I would have guessed that most of their visitors are blocking ads.
- nicky0 10y ago
  Most of the ads are served to non-logged-in visitors who come to specific question pages through a web search. SO actually shows you fewer ads the more reputation points you have.
  - criddell 10y ago
    I think I would expect logged-in users to be more likely to have whitelisted the site than random Google visitors.
    - nicky0 10y ago
      But there are a lot more of the random Google visitors than active participants. SO is effectively a machine for getting smart people to create specific, targeted searchable content to run ads against.
  - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
    What's the flow there for a user? They're researching an answer ... do they ignore the issue and run off and buy something? I sometime have poor focus but when you're problem solving it seems the least likely time to distract yourself with shopping. I did once follow a Google ad about 10 years ago, but in my defence I was just surfing cool tech and the image looked interesting. Of course I didn't buy anything, who lets advertisers tell them what to buy? I digress.

eanzenberg 10y ago

Re: 'Why we make money' Is it now shameful to make money, so you have to defend it when you do?

dbancajas 10y ago
yeah. it's crazy. it costs money to run the servers itself. We are lucky they haven't made the site subscription based or something.

jack9 10y ago

> And we don’t want to use an automated system that selects some ads for us. So they do direct deals mostly, which is antiquated and probably to preserve their branding as a "tech site". > Did you know we have a lot of unpaid inventory on Stack Overflow every month? This is what trying to guess your avails with direct ends up doing. Leaving inventory unmonetized. Typically, you get paid less for less of your inventory trying to do monthly manual trafficking. All they do is display, so it's rather silly to quibble about CPMs in the 25 cent range...until you look at the traffic and realize that translates to real money.

ocoster 10y ago
What you are missing is that there is a cost associated with monetizing the full inventory with automation. You lose control over what is being shown, you are diluting your brand and you are at risk of alienating your users. At Stack Overflow we are not willing to make this trade off.
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago
  Surely you can automate everything but keep manual curation?
- jack9 10y ago
  > What you are missing Automation costs are actually administrative costs (platform fees), which have recently increased via unmonetized opportunity cost models (opportunity being a specific technical term in advertising). SO is not fully or optimally monetizing, probably because they prefer to keep the old tech they are using and/or the staff that has been there since early days. It's also possible they want some dejour/nonstandard controls. Saying they are making an informed tradeoff is simply incorrect. Saying they are making a (unspecified) choice, then not really talking about that choice, is what the article skirts. Sub 10k/mo for platforms at 2 billion opps per day is AOL and SpotX. That schedule doesn't matter at the volume SO works with. Fees and Opp costs are not the issue with the unmonetized inventory.
Latty 10y ago
Except for all the crap about "targeted advertising", it turns out that if you run a site like StackOverflow, you can more accurately target adverts to your average user by curating the adverts than by letting some system try and guess based on whatever they have managed to sniff. More importantly, the automated stuff is a huge security risk, and will generally annoy your users when someone puts out something they shouldn't, even if it's not a security issue. Sure, they could saturate the pages with more crap adverts no one wants, and they would sell for less (because they would be less effective), and they'd piss off their user base. SO has long been one of the very, very few on my adblocking whitelist. I don't dislike adverts as a core idea, but 99% of advertising online is invasive, annoying and useless.

lordnacho 10y ago

So is it cash flow positive? I hope so, because it's hands down the most useful site for programmers. I even got the gold medal for using it every day for a long time.

marxidad 10y ago
They make over 10 million dollars a year.
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago
  Between 300 people cited elsewhere that's only $30k. Presumably they pay for hosting, facilities. Doesn't sound like it leaves a lot of pre-tax pay unless they're using primarily overseas workers in low-cost countries?
  - oblio 10y ago
    None of their locations seem to be that cheap, if you look at the remote workers. Not Silicon Valley expensive, but not working for peanuts either.
  - cjlm 10y ago
    $300k, surely?
    - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
      10,000,000 ÷ 300 = 1,000,000 ÷ 30 = 100,000 ÷ 3 ~ 33,333 (commas for grouping) Or 1e07/3e02 = 1e05/3.
      - cjlm 10y ago
        Whoops...

0xmohit 10y ago

Does somebody has a clue about what % of the revenues come from ads and jobs? I understand that there might be other sources too (documentation and such).

Alupis 10y ago

Perhaps it's time they consider paying Moderators for their time and effort. It doesn't need to be anything large, even a small stipend will suffice. Moderators are the real lifeblood of StackExchange. They spend countless hours ensuring their respective Sub Exchange hums along. Yes, it's a volunteer "job", but it's a job none-the-less - especially since once you become a Moderator, it's more-or-less expected you have certain responsibilities and obligations. Given StackExchange makes a pretty healthy profit off the efforts of the "volunteers", and given StackExchange is a for profit company, it seems fitting they should have to pay for the labor that creates their profit. Currently, StackExchange kicks back and rakes in money via various avenues, but then doesn't have to pay staff to actually manage the growing plethora of Sub Exchanges. We all give companies grief for underpaying or mis-classifying employees, but somehow everyone overlooks StackExchange. I believe it an accurate statement to say, StackExchange would not be a thing today, if it were not for the innumerable hours worked for free by a growing army of "volunteers".

prdonahue 10y ago
Are you a moderator?
- Alupis 10y ago
  > Are you a moderator? No, and have never been. I have no dog in that race - but as a long time Stack Exchange user, I witness these people's hard work every day.
collyw 10y ago
Overzealous moderators are the worst part about Stack Overflow.
Latty 10y ago
I mean, sure, but I'm not sure why you say '"volunteers"' - they are exactly volunteers. Yes, extracting labour for free from volunteers can be the sign of something shady, but with SE I don't really see that evil intent. Moderators not being staff means that the community has more say in how the sites function, which is a thing people want. It's hard - communities want to police themselves, not be dictated unto by a controlling body. As soon as you start paying the moderators, they are under your sway. I also don't think it'd be easy to create a fair remuneration system that didn't incentivise the wrong thing, or create pressure on moderators that they don't currently have.

dolguldur 10y ago

Stackoverflow is the prime example for how a company can generate tremenduous value without making that much money. It's difficult to estimate its contribution to the world economy quantitatively, but I'd definitely say billions, many many billions.

chubot 10y ago
How do you know they don't make that much money? I didn't see that anywhere in the blog post. I agree that they make an enormous contribution to the world economy. Joel really did knock it out of the park -- remember expertsexchange? His goal was to get rid of that and it worked.
- fredley 10y ago
  Or as Joel likes to call it 'that hyphenated site'
- codinghorror 10y ago
  Joel, eh? Think you might be forgetting someone in there, somewhere? ;)
  - ocoster 10y ago
    You may be gone, but not forgotten, never that, Jeff :)
  - mattmanser 10y ago
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but I always got the impression from the podcasts that while you both designed it, it was more you actually programming it. I could be mis-remembering after all this time! Didn't you quit your job and program it while Joel was still mainly focused on Fog Creek day-to-day?
    - codinghorror 10y ago
      Yes, it was Joel's famous "servant leadership". We brainstormed ideas once a week on weekly calls (which became the podcast) and he trusted me (and Geoff and Jarrod, the first two people at the company after the founders) to build Stack Overflow as we saw fit. Community feedback was a huge part of that feedback cycle once the beta was live.

overcast 10y ago

At this point, I have no desire to participate in or help stackoverflow. The attitudes there are such hostile, elitist garbage, where someone is incapable of asking a question, because it will instantly be closed by the mods. God forbid they are a newbie to the site. Responses essentially amount to go RTFM. This sums it up well. https://hackernoon.com/the-decline-of-stack-overflow-7cb69faa575d#.oyn9b1aoz https://hackernoon.com/the-decline-of-stack-overflow-7cb69fa...

maaaats 10y ago
Wow, what a hostile post. What would you think people would think of HN reading your stuff?
- overcast 10y ago
  This isn't my stuff. Though myself, and others share the same sentiment. Read the comments below the article.
sosborn 10y ago
> Responses essentially amount to go RTFM. Let's be honest, reading the docs should be everyone's first step before posting a question. So many questions follow the template of "I want to know how to do this but I don't want to put in any effort." The volume of those kinds of questions are what drove me away - not the moderation.
- EpicEng 10y ago
  And, on the flip side; people who do RTFM will only ask relatively esoteric questions looking for help on a difficult problem. Good luck getting any answers to that. It happens, but it's pretty rare. Everyone jumps on the latest "why is my hash map implementation crashing?" (It's a bad pointer) in the race for rep. I am still pretty highly ranked on SO (top 1%), but I haven't been active for nearly two years now.
  - bostik 10y ago

bluedino 10y ago

Ads. Of course. And over half their staff is marketing/sales. http://stackoverflow.com/company/team http://stackoverflow.com/company/team

Pica_soO 10y ago

Would it be thieving, if i made a NN-Crawler, that condensed the Stack overflow-Conversations into a query able chat bot?

ocoster 10y ago
Did you know that we provide the complete set of questions and answers (from all sites, including Stack Overflow)? No need to crawl anything. You can find it on the internet archive: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange https://archive.org/details/stackexchange
- aalear 10y ago
  And there's also the API - http://api.stackexchange.com http://api.stackexchange.com
  - ocoster 10y ago
    And the Data Explorer (use SQL in the browser to query the Stack Overflow database): http://data.stackoverflow.com http://data.stackoverflow.com
    - Pica_soO 10y ago
      Thanks, thats great..

weeblywoo 10y ago

Not very diverse, SO. Shame! Shame! Shame!

tedmiston 10y ago

> We are in the process of sending out an email now announcing Developer Story to the larger community in the hopes that we can help some percentage of developers. If that email is rejected, we’ll unsubscribe you. If you’re unresponsive to emails we send, we’ll unsubscribe you. If you mark it as spam, we’ll unsubscribe you. How great it would be if every site would subscribe to such high standards. Bravo, SO.

rbobby 10y ago
> If you mark it as spam, we’ll unsubscribe you. How would they know?
- skizm 10y ago
  They probably assume if you make as spam, you will also be unresponsive to the email. If you are responsive they can say that overrides the marking as spam action.
- clay_to_n 10y ago
  In the comments, they explain that Sendgrid gets notified of spam marks, and Sendgrid gives SO a webhook whenever someone marks as spam. So they then unsubscribe that user.
- breakingcups 10y ago
  You can include a header in your email message where, if a user marks a message as spam, Gmail / Hotmail / whatever will let you know.
  - tgb 10y ago
    Why do they do that? Seems great for this use-case but terrible information to give bad actors.
    - TheHegemon 10y ago
      Would make sense to prevent themselves to be marked as spam in the future.

mrfusion 10y ago

I'm so happy we have stack overflow. Do you guys remember experts exchange.com?

abraae 10y ago
That site made me wish I could set up a "exclude from search results forever" on Google.
- jnky 10y ago
  https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist-by-goo/nolijncfnkgaikbjbdaogikpmpbdcdef?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...
  - TorKlingberg 10y ago
    Chrome only, has be installed on each PC, not on mobile. Bleh.
- jeffasinger 10y ago
  I installed a firefox plugin to specifically remove those results from Google.
deleted 10y ago
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pbhjpbhj 10y ago
It was pretty good and usually useful IME until they got greedy and hid the content from all but subscribers. It made me quite angry when they locked up my content. I switched to posting solutions on my blog then. Now I tend to stick stuff on Stack rather than blog it.

motoford 10y ago

I always thought they earned a nickel for every time they closed a question as "not constructive"

dep_b 10y ago

I like Stack Overflow, but I seriously don't know how all these answers end up there. I think about 80% of all my questions are answered sooner or later by myself. And some of them are quite massively upvoted too afterwards, so they weren't always niche problems.

deleted 10y ago

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cdnsteve 10y ago

A reminder that you don't need to use the latest or fanciest tech stack to achieve success in business. In the case of SO, boring wins, it's proven and seems like it allows them to focus on their product and to create new value for users.

dudeget 10y ago
what's their stack?
- ocoster 10y ago
  Web Server: IIS, Database: SQL Server, Web framework (backend): ASP.NET/MVC. Additionally: Redis, Elasticsearch, HAProxy (all on Linux). jQuery on the front end (with some TypeScript) and LESS -> CSS.
- Nick-Craver 10y ago
  If curious, I did a post on that a while back. I'm settling into a new house and will pick this series back up soon. https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-architecture-2016-edition/ https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar...

DeBraid 10y ago

tldr: Display Ads and Talent. > We help companies build their brand and source technical talent through our business products: Display Ads and Talent.

chiph 10y ago

> Every new email, except for transactional emails like “Forgot your password?”, sent through this system will have three links at the bottom: a one-click unsubscribe, a direct link to manage all categories, and feedback. It's terrific that they're doing this. The first two links are what the CAN-SPAM Act requires. The "feedback" link is not a result of complying with CAN-SPAM, but is a good idea for any online business. https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can...

greggman 10y ago

I would pay to get bugs fixed. The snippet editor has been broken for about 6 months. Funny that a site about code would have a buggy code editor.

Hydraulix989 10y ago

What do you think is the purpose of this piece? Seems like it came straight from PR land to me.

otar 10y ago

I have tweeted about SO several minutes ago before I discovered this topic on HN: https://twitter.com/otarch/status/798647799411675136 https://twitter.com/otarch/status/798647799411675136 StackOverflow is so powerful resource on the Internet, alongside with Wikipedia and Internet Archive. I wish I could donate two ways: 1) Yearly or monthly (subscription) donations, like on Wikipedia 2) I would be extremely happy to donate authors of some great, life-saving answers. I feel so excited when I find the right answer after searching a solution for hours. Just shut up and take my money!

skolsuper 10y ago
SO intentionally does not want to integrate payment of any kind for answerers because of Motivation Crowding Theory[1], the idea that intrinsic motivations like altruism can be crowded out by extrinsic motivations like profit, which is problematic because intrinsic motivation is generally stronger and effective for longer than extrinsic motivation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation_crowding_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation_crowding_theory

cerved 10y ago

It's great you are making money. If only there wasn't so many terrible answers ranking no.1 on Google.. :-/

jorgec 10y ago

I love Stack Overflow but its community is right now poisonous that i don't want to participate anymore but to be a lurker like many others. My 2cents.

kevin_thibedeau 10y ago

Seeing their salary calculator makes me depressed what a 1-year experience 1x developer in the NYC metro makes.

pcurve 10y ago
Consider how depressed developer salary is in Japan, I'm surprised how well Stackover pays... I'm guessing their Japanese office is tiny.

deleted 10y ago

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latchkey 10y ago

I paid a good amount of money for the jobs listings because it is Stack Overflow. The sales person was very persistent and available while the negotiations were happening to use their service (yes, you can get discounts). As soon as I paid, she disappeared and was never to be heard from again. No follow up at all. I also got zero good jobs references for an extremely profitable tech business in the heart of downtown financial district in San Francisco. All the people who applied were basically spam and that wasn't any better than just posting on LinkedIn or HN for free. Not really a complaint, just one small data point to consider.

shiftoutbox 10y ago

We don't ; vc baby !!