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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

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
For my own curiosity, when you mean anonymous answers do you mean by people who don't have accounts on our platform at all, or do you mean people who already have accounts disconnecting their persona from a specific answer?
- subhobroto 10y ago
  You got it in the latter (former would be even better). Explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12961447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12961447
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RHSeeger 10y ago
> Introduce anonymous answers. Or, if you are worried about spam, you could allow signed in users to "post a question|answer anonymously". This would not allow users to see who posted the question, but would allow things like statistics (to track spammers and the like).
wool_gather 10y ago
Spam has a lot of problem potential. Dodging spam when you're looking for answers is like jumping in a swimming hole where someone dumped a garbage bag of empty milk containers, lettuce leaves, coffee grounds, plastic wrap... Frankly, it's just another kind of advertisement, and I think it's much worse than the official kind, whose site-killing power you mention. >Spam is a non-issue here unless spammers model answers like good answers Many people give answers broad latitude as far as "goodness". Users can also be easily confused: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/337843/review-audit-failure-and-no-i-dont-understand http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/337843/review-audit-..., and even moderators are sometimes inclined towards leniency: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/333722/how-is-this-question-not-spam/333764 http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/333722/how-is-this-q... A multi-layered system, starting with some filtering right at the beginning, is, I think, the best way to keep illicit ads under control. Stack Overflow has very high value as a target for spammers and very low amounts of spam compared to that value; I'd really like it to stay that way. I hate having to register at every new site, too, but I don't think it's entirely unreasonable if you're actually trying to post.

jc4p 10y ago

For my own curiosity, when you mean anonymous answers do you mean by people who don't have accounts on our platform at all, or do you mean people who already have accounts disconnecting their persona from a specific answer?

subhobroto 10y ago
You got it in the latter (former would be even better). Explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12961447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12961447

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RHSeeger 10y ago

> Introduce anonymous answers. Or, if you are worried about spam, you could allow signed in users to "post a question|answer anonymously". This would not allow users to see who posted the question, but would allow things like statistics (to track spammers and the like).

wool_gather 10y ago

Spam has a lot of problem potential. Dodging spam when you're looking for answers is like jumping in a swimming hole where someone dumped a garbage bag of empty milk containers, lettuce leaves, coffee grounds, plastic wrap... Frankly, it's just another kind of advertisement, and I think it's much worse than the official kind, whose site-killing power you mention. >Spam is a non-issue here unless spammers model answers like good answers Many people give answers broad latitude as far as "goodness". Users can also be easily confused: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/337843/review-audit-failure-and-no-i-dont-understand http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/337843/review-audit-..., and even moderators are sometimes inclined towards leniency: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/333722/how-is-this-question-not-spam/333764 http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/333722/how-is-this-q... A multi-layered system, starting with some filtering right at the beginning, is, I think, the best way to keep illicit ads under control. Stack Overflow has very high value as a target for spammers and very low amounts of spam compared to that value; I'd really like it to stay that way. I hate having to register at every new site, too, but I don't think it's entirely unreasonable if you're actually trying to post.