“SO has probably added billions of dollars of value to the world in increased programmer productivity.” No: the voluntary contributions of many skilled program

“SO has probably added billions of dollars of value to the world in increased programmer productivity.” No: the voluntary contributions of many skilled programmers, mediated by a website, has increased programmer productivity. Stack Overflow has captured and exploited some of the value created, and the contributors have not been paid. Skill needed to create SO / Expertise embodied in content provided for free to SO = approx zero. Running a big site like SO is hard, but it’s trivial compared to the expertise required to write the content on SO from scratch.