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It’s clear now that Stack Overflow was a bait-and-switch play: 1. get the high quality content through gamification of writing answers and moderating the site
by goatinaboat 7y ago
It’s clear now that Stack Overflow was a bait-and-switch play:
1. get the high quality content through gamification of writing answers and moderating the site with points and badges
2. once a critical mass of content was captured and the competition eliminated, tell the original creators they were no longer welcome
3. profit with a new, ad-friendly userbase
- lioeters 7y ago"Bait-and-switch" implies an intentional plan from the beginning. What I suspect typically happens is that a company starts with good (or neutral) intentions, grows a community that trusts them. Then it becomes profitable, and a new set of C-levels and managers swoop in with a completely different set of values, to exploit and squeeze more profit out of the community they never contributed to building.
- captainbland 7y agoSure but the original intention makes no difference to the user base, particularly those who've put in a lot of time and effort for little reward other than community kudos. I suppose there's a deeper problem of the difficulty of ethical profitability over the long term. We seem to see this same pattern again and again with startups that seem to grow out of their good intentions, particularly with social media or otherwise community driven websites.