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I mean, their use of SO's content may be legal but it doesn't mean they aren't dicks. It's a wholesale ripoff of another site's content that adds absolutely no
by danilocampos 16y ago
I mean, their use of SO's content may be legal but it doesn't mean they aren't dicks. It's a wholesale ripoff of another site's content that adds absolutely no value to anyone but the publishers themselves. It inconveniences users and it harms the good work of Stack Overflow by robbing them of rankings they deserve.
In the same way I can call someone's mother bad names because it isn't illegal, it doesn't mean I should do it, because I can follow the letter of the law 100% and still be an asshole. Overall, my policy is that it's best not to be an asshole and it annoys me when others can't share that basic ethos.
- steveklabnik 16y agoTruth. That's why I'm waflling, on one side, it sucks that they're solely copying things. This is never something that I'd personally do. That said, you could make an argument that the value they're adding is SEO and promotion, it's pretty impressive to be able to out-rank SO...
- _delirium 16y agoThe same happens with Wikipedia as well. It's free-content, because that's sort of the point of the project. And reusing that content is great and encouraged. But just rehosting the exact contents of en.wikipedia.org with ads slapped on is a bit lame. Legal, but it's not any sort of interesting reuse, just adding more noise to the internet.
- jacquesm 16y agoWikipedia gets so much traffic from google that the harm there is minimal compared to what's happening to stackoverflow.