5 ms·

I think the worst culprits are the ones that skim StackOverflow questions and rehash them into their own supposed original "question and answer" site

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
bartl 16y ago
Jeff Atwood discusses this in his most recent Coding Horror blog post (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/01/trouble-in-the-house-of-google.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/01/trouble-in-the-hous...), in which he states that he doesn't really mind people copying StackOverflow questions (and answers), but that he does mind that the copies get a higher Google ranking than the original.
- retube 16y ago
  How does that happen though? efreedom must be doing something special with SEO to get higher than SO given that SO must have huge page rank score.
  - iuytgyuikoiuy 16y ago
    Pagerank is based on number/quality of links. Nobody links to an SO question, except perhaps mentioning it in a blog post. Scrapping sites create lots of links to the question, even if they are low quality ones
    - retube 16y ago
      Yeah but does anyone link to efreedom question pages? And SO as a whole must have way more inbounds than efreedom, surely?
ergo98 16y ago
What do you think most StackOverflow answers are? It's a karma-paid labor pool where you can post questions and a lot of under-employed people will rush out and do the necessary Google searches, collating and slightly rewriting the results to yield the most votes. Everyone is ripping off someone's content. And just to be accurate here, SO content is creative commons (created by the community). Are those just cheap words?
- nervechannel 16y ago
  What do you think most StackOverflow answers are? It's a karma-paid labor pool ... said the comment on Hacker News, earning the poster 3 points so far.
  - ergo98 16y ago
    2 points. I started at one. I desperately hope for more, though, as this is going to give me my big break. I'm trying to earn six more trophies, a ribbon, and link this profile on my resume.
- bigfudge 16y ago
  Except that thare are some genuinely useful compilations on SO which you don't get elsewhere, e.g.: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/72394/what-should-a-developer-know-before-building-a-public-web-site http://stackoverflow.com/questions/72394/what-should-a-devel... These add significant value to the original content IMO
  - ergo98 16y ago
    Of course there are. It is a community and discussions can be interesting. However most of the time that I and most people come across SO it's the top search hit for a technical question. The answers are seldom unique, but instead are usually pulled almost word for word from the online manual for the same. That is overwhelmingly the value of SO -- it benefits by collecting aggregated content from all over the web. It is, hilariously, by design exactly what many in here are complaining about. In that case instead of an automated process it's a mechanical turk. Hey I don't care because it gets me my answer, but I can see the hilarious paradox in some of the complaints. I was once searching on a problem -- one that I had faced years earlier but had then forgotten -- and the top link was a SO QA. The answer sounded oddly familiar, when I remembered that it was actually from a blog entry I had posted two years prior.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

bartl 16y ago

Jeff Atwood discusses this in his most recent Coding Horror blog post (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/01/trouble-in-the-house-of-google.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/01/trouble-in-the-hous...), in which he states that he doesn't really mind people copying StackOverflow questions (and answers), but that he does mind that the copies get a higher Google ranking than the original.

retube 16y ago
How does that happen though? efreedom must be doing something special with SEO to get higher than SO given that SO must have huge page rank score.
- iuytgyuikoiuy 16y ago
  Pagerank is based on number/quality of links. Nobody links to an SO question, except perhaps mentioning it in a blog post. Scrapping sites create lots of links to the question, even if they are low quality ones
  - retube 16y ago
    Yeah but does anyone link to efreedom question pages? And SO as a whole must have way more inbounds than efreedom, surely?

ergo98 16y ago

What do you think most StackOverflow answers are? It's a karma-paid labor pool where you can post questions and a lot of under-employed people will rush out and do the necessary Google searches, collating and slightly rewriting the results to yield the most votes. Everyone is ripping off someone's content. And just to be accurate here, SO content is creative commons (created by the community). Are those just cheap words?

nervechannel 16y ago
What do you think most StackOverflow answers are? It's a karma-paid labor pool ... said the comment on Hacker News, earning the poster 3 points so far.
- ergo98 16y ago
  2 points. I started at one. I desperately hope for more, though, as this is going to give me my big break. I'm trying to earn six more trophies, a ribbon, and link this profile on my resume.
bigfudge 16y ago
Except that thare are some genuinely useful compilations on SO which you don't get elsewhere, e.g.: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/72394/what-should-a-developer-know-before-building-a-public-web-site http://stackoverflow.com/questions/72394/what-should-a-devel... These add significant value to the original content IMO
- ergo98 16y ago
  Of course there are. It is a community and discussions can be interesting. However most of the time that I and most people come across SO it's the top search hit for a technical question. The answers are seldom unique, but instead are usually pulled almost word for word from the online manual for the same. That is overwhelmingly the value of SO -- it benefits by collecting aggregated content from all over the web. It is, hilariously, by design exactly what many in here are complaining about. In that case instead of an automated process it's a mechanical turk. Hey I don't care because it gets me my answer, but I can see the hilarious paradox in some of the complaints. I was once searching on a problem -- one that I had faced years earlier but had then forgotten -- and the top link was a SO QA. The answer sounded oddly familiar, when I remembered that it was actually from a blog entry I had posted two years prior.