There are lots of lessons here. Basically EE acted with hubris because they saw themselves as the only game in town. SO came along and quickly dethroned them in

There are lots of lessons here. Basically EE acted with hubris because they saw themselves as the only game in town. SO came along and quickly dethroned them in the programming arena (EE has a somewhat broader base than that). Charging people for user-generated content is a shortsighted and doomed business model. What's more it's sleazy. I'm reminded of the whole CDDB/Gracenote fiasco from years ago. Chris Dixon wrote a great blog post about this [1]. EE in this context (or the "evil hyphen site" as Joel calls it) is acting as an extractor. They're simply putting up a barrier and charging a toll. Compare this to companies like Dropbox and Evernote. These companies provide pretty amazing services (particularly Dropbox) for free. I've seen many people say they pay for Dropbox not because they need the space but because they want to give them money for their amazing services. These companies are builders. And let's not forget that EE earned a lot of bad will by once being free like SO and switching to this hideous pseud-paywall monstrosity. Treat your users like crap and they go elsewhere. Quelle surprise. [1]: http://cdixon.org/2010/06/19/builders-and-extractors/ http://cdixon.org/2010/06/19/builders-and-extractors/