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Reading through the comments on Meta StackOverflow to the question, two things become really obvious to me. 1. I'm so used to the hyper-insightful Hacker News
by silverbax88 16y ago
Reading through the comments on Meta StackOverflow to the question, two things become really obvious to me.
1. I'm so used to the hyper-insightful Hacker News business users that the many of the SO responses seem very idealistic. In other words, I get the impression that a lot of them are coders who think the world 'should work a certain way' but have no real business experience.
2. SO isn't making much money and isn't too keen on telling what their business model, if there is one, actually is.
- michaelbuckbee 16y agoAs to your point number 2, the top upvoted answer to that question is by one of the founders who clearly states the three ways that they are making money.
- silverbax88 16y agoYes, he says, 'here's how we bring in revenue, and you should be able to do the math'. I'd say he avoided the actual question rather deftly, which is how SO is going to scale from a traffic and ad site to a site that brings in the kind of money that VC's want.
- michaelbuckbee 16y agoI think there is a real mistake in all of this discussion in conflating StackOverflow and StackExchange. What StackOverflow did to Experts-exchange, StackExchange is trying to do to Demand Media/eHow, and they seem to be trying to do it the same way by building a better product and providing better answers.
- patio11 16y agoStackExchange is trying to do to Demand Media/eHow Not quite. They're pretty big on focusing only on topics where meaningful questions have right answers, as opposed to (I swear this is an actual eHow page) How To Pour Water Into A Glass.
- Poiesis 16y agoYou know, just last night I just looked up "how to flip an egg" and ended up reading a Wikihow article. I can flip pancakes great sans spatula, you see, but doing a decent egg over easy continues to elude me. I could see someone trying to look up tricks to pouring water without spilling it, maybe. Never thought I'd say that, though.
- hvs 16y agoThere's almost always a Youtube video for things like that. It's actually pretty impressive how many useful "how-to" videos there are on there.