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Their business model conflicts with what would serve users best. It once was a place where I would trust answers, now I have to search multiple times, scroll t
by matt_s 5y ago
Their business model conflicts with what would serve users best. It once was a place where I would trust answers, now I have to search multiple times, scroll through many results to find relevant answers.
Having massive amounts of questions gets more surface area for ads but a lot of programming Q&A that is a few years out of date is mostly useless. API's change, things become deprecated or better solutions emerge.
They need to cull massive amounts of content for it to be more helpful but that would likely drop revenue.
- mooreds 5y agoI wasn't able to find a detailed breakdown of their revenue, though https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2020/07/28/stack-overflow-qa-website-raises-85-million-series-e/?sh=10e3b4a45752 https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2020/07/28/stack-ove... indicates that Teams is responsible for 1/3 of it. Is it the ads you object to?
- matt_s 5y agoThe ad revenue model requires a lot of SEO friendly pages to be in search indexes. I don't mind ads or that model in general. A lot of the answers on pages are outdated but they have no incentive to cleanup old content if its going to affect their bottom line because they will have less indexed pages. This means I get much more noise when trying to find something so I go elsewhere.
- mooreds 5y agoBut won't that be self correcting if people bounce away from old (less useful) content? That would negatively affect SEO, I'd think.