As a counter-argument (yes, I’m the same person): I once spent 50 hours on a small website around some technical search terms with lackluster results. Two of th

As a counter-argument (yes, I’m the same person): I once spent 50 hours on a small website around some technical search terms with lackluster results. Two of the guides made it to Google’s front page, and I got about 100,000 hits across 4 years. Success, in a sense. I’d hoped to make a few dollars with an ebook or something, but couldn’t get conversions. Fine, I mentally recategorized my time investment as charity work (I’ve certainly benefited from others’ technical posts). But when a Wordpress upgrade broke the site, I just couldn’t justify the time to fix it, and the next 100,000 searchers won’t get an answer, which I feel bad about. It’s all small potatoes, but I wonder what we’re all missing when there is so little incentive (and some ongoing cost) to sharing knowledge.