13 ms·

StackOverflow

212 points by Garbage 15y ago

ColdAsIce 15y ago
Hey Greg! Great talks at JFokus a few weeks back, keep it up!
recoiledsnake 15y ago
Lets say you go to a dance club because people come there to hangout. Is the discotheque ripping you off by not paying for making their dance club better? Are you getting zero value for it? Are their expenses zero for taking the effort to make it a good experience? And StackOverflow does not even charge an entry fee. I believe almost everyone on that site received more value from it than they put in. The amount of time saved by SO is ridiculous and was painfully obvious before the Panda update to Google which demoted the clones in the search results. StackOverflow is the result of tons of hard work on both the technology and the community by the founders and employees. The site scales very well inspite of super heavy traffic and the UI/UX provide a great experience. In fact, the site and their blog posts serve as a poster child for .NET based startups while using OSS software like Redis. Is it really the end of the world if they show an ad or two? The sense of entitlement in the article is just too much for me to bear. The author can take the CC licensed content and go build a Wikipedia style site for all SO cares and instantly get a free bootstrap of millions of quality questions and answers. I think they will actually be happy if it's a better place than SO, because they set out with the aim of making the status quo better for programmers all around the globe and succeeded wildly and raised the bar pretty high.
krohrbaugh 15y ago
The author's main point is that Expert's Exchange (EE) was very similar to StackOverflow (SO) until they needed to push up the S-curve from a profitability perspective. It's a valid concern since SO has relied on organic growth to fuel the necessary returns in order to sustain its current business model and then, more recently, attract VC investment. What the author doesn't mention is what makes SO slightly different. One is the licensing of the content, which the founders never fail to point out (and has already been rehashed here by several SO defenders). This is hand-waving, since they couldn't have achieved early success to drive organic growth without this license in place (this isn't the first time EE has been compared to SO). The other more interesting difference is the StackExchange (SE) platform and accompanying business model, which basically seeks to expand into an unending array of fields and topics. SO & SE are likely to continue being pleasant to use, as long as the StackExchange strategy is working and growth can come from the platform extension. Should that strategy fail, SO will need a growth strategy that provides the returns VCs expect and the company may be forced into some inconvenient (to users) "monetization" decisions. Essentially, when you're a for-profit company, it's easy to "do no evil" when you're rapidly growing organically. EE is only one such example, it's easy to come up with dozens of others: About.com, Mahalo, Digg, SourceForge, Google, Ben & Jerry's, etc. Unless it's a non-profit or maybe one of those new B-Corps, history provides much more support for skeptics. After all, company leaders aren't just acting out of greed, they are legally obligated to do what is best for shareholders. That said, let's hope Mr. Spolsky hasn't forgotten about his rant on platform providers who don't realize they are platform providers (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Platforms.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Platforms.html). He should be able to make the case that treating users (which are like developers in a traditional software platform) fairly will drive more long-term shareholder value than tactics employed by those that came before SO. Only time will tell.
- yuhong 15y ago
  There is a reason why Google IPOed using dual class stock.
instakill 15y ago
I very much agree with Joel in that SO is about, at least to me, acting as some kind of centralized destination where I know that somebody has had the same problem I'm currently experiencing, has asked it before, and has been given an answer or a few by the community. If no such question has been asked, I'll ask it because chances are somebody else will want to ask it down the line. SO is unlikely EE in that anyone in the community answers a question, and popular ones generally become community wiki answers, and I know the former to be true because after much learning, I (as a self-perceived noob) started answering quite a few questions and have built up a reputation. Do I think I wasted time in doing so? Of course not, I've helped others and I've helped keep the Rails community noob friendly. That and I can show off my earned reputation to any future potential employers.
smsm42 15y ago
Disclosure upfront: I'm an SO fanboy. I used EE back at its glory days, and I can say there's a world of difference between EE and SO. EE felt as it was a site built to make money, and the particular vehicle they used is to host questions and answers. SO feels as a site built to create questions&answers community, and they are making money out of it. There's a subtle difference about it, but it felt throughout the site - how it was designed, how workflows were organized, etc. Of course, I might be wrong and SO founders may be just evil geniuses tricking myself and everybody else, but the feeling is distinctly different from EE. Of course, SO also has much superior engine, user interface and benefit of years of experience that EE didn't have back then.
pbreit 15y ago
This article is terrible. First, it assumes no learning since the EE days. Second, comparisons to EE are weak (I do't remember EE ever being good). Third, he picked a lousy target (StackOverflow) given that FogCreek is well-known for having extreme patience, especially as it relates to commercialization. Finally, he leaves out the primary business: the StackExchange software being offered to customers to create other verticals.
rabc 15y ago
"Hey, look! They're making money with my knowledge! How they dare to do that?" Welcome to real world.
- qwe123_troll 15y ago
  Barnum, that great scholar of suckers, said it better.
  - h_r 15y ago
    I don't get this attitude toward SO. Most of the people who go there get the answers they seek, including experts with questions outside their domain of expertise. I hear all sorts of people fretting about how to give back to the community to make their lives more meaningful. Isn't this an ideal win/win?
    - batista 15y ago
      Well, check the article again. You had that win/win situation with experts-exchange too. Then they baited and switched upon their users, putting up a paywall.
      - ceejayoz 15y ago
        > Then they baited and switched upon their users, putting up a paywall. Which StackOverflow's Creative Commons license and public data dumps make very difficult to implement.
        qwe123_troll 15y ago
        There's no value in SO's database of questions and answers, they might as well give it away under whatever liberal license they want. The real business value of SO is the engaged ("community") web traffic it receives. ("Community" == "higher ad CPM" and "highly contextual advertising" in business terms.)
AndrewHampton 15y ago
Although one key difference is that EE kept the IP for all the user generated content, but all SO content is licensed under Creative Commons. http://stackoverflow.com/faq#editing http://stackoverflow.com/faq#editing
- gizzlon 15y ago
  Exactly.. Of course it won't be super-easy to replace SO but at least the information is available. They even post data dumps.. cool =) If they are cynical, they might change license for new content after the community has gained enough traction. I'm not convinced people would stop using SO if they did. http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/
  - Piskvorrr 15y ago
    Important point: new content. It is not possible to retroactively change the CC license used to a more restrictive one ("I know you fully legally downloaded the last data dump, but could you delete your copy? Pretty please?"). So, license change -> major drop in participation as many will go elsewhere bringing with them SO's content up to that point -> might as well close the thing down, killing the golden goose and whatnot. (btw, 1.there are worries that the community has already gained too much traction and the site's decline is imminent, as it'll surely be swamped with high-noise Q&A; and 2. speaking for myself, I'd surely quit if a restrictive license were put in place, there are many such users)
- bad_user 15y ago
  I think Stack Overflow will be better in the long run. For instance I don't mind ads that are relevant to me, like book recommendations. I also wouldn't mind complementary services related to Stack Overflow. There are more options available right now than in the early 2000 that could earn them revenue without upsetting the community.
  - tucson 15y ago
    yes, but how can the need for ROI (on the $millions invested) not hurt the current user experience?
zvrba 15y ago
SO has recently been flooded by people who create an account and post questions in the "fix my problem" style, often also pasting a bunch of their defunct code. There are also questions that would be more appropriate for rent-a-coder. All in all, I'm getting annoyed and considering to leave the community.
- lambda 15y ago
  Yeah, there are bad questions. Always have been, always will be. Sometimes, I take the time to explain to people how to make their question better (reduce the code down to a minimal example, and explain what you've already tried being the two most important pieces of advice). Sometimes I just downvote or vote to close if it's bad enough. You have the freedom to chose the questions that you pay attention to. If you're feeling burned out by bad questions, just skip them and keep looking for good ones; or go elsewhere and do something else for a while.
- shaggyfrog 15y ago
  If you don't have enough rep yet to vote-to-close yourself, flag 'em for attention, and the rest of us will bring down the Close Hammer.
- spolsky 15y ago
  "Fix my code" questions are considered "too localized" and should be closed as such.
  - zvrba 15y ago
    I dare suggesting that this is a larger problem and trying to close individual questions is not a scalable approach.
- Piskvorrr 15y ago
  Yup. As recently as 2008, in fact ;) It's just a question of scale - the community gets larger, so you get more of everything.
AshleysBrain 15y ago
EE always had a dubious way of trying to game Google search results: have a huge advert at the top making the content you're after look blocked, followed by tonnes of filler content, then if you scrolled a looooong way to the bottom there's the content in tiny text. So Google sees the content but most humans don't. That always annoyed me sufficiently to block all EE results from search and just use SO. SO have always stated they're trying to be helpful to searchers and make the internet better. IMO it's no wonder they thoroughly beat EE and I'd think twice about trying to bring anything like EE back...
- davorak 15y ago
  EE only had the at content at the end of the human reachable page because google was going to stop listing pages that had content only for the robot. Or at least that is what I remember happening.
  - recursive 15y ago
    And at least at some point, it was only there if you had a google referer header. Navigating directly to the page in question wouldn't show you the answers at all.
  - calloc 15y ago
    Yeah, and you only get the content if you visit from Google and not go the URL directly.
spolsky 15y ago
Co-founder of Stack Overflow, here. A lot of the people who were involved in some way in Experts-Exchange don't understand Stack Overflow. The basic value flow of EE is that "experts" provide valuable "answers" for novices with questions. In that equation there's one person asking a question and one person writing an answer. Stack Overflow recognizes that for every person who asks a question, 100 - 10,000 people will type that same question into Google and find an answer that has already been written. In our equation, we are a community of people writing answers that will be read by hundreds or thousands of people. Ours is a project more like wikipedia -- collaboratively creating a resource for the Internet at large. Because that resource is provided by the community, it belongs to the community. That's why our data is freely available and licensed under creative commons. We did this specifically because of the negative experience we had with EE taking a community-generated resource and deciding to slap a paywall around it. The attitude of many EE contributors, like Greg Young who calculates that he "worked" for half a year for free, is not shared by the 60,000 people who write answers on SO every month. When you talk to them you realize that on Stack Overflow, answering questions is about learning. It's about creating a permanent artifact to make the Internet better. It's about helping someone solve a problem in five minutes that would have taken them hours to solve on their own. It's not about working for free. As soon as EE introduced the concept of money they forced everybody to think of their work on EE as just that -- work.
- ridruejo 15y ago
  At some point Stack Overflow may turn 'evil' but I personally have received a lot of value out of the site and I am willing to give it the benefit of the doubt that will be able to come up with a business model that will not alienate users and contributors. I personally feel a little bit more concerned with the changes being introduced by Quora (the point currency stuff) than what Joel and the rest of the team has done with Stack Overflow so far.
  - derpapst 15y ago
    Exactly. And even if SO goes evil some day: one cannot point out the fact often enough how cool it was that SO shared the user generated data. We at TwoToReal.com benefit a lot from it (http://twotoreal.com/site/credits/ http://twotoreal.com/site/credits/)!
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
chrisaycock 15y ago
> The idea of the business model is to pay people in imaginary currency and sell what they do for real currency. That "imaginary" currency has paid off for me. I got my most recent job through Stack Overflow.
- NickLarsen 15y ago
  We're happy to hear you got your job with a little help from us! If anyone else would like an invite to our careers site, you can use this link for an invite. http://bit.ly/A4CB1B http://bit.ly/A4CB1B Additionally we are actually hiring people to join the careers team right now, http://bit.ly/xXXewd http://bit.ly/xXXewd <- developers, and http://bit.ly/xthTi9 http://bit.ly/xthTi9 <- product manager. I am curious how your Stack Overflow activity was used in the hiring process. Would you mind sharing?
  - chrisaycock 15y ago
    > I am curious how your Stack Overflow activity was used in the hiring process. Would you mind sharing? I searched on the Careers 2.0 site and applied to a few firms that looked interesting. For one particular firm, my SO profile acted as my "code sample". I got the offer within a few weeks and have been happy ever since. I'll note that most of the firms that advertised on your Careers site were very serious about software quality. The signal-to-noise of excellent companies was far beyond what I've traditionally gotten through a head hunter. I suspect that's because any hiring manager who actually knows what SO is has probably had tons of hands-on experience with coding.
- rogerbinns 15y ago
  > That "imaginary" currency ... The currency that you get paid with on SO, Github, mailing lists, open source software etc is reputation. In many circumstances (eg getting a job) it is far more valuable than real currency.
lukev 15y ago
This is roughly analogous to claiming that the iPad won't work because resistive touch tablets didn't take off.
telent 15y ago
Here's a rather less paranoid article that's (partly) about SO. http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2012/02/29/Undocumentedness http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2012/02/29/Undocument... Seriously, given that the data is freely available and for as long as it remains so, "OMG you're making money from my knowledge how dare you you cad" is about as valid a complaint as it would be if levelled at any of the ISPs in days of yore that ran Usenet servers. And it's definitely saved me more time (a factor of 100 - 10,000? I have no idea) than I've ever given back to it
- michaelmior 15y ago
  I think you nailed it. I try to answer questions on SO when I have spare time. But that's mostly because of the massive value I've gained from the site. Most of the time it's not even asking questions, but looking at great answers to questions that have already been asked. If I continue to get the same value from SO, I'm happy to keep answering questions where I can and they're free to profit off that in any way they choose as long as everything remains public.
SideburnsOfDoom 15y ago
> The whole point here is to make as much money as possible. If the goal were to build up community you wouldn’t need to set them up as a centralized broker of the information, it would be distributed I don't think that he totally gets StackOverflow. SO has demonstrated to my satisfaction that: 1) they care about other things besides money. Sure money pays the bills, but if you do it right, being rich and famous is just a by-product to the main accomplishment. 2) SO works far better at getting stuff done in the technical QA space than any "distributed" model so far tried.
lukejduncan 15y ago
Maybe this was before my time, but was experts-exchange ever anything more than SEO spam with no content?
- RegEx 15y ago
  It took me way too long to realize this, but there were actually answers below the huge wall of links on E-E pages!
  - Piskvorrr 15y ago
    This was not implemented until Google has temporarily kicked them off the indexes for black-hat SEO back in 2008, IIRC. Before that, the answers were not physically present on the page served to humans, but they were on the page that was served to Googlebot. This is called "content cloaking" and is punishable by a Google-ban (which takes at least weeks to get reversed).
- nas 15y ago
  I think at first they showed answers. Later they only showed answers to GoogleBot and tried to get you to jump through hoops to see them. Finally, Google smacked them down and they implemented a tricky system where you had to scroll and long way to see the answers. The site was designed to try to get you to sign-up or pay to see answers. Overall it was a sleazy site, IMHO. Occasionally I would find useful answers there but eventually I just blacklisted them from my Google results. StackOverflow is miles better than EE ever was.
- jasonkester 15y ago
  Sure. Early on, it was a scraper that pulled down usenet content and rebranded it as its own with ads over the top. I first found them via a Google search on my own name, to discover that in addition to comp.sci.*, I'd also been answering questions there.
  - Nick_C 15y ago
    Yep, same here. Sort of amusing to see some historical revisionism going on here from the E-E people. I don't doubt that there were some genuine contributors, but claiming other's hard work as their own tainted E-E's brand for me. P.S. For the young 'uns, Google Groups isn't. It is usenet re-branded. Google is now doing the same thing!
apetresc 15y ago
If this guy's writing is indicative of the quality of EE "experts"' prose, then I'm even less surprised that place went down.
yannis 15y ago
I think spolsky hit the nail on the head with "answering questions is about learning". If I profit from it and the site owners profit from it as well, so be it. This is a very rare case of win-win.
peeters 15y ago
20k+ rep SO user here. Early on, reputation was an incentive to answer a lot of questions because with it came graduated permissions. At 20k, there is no further incentive besides vanity. So reputation isn't an incentive for me. Has that stopped me from answering questions? Absolutely not. Joel is bang-on that my take away from SO is not reputation, it's knowledge. It seems like some people can't grasp that you learn just as much answering questions as you do asking them. StackOverflow could shut me out tomorrow (I hope it doesn't!) and I wouldn't feel like I've wasted time on the site. I'd just find another site like it and start over.
dbecker 15y ago
Stack Overflow has made the internet a better "place" Experts-Exchange just got in my way when I googled for answers.
skotzko 15y ago
Regarding the undercurrent of anger that seems to exist regarding Stack Overflow making money: SO has a great model that is incredibly useful and helps many, many people. They have created massive value. SO making more money means more people being helped, and yes, a well-deserved return for the founders and team members who poured their lives into creating and supporting such an amazingly useful resource. This is a good thing.
syed123 15y ago
Stackoverflow is one of the best things that have happened to tech community, for that very purpose we have created a group to meet other engineers from stackoverflow community for lunch http://www.LetsLunch.com/stackoverflow http://www.LetsLunch.com/stackoverflow
katbrisbin 15y ago
I work for Google's Developer Relations department. My team just moved their technical Q&A to Stack Overflow, as have other DevRel teams. We have several sponsored tags on SO and make the effort to help respond to questions tagged in our area of expertise.
meanguy 15y ago
If by "StackOverflow" you mean "Tumblr" then yes, I agree totally.
GregYoung 15y ago
I was to point out that I never at any point suggested that SO would make the same mistake as EE and put up a pay gate. This was a very stupid idea. There are many less intrusive ways of capitalizing a community (I can think about a dozen off the top of my head). I would hope Joel et al are smarter than to make the same mistakes and kill the goose. @Joel I think you need to learn more about EE's background (as do many here). It was more community oriented than SO is at this point. Hell the community even wrote large portions of the software thats still being used. They screwed up in their attempts at capitalization and alienated their community. The point of looking back at EE experiences has to do with their alienation of the community. I was perfectly happy to do it at the time and it was learning experiences. It was not also as you said "a customer getting an answer" any more than SO is, that model came later. If you believe that you are more like wikipedia then by all means feel free to become a non-profit. Otherwise the stated goal of your company will be to grow your community so that you can capitalize off of their efforts. We can spin this in many ways but the stated goal of the company is to do this. To the other people in this thread who think that SO is righteous. How do you feel about Facebook? Google? There are loads of examples of these styles of business models out there. The question with these business models is whether they can squeeze the necessary revenue out of a community without alienating it. Some have been good with it, some have not been so good at it. Also for those who called me a hypocrite due to SO donating some money to charity the difference is CB donates ALL profits to charity. They operate essentially as a non-profit.
- GregYoung 15y ago
  Also how'd this turn out for people? http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/05/migration-of-se-1-0-sites/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/05/migration-of-se-1-0-si...

212 points by Garbage 15y ago

Hey Greg! Great talks at JFokus a few weeks back, keep it up!

Lets say you go to a dance club because people come there to hangout. Is the discotheque ripping you off by not paying for making their dance club better? Are you getting zero value for it? Are their expenses zero for taking the effort to make it a good experience? And StackOverflow does not even charge an entry fee. I believe almost everyone on that site received more value from it than they put in. The amount of time saved by SO is ridiculous and was painfully obvious before the Panda update to Google which demoted the clones in the search results. StackOverflow is the result of tons of hard work on both the technology and the community by the founders and employees. The site scales very well inspite of super heavy traffic and the UI/UX provide a great experience. In fact, the site and their blog posts serve as a poster child for .NET based startups while using OSS software like Redis. Is it really the end of the world if they show an ad or two? The sense of entitlement in the article is just too much for me to bear. The author can take the CC licensed content and go build a Wikipedia style site for all SO cares and instantly get a free bootstrap of millions of quality questions and answers. I think they will actually be happy if it's a better place than SO, because they set out with the aim of making the status quo better for programmers all around the globe and succeeded wildly and raised the bar pretty high.

krohrbaugh 15y ago

The author's main point is that Expert's Exchange (EE) was very similar to StackOverflow (SO) until they needed to push up the S-curve from a profitability perspective. It's a valid concern since SO has relied on organic growth to fuel the necessary returns in order to sustain its current business model and then, more recently, attract VC investment. What the author doesn't mention is what makes SO slightly different. One is the licensing of the content, which the founders never fail to point out (and has already been rehashed here by several SO defenders). This is hand-waving, since they couldn't have achieved early success to drive organic growth without this license in place (this isn't the first time EE has been compared to SO). The other more interesting difference is the StackExchange (SE) platform and accompanying business model, which basically seeks to expand into an unending array of fields and topics. SO & SE are likely to continue being pleasant to use, as long as the StackExchange strategy is working and growth can come from the platform extension. Should that strategy fail, SO will need a growth strategy that provides the returns VCs expect and the company may be forced into some inconvenient (to users) "monetization" decisions. Essentially, when you're a for-profit company, it's easy to "do no evil" when you're rapidly growing organically. EE is only one such example, it's easy to come up with dozens of others: About.com, Mahalo, Digg, SourceForge, Google, Ben & Jerry's, etc. Unless it's a non-profit or maybe one of those new B-Corps, history provides much more support for skeptics. After all, company leaders aren't just acting out of greed, they are legally obligated to do what is best for shareholders. That said, let's hope Mr. Spolsky hasn't forgotten about his rant on platform providers who don't realize they are platform providers (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Platforms.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Platforms.html). He should be able to make the case that treating users (which are like developers in a traditional software platform) fairly will drive more long-term shareholder value than tactics employed by those that came before SO. Only time will tell.

yuhong 15y ago
There is a reason why Google IPOed using dual class stock.

instakill 15y ago

I very much agree with Joel in that SO is about, at least to me, acting as some kind of centralized destination where I know that somebody has had the same problem I'm currently experiencing, has asked it before, and has been given an answer or a few by the community. If no such question has been asked, I'll ask it because chances are somebody else will want to ask it down the line. SO is unlikely EE in that anyone in the community answers a question, and popular ones generally become community wiki answers, and I know the former to be true because after much learning, I (as a self-perceived noob) started answering quite a few questions and have built up a reputation. Do I think I wasted time in doing so? Of course not, I've helped others and I've helped keep the Rails community noob friendly. That and I can show off my earned reputation to any future potential employers.

smsm42 15y ago

Disclosure upfront: I'm an SO fanboy. I used EE back at its glory days, and I can say there's a world of difference between EE and SO. EE felt as it was a site built to make money, and the particular vehicle they used is to host questions and answers. SO feels as a site built to create questions&answers community, and they are making money out of it. There's a subtle difference about it, but it felt throughout the site - how it was designed, how workflows were organized, etc. Of course, I might be wrong and SO founders may be just evil geniuses tricking myself and everybody else, but the feeling is distinctly different from EE. Of course, SO also has much superior engine, user interface and benefit of years of experience that EE didn't have back then.

pbreit 15y ago

This article is terrible. First, it assumes no learning since the EE days. Second, comparisons to EE are weak (I do't remember EE ever being good). Third, he picked a lousy target (StackOverflow) given that FogCreek is well-known for having extreme patience, especially as it relates to commercialization. Finally, he leaves out the primary business: the StackExchange software being offered to customers to create other verticals.

rabc 15y ago

"Hey, look! They're making money with my knowledge! How they dare to do that?" Welcome to real world.

qwe123_troll 15y ago
Barnum, that great scholar of suckers, said it better.
- h_r 15y ago
  I don't get this attitude toward SO. Most of the people who go there get the answers they seek, including experts with questions outside their domain of expertise. I hear all sorts of people fretting about how to give back to the community to make their lives more meaningful. Isn't this an ideal win/win?
  - batista 15y ago
    Well, check the article again. You had that win/win situation with experts-exchange too. Then they baited and switched upon their users, putting up a paywall.
    - ceejayoz 15y ago
      > Then they baited and switched upon their users, putting up a paywall. Which StackOverflow's Creative Commons license and public data dumps make very difficult to implement.
      - qwe123_troll 15y ago
        There's no value in SO's database of questions and answers, they might as well give it away under whatever liberal license they want. The real business value of SO is the engaged ("community") web traffic it receives. ("Community" == "higher ad CPM" and "highly contextual advertising" in business terms.)

AndrewHampton 15y ago

Although one key difference is that EE kept the IP for all the user generated content, but all SO content is licensed under Creative Commons. http://stackoverflow.com/faq#editing http://stackoverflow.com/faq#editing

gizzlon 15y ago
Exactly.. Of course it won't be super-easy to replace SO but at least the information is available. They even post data dumps.. cool =) If they are cynical, they might change license for new content after the community has gained enough traction. I'm not convinced people would stop using SO if they did. http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/
- Piskvorrr 15y ago
  Important point: new content. It is not possible to retroactively change the CC license used to a more restrictive one ("I know you fully legally downloaded the last data dump, but could you delete your copy? Pretty please?"). So, license change -> major drop in participation as many will go elsewhere bringing with them SO's content up to that point -> might as well close the thing down, killing the golden goose and whatnot. (btw, 1.there are worries that the community has already gained too much traction and the site's decline is imminent, as it'll surely be swamped with high-noise Q&A; and 2. speaking for myself, I'd surely quit if a restrictive license were put in place, there are many such users)
bad_user 15y ago
I think Stack Overflow will be better in the long run. For instance I don't mind ads that are relevant to me, like book recommendations. I also wouldn't mind complementary services related to Stack Overflow. There are more options available right now than in the early 2000 that could earn them revenue without upsetting the community.
- tucson 15y ago
  yes, but how can the need for ROI (on the $millions invested) not hurt the current user experience?

zvrba 15y ago

SO has recently been flooded by people who create an account and post questions in the "fix my problem" style, often also pasting a bunch of their defunct code. There are also questions that would be more appropriate for rent-a-coder. All in all, I'm getting annoyed and considering to leave the community.

lambda 15y ago
Yeah, there are bad questions. Always have been, always will be. Sometimes, I take the time to explain to people how to make their question better (reduce the code down to a minimal example, and explain what you've already tried being the two most important pieces of advice). Sometimes I just downvote or vote to close if it's bad enough. You have the freedom to chose the questions that you pay attention to. If you're feeling burned out by bad questions, just skip them and keep looking for good ones; or go elsewhere and do something else for a while.
shaggyfrog 15y ago
If you don't have enough rep yet to vote-to-close yourself, flag 'em for attention, and the rest of us will bring down the Close Hammer.
spolsky 15y ago
"Fix my code" questions are considered "too localized" and should be closed as such.
- zvrba 15y ago
  I dare suggesting that this is a larger problem and trying to close individual questions is not a scalable approach.
Piskvorrr 15y ago
Yup. As recently as 2008, in fact ;) It's just a question of scale - the community gets larger, so you get more of everything.

AshleysBrain 15y ago

EE always had a dubious way of trying to game Google search results: have a huge advert at the top making the content you're after look blocked, followed by tonnes of filler content, then if you scrolled a looooong way to the bottom there's the content in tiny text. So Google sees the content but most humans don't. That always annoyed me sufficiently to block all EE results from search and just use SO. SO have always stated they're trying to be helpful to searchers and make the internet better. IMO it's no wonder they thoroughly beat EE and I'd think twice about trying to bring anything like EE back...

davorak 15y ago
EE only had the at content at the end of the human reachable page because google was going to stop listing pages that had content only for the robot. Or at least that is what I remember happening.
- recursive 15y ago
  And at least at some point, it was only there if you had a google referer header. Navigating directly to the page in question wouldn't show you the answers at all.
- calloc 15y ago
  Yeah, and you only get the content if you visit from Google and not go the URL directly.

spolsky 15y ago

Co-founder of Stack Overflow, here. A lot of the people who were involved in some way in Experts-Exchange don't understand Stack Overflow. The basic value flow of EE is that "experts" provide valuable "answers" for novices with questions. In that equation there's one person asking a question and one person writing an answer. Stack Overflow recognizes that for every person who asks a question, 100 - 10,000 people will type that same question into Google and find an answer that has already been written. In our equation, we are a community of people writing answers that will be read by hundreds or thousands of people. Ours is a project more like wikipedia -- collaboratively creating a resource for the Internet at large. Because that resource is provided by the community, it belongs to the community. That's why our data is freely available and licensed under creative commons. We did this specifically because of the negative experience we had with EE taking a community-generated resource and deciding to slap a paywall around it. The attitude of many EE contributors, like Greg Young who calculates that he "worked" for half a year for free, is not shared by the 60,000 people who write answers on SO every month. When you talk to them you realize that on Stack Overflow, answering questions is about learning. It's about creating a permanent artifact to make the Internet better. It's about helping someone solve a problem in five minutes that would have taken them hours to solve on their own. It's not about working for free. As soon as EE introduced the concept of money they forced everybody to think of their work on EE as just that -- work.

ridruejo 15y ago
At some point Stack Overflow may turn 'evil' but I personally have received a lot of value out of the site and I am willing to give it the benefit of the doubt that will be able to come up with a business model that will not alienate users and contributors. I personally feel a little bit more concerned with the changes being introduced by Quora (the point currency stuff) than what Joel and the rest of the team has done with Stack Overflow so far.
- derpapst 15y ago
  Exactly. And even if SO goes evil some day: one cannot point out the fact often enough how cool it was that SO shared the user generated data. We at TwoToReal.com benefit a lot from it (http://twotoreal.com/site/credits/ http://twotoreal.com/site/credits/)!

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

chrisaycock 15y ago

> The idea of the business model is to pay people in imaginary currency and sell what they do for real currency. That "imaginary" currency has paid off for me. I got my most recent job through Stack Overflow.

NickLarsen 15y ago
We're happy to hear you got your job with a little help from us! If anyone else would like an invite to our careers site, you can use this link for an invite. http://bit.ly/A4CB1B http://bit.ly/A4CB1B Additionally we are actually hiring people to join the careers team right now, http://bit.ly/xXXewd http://bit.ly/xXXewd <- developers, and http://bit.ly/xthTi9 http://bit.ly/xthTi9 <- product manager. I am curious how your Stack Overflow activity was used in the hiring process. Would you mind sharing?
- chrisaycock 15y ago
  > I am curious how your Stack Overflow activity was used in the hiring process. Would you mind sharing? I searched on the Careers 2.0 site and applied to a few firms that looked interesting. For one particular firm, my SO profile acted as my "code sample". I got the offer within a few weeks and have been happy ever since. I'll note that most of the firms that advertised on your Careers site were very serious about software quality. The signal-to-noise of excellent companies was far beyond what I've traditionally gotten through a head hunter. I suspect that's because any hiring manager who actually knows what SO is has probably had tons of hands-on experience with coding.
rogerbinns 15y ago
> That "imaginary" currency ... The currency that you get paid with on SO, Github, mailing lists, open source software etc is reputation. In many circumstances (eg getting a job) it is far more valuable than real currency.

lukev 15y ago

This is roughly analogous to claiming that the iPad won't work because resistive touch tablets didn't take off.

telent 15y ago

Here's a rather less paranoid article that's (partly) about SO. http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2012/02/29/Undocumentedness http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2012/02/29/Undocument... Seriously, given that the data is freely available and for as long as it remains so, "OMG you're making money from my knowledge how dare you you cad" is about as valid a complaint as it would be if levelled at any of the ISPs in days of yore that ran Usenet servers. And it's definitely saved me more time (a factor of 100 - 10,000? I have no idea) than I've ever given back to it

michaelmior 15y ago
I think you nailed it. I try to answer questions on SO when I have spare time. But that's mostly because of the massive value I've gained from the site. Most of the time it's not even asking questions, but looking at great answers to questions that have already been asked. If I continue to get the same value from SO, I'm happy to keep answering questions where I can and they're free to profit off that in any way they choose as long as everything remains public.

SideburnsOfDoom 15y ago

> The whole point here is to make as much money as possible. If the goal were to build up community you wouldn’t need to set them up as a centralized broker of the information, it would be distributed I don't think that he totally gets StackOverflow. SO has demonstrated to my satisfaction that: 1) they care about other things besides money. Sure money pays the bills, but if you do it right, being rich and famous is just a by-product to the main accomplishment. 2) SO works far better at getting stuff done in the technical QA space than any "distributed" model so far tried.

lukejduncan 15y ago

Maybe this was before my time, but was experts-exchange ever anything more than SEO spam with no content?

RegEx 15y ago
It took me way too long to realize this, but there were actually answers below the huge wall of links on E-E pages!
- Piskvorrr 15y ago
  This was not implemented until Google has temporarily kicked them off the indexes for black-hat SEO back in 2008, IIRC. Before that, the answers were not physically present on the page served to humans, but they were on the page that was served to Googlebot. This is called "content cloaking" and is punishable by a Google-ban (which takes at least weeks to get reversed).
nas 15y ago
I think at first they showed answers. Later they only showed answers to GoogleBot and tried to get you to jump through hoops to see them. Finally, Google smacked them down and they implemented a tricky system where you had to scroll and long way to see the answers. The site was designed to try to get you to sign-up or pay to see answers. Overall it was a sleazy site, IMHO. Occasionally I would find useful answers there but eventually I just blacklisted them from my Google results. StackOverflow is miles better than EE ever was.
jasonkester 15y ago
Sure. Early on, it was a scraper that pulled down usenet content and rebranded it as its own with ads over the top. I first found them via a Google search on my own name, to discover that in addition to comp.sci.*, I'd also been answering questions there.
- Nick_C 15y ago
  Yep, same here. Sort of amusing to see some historical revisionism going on here from the E-E people. I don't doubt that there were some genuine contributors, but claiming other's hard work as their own tainted E-E's brand for me. P.S. For the young 'uns, Google Groups isn't. It is usenet re-branded. Google is now doing the same thing!

apetresc 15y ago

If this guy's writing is indicative of the quality of EE "experts"' prose, then I'm even less surprised that place went down.

yannis 15y ago

I think spolsky hit the nail on the head with "answering questions is about learning". If I profit from it and the site owners profit from it as well, so be it. This is a very rare case of win-win.

peeters 15y ago

20k+ rep SO user here. Early on, reputation was an incentive to answer a lot of questions because with it came graduated permissions. At 20k, there is no further incentive besides vanity. So reputation isn't an incentive for me. Has that stopped me from answering questions? Absolutely not. Joel is bang-on that my take away from SO is not reputation, it's knowledge. It seems like some people can't grasp that you learn just as much answering questions as you do asking them. StackOverflow could shut me out tomorrow (I hope it doesn't!) and I wouldn't feel like I've wasted time on the site. I'd just find another site like it and start over.

dbecker 15y ago

Stack Overflow has made the internet a better "place" Experts-Exchange just got in my way when I googled for answers.

skotzko 15y ago

Regarding the undercurrent of anger that seems to exist regarding Stack Overflow making money: SO has a great model that is incredibly useful and helps many, many people. They have created massive value. SO making more money means more people being helped, and yes, a well-deserved return for the founders and team members who poured their lives into creating and supporting such an amazingly useful resource. This is a good thing.

syed123 15y ago

Stackoverflow is one of the best things that have happened to tech community, for that very purpose we have created a group to meet other engineers from stackoverflow community for lunch http://www.LetsLunch.com/stackoverflow http://www.LetsLunch.com/stackoverflow

katbrisbin 15y ago

I work for Google's Developer Relations department. My team just moved their technical Q&A to Stack Overflow, as have other DevRel teams. We have several sponsored tags on SO and make the effort to help respond to questions tagged in our area of expertise.

meanguy 15y ago

If by "StackOverflow" you mean "Tumblr" then yes, I agree totally.

GregYoung 15y ago

I was to point out that I never at any point suggested that SO would make the same mistake as EE and put up a pay gate. This was a very stupid idea. There are many less intrusive ways of capitalizing a community (I can think about a dozen off the top of my head). I would hope Joel et al are smarter than to make the same mistakes and kill the goose. @Joel I think you need to learn more about EE's background (as do many here). It was more community oriented than SO is at this point. Hell the community even wrote large portions of the software thats still being used. They screwed up in their attempts at capitalization and alienated their community. The point of looking back at EE experiences has to do with their alienation of the community. I was perfectly happy to do it at the time and it was learning experiences. It was not also as you said "a customer getting an answer" any more than SO is, that model came later. If you believe that you are more like wikipedia then by all means feel free to become a non-profit. Otherwise the stated goal of your company will be to grow your community so that you can capitalize off of their efforts. We can spin this in many ways but the stated goal of the company is to do this. To the other people in this thread who think that SO is righteous. How do you feel about Facebook? Google? There are loads of examples of these styles of business models out there. The question with these business models is whether they can squeeze the necessary revenue out of a community without alienating it. Some have been good with it, some have not been so good at it. Also for those who called me a hypocrite due to SO donating some money to charity the difference is CB donates ALL profits to charity. They operate essentially as a non-profit.

GregYoung 15y ago
Also how'd this turn out for people? http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/05/migration-of-se-1-0-sites/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/05/migration-of-se-1-0-si...