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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 flo

by 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/)!
- AznHisoka 15y ago
  I agree with you on Quora.. they may have shot themselves on the foot there.. By introducing a barrier to post a question, they've just eliminated a huge % of user generated content. Now you're relying on your existing users to keep posting and answering questions, and inevitably it will keep decreasing.
ctide 15y ago
When you talk to them you realize that on Stack Overflow, answering questions is about learning I want to reiterate this point, for a while I would make it a point to check the latest questions on Stack Overflow for various languages I was decent at and try to answer a couple every day. There were lots of questions in which I knew 80% of the answer, and the process of discovering the last 20% always helped me learn something new. Between just reading answers to random questions and doing that, I found it to be a really awesome way to become a more knowledgable developer.
- obituary_latte2 15y ago
  Absolutely. To me, that is a large part of the value: learning while offering help. Points have no value but the knowledge does. Right now, SO offers a good platform for such.
HardyLeung 15y ago
Joel, I think you have the right product and are sincere about this, but I believe Greg Young, the author of the article, brought up a few good points. I read the article and one analogy quickly came to my mind. EE was like AltaVista/Lycos/Infoseek, and Stack Overflow is like the younger version of Google. + The latter is clearly superior in technology (or content) to the other. + The latter makes user happy by giving them real value, whereas the former focused on milking the users for revenue. + The latter made promises to the users (Google: "don't be evil", SO: "contents are the community's property") and the users liked it. + Last but not least, "the competition is only a click away" (Google). "You can start a SO competitor in a heartbeat" (SO). So far so good. But guess what happened to Google? They got good. They got big. They were no longer satisifed with being the king of search. They started Plus. They started saying "If you don't want people to know what you do, you shouldn't do that anyway". They now want your data to be shared among their properties and you cannot opt out. They got jealous of Apple. They got freaked out by Facebook. I don't doubt Google started with a conscience, and a genuine focus to build a better search engine. They succeeded. Wildly. But except for the most hard-core Google believers, I doubt that many people still trust their "Don't be evil" mantra in its absolute. Frankly, do people even say that with a straight face outside of comparison with Microsoft? I love SO and believe in the integrity of Joel and Jeff and others. You guys really rock. But time will change. Tide will change. A tidepool that is fun for little kids could become a fatal trap the very next day (sadly, this happens often). So please keep the warning in mind.
- mchanson 15y ago
  I think since the data is open if SO goes of the rails in the future someone can take the data and relaunch a new site and compete.
- lukeschlather 15y ago
  The game is still young even with Google. But as for SO, I would like to see SO close up their data. I don't even think they could legally get away with it. Google has always been closed, so the comparison doesn't make a lot of sense.
- SideburnsOfDoom 15y ago
billybob 15y ago
Enthusiastic SO user here. The fact that the data is available puts SO in the same category as open source software for me. I use open source for all my tools of choice. My browser, editor, programming language, libraries, web framework, server operating system, etc etc are all open source. I get tens of thousands of dollars in value from open source. In gratitude for that, and to keep the ball rolling, I do spend some effort contributing back to open source. StackOverflow is no different, to me. The info on SO has saved me many hours of frustration and taught me lots of new things. Answering questions (and asking good ones) is my way of giving back. And in both cases, it's partly selfish, too: whatever I contribute back to open source or to StackOverflow is not lost to me when I move to the next job. Sure, I've given many hours to StackOverflow. But it's given many more hours to me in saved time. I want to keep that around.
robomartin 15y ago
Why isn't SO open-source? How do you feel about the many clones out there?
- lloeki 15y ago
  Although not open source: - content is openly CC-licensed - some components are open-source, like their thin ORM - the SE team regularly and openly discusses about their architecture through their blogs
Permit 15y ago
I think one of the most common ideas found in posts like Greg's is a gross misunderstanding of Stack Overflow's business model[1] which leads one to speculate that the only way to make a site like SO profitable would be to charge for access to answers. I've been a huge fan of SO for a few years and am happy to see you guys figured out a way to make the site profitable without resorting to a paywall. [1]http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/79435/what-is-stack-overflows-business-model http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/79435/what-is-stack-...
- bryanlarsen 15y ago
  It's profitable now, yes, and probably always will be. But what happens when the site inevitably stagnates but the investors keep demanding revenue growth?
  - drumdance 15y ago
    More sites on different topics. Conferences. Books. Training courses. There are a lot of ways to monetize an enthusiastic audience that wants to learn.
  - mutagen 15y ago
    Aren't 'the investors' the guys the built it: Joel Spolsky, Jeff Atowood, and originally a small engineering team? Edit: apparently I should have done just a few more searches before I answered this, it seems that SO did seek venture funding: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/02/14.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/02/14.html
  - sounds 15y ago
    I know I'm just an armchair quarterback, but there's a revolution in moving university courses online. Surely some of that will stick to the stackoverflow/serverfault/superuser crowd...
lrobb 15y ago
I learned this from a very wise man* about why you shouldn't take VC money: "The fundamental reason is that VCs do not have goals that are aligned with the goals of the company founders." While I don't doubt your good intentions... Isn't the fact that WikiPedia is a 501(c)3 and you have outside influences a rather large difference? *you
- tptacek 15y ago
  Why stop there? Isn't it true that space aliens could in fact target Jimbo Wales' brain with their brain de-braining modulators to coerce Wikipedia into erecting a paywall? Sure it's unlikely! That's the point of bringing it up as if it were a real issue on a message board! Points for cleverness! What sucks is, in the meantime, until we can see the greens of the aliens zgrnkzorks, we're stuck judging people by their actions and sometimes even taking them at their word.
  - asr 15y ago
    Your comment is rude and trollish. GP made the reasonable point that trust in Joel may not be enough because VCs always apply pressure to monetize. Agree or not (and I don't), it's not some beyond-the-pale view. Chill with the space aliens.
SteveJS 15y ago
I don't think he misunderstands at all. "value not just to the person they are helping but as a searchable help database over time." I think he is pointing out that what something looks like at one point in time, does not prove it will be that way forever: "It went defunct and was basically built up from community around 2000-2001. It was a community site at that point, and it grew rapidly as such. Everything was free and community driven." Most of the early items on SO that made it interesting to me are gone (deleted as not relevant) such as the _single_ question by Alan Kay! The guy isn't confused, he's just commiserating that things mature and change. It's highly likely that change for SO will be in the direction of a better business model. [Edit: A better business model does not imply bad for the community, but it does often imply change.]
- mistermann 15y ago
  "Most of the early items on SO that made it interesting to me are gone (deleted as not relevant)" Could you expand on this, I'm curious to know what you're talking about.
  - Piskvorrr 15y ago
    "What Easter Eggs have you left in code" - gone. "What's your favorite programming cartoon" - gone. "What code would you have on your wedding cake" - gone. "Programmers' last words" - gone. "Most elegant, amusing or strange code one liners" - gone. And good riddance, I'd say. Interesting - perhaps. Fun - sometimes. Useful - rarely.
  - m_myers 15y ago
    Some questions in the early days were more like lists than questions; for example, "Hidden Features of C#/Java/C++", "What is the single most influential book every programmer should read?", "How do you clear your mind after a day of coding?", or Alan Kay's question "Significant new inventions in computing since 1980". These really aren't a good fit for the Q/A model, so they've been gradually deleted over the past year or so. Now it's true that some of them did collect some useful content. Some of this content can be/has been migrated to tag wikis. Some of it could be blog material, but we haven't hammered out exactly how this will work. The bottom line is that big fun list-of-x questions are gone and won't come back. That said, we've just undeleted Alan Kay's question since it really should be visible somewhere in the interim. Here it is: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-inventions-in-computing-since-1980 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-in...
emp_ 15y ago
I come across at least two people every week wanting to learn how to program, instead of giving them a 500-page C book I tell them to go to SO and try to help someone, research on google a random subject/question etc, then they start the reverse approach towards tools such as "I think I know how to do this, but how can I run python on my computer?" instead of installing 80GB of IDEs without knowing what they are for. The results are amazing, they decide their favorite subjects without personal bias (a female friend got ultra hooked on SQL for example, even tho I hate it as a business language) and you just watch them fly. I also make sure to point out that the reputation is not a certification of authority or correctness, as I see they are just experience points, just how much you learned while being nice enough to share that experience. I am not a fan of the SE network splitting the subjects but understand why it exists right now, but I also think it is just an amazing problem to spend years on.
jason1178 15y ago
Joel, Not all of us misunderstand where SO is going or your motivations. I've posted as much here: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/92683/what-experts-exchange-thinks-of-stack-overflow http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/92683/what-experts-e... The facts are that despite what everyone thinks/hopes, EE isn't going anywhere anytime soon. SO rules the roost for programming but EE covers more than just programming topics and is still doing pretty well and, as a user of both sites, I'm happy both exist. Also: "The attitude of many EE contributors" [citation needed] "As soon as EE introduced the concept of money they forced everybody to think of their work on EE as just that -- work." [citation needed] It's okay Joel. I know you feel the need to demonize EE because it worked in the beginning. Keep up the great work and see you around the web. JCL
Eric_Peterson 15y ago
Senior Administrator at Experts Exchange, here. A lot of the people who are involved in some way in Stack Overflow don't know s--t from apple butter about Experts Exchange. "In that equation there's one person asking a question and one person writing an answer" Citation needed. As others have noted, never let facts get in the way of a good sound bite -- or blog post. There's no evidence I've seen -- and I'm pretty sure I've spent more time looking at Experts Exchange than Mr Spolsky has -- that indicates this is remotely true, any more than it is at Stack Overflow. "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." Usually at Experts Exchange, if only because it's been around a lot longer than most others... and if only because it takes steps to ensure that people get THEIR question answered (as opposed to what someone with a "rep" thinks of the question). "In our equation, we are a community of people writing answers that will be read by hundreds or thousands of people." Citation needed. You have 204,851 questions, as of this writing, that don't have any answers, let alone ones worthy of being read by hundreds or thousands of people. "Ours is a project more like wikipedia -- collaboratively creating a resource for the Internet at large." Explains why you don't have anything other than advertising (that's what your job board is) and a few partnerships as a revenue model -- a model that failed in the last century. You're sure not going to ask the people who use your site to pay for it -- even though that's what Wikipedia does -- because then all the promises Mr Atwood made would be ... untruths. "Because that resource is provided by the community, it belongs to the community." Animal Farm was a community too. We'll see how much it belongs to the community when someone tries to take it away from you. "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." Straw man, but I'll grant that it was the perfect rallying cry. Experts Exchange disclaims any and all ownership of content (which is all the creative commons license deals with) -- and that has been consistent since 1996. But... EE is also honest. It expects people who receive a benefit of its service to pay for it, either by paying or by contributing. The guy passing by once a year to get a quick and dirty answer to a programming question he's too lazy to figure out on his own is not, by any definition, a member of a community; he's a tourist. If SO wants to consider itself the Disneyland of Q&A sites -- a fantasyland in which everything is perfect and good -- then so be it, but you'd better be a lot more diligent about who actually provides your content. Hint: your question-answerers aren't the whole equation. There's no question EE made some amazingly stupid mistakes -- against the advice of people who have been around EE, the tech industry and subscription/advertising/membership businesses a lot longer than those making the decisions. In doing so, it opened the door for you and Mr Atwood to go FUD on it, and build yourself a lot of traffic, but not a business. But that also opened the door for EE to recognize the value of its community -- as opposed to the Del Webb-esque agglomeration you've assembled -- and include it into the planning and development of not just the site's features, but its agenda and planning for the future. And since it actually has a viable business model, it can do that. "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." You're probably right. Then again, you're also taking what he said out of context. For the record (and for those too lazy to actually read Greg's post), he said "Let’s do some quick math assuming 5 minutes per post thats 50,000 minutes of my time. Or roughly a half year full time weeks of work. I think the time is actually higher than that though." I can promise that when Greg posted, he did so thoughtfully, while doing his best to help the people he was responding to. I can also guarantee that he learned a lot at EE; if nothing else, he learned how to write, and speak to groups, and take criticism of his efforts. He learned that he was valued for something other than his ability to write code. He learned that there were a lot of people he had never met concerned with his well-being in the days, weeks and months following Hurricane Katrina. However, he was never compelled by anyone to do anything, and like most people who do volunteer work (there's that word again), it's usually a labor of love. You're welcome to make things up as you go along about EE-The-Company... but do not put words in the mouths of EE's members, and especially those who answer questions. You aren't worthy. "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." Neither you nor your partner has any experience to speak of with Experts Exchange. At least I've posted a few times at SO. At least I've taken the time to figure out how your site works, as has the Managing Director at EE and at least two of the other site administrators. I won't call you a liar, Mr Spolsky... but I will say you're playing fast and loose with the truth when you say you have "experience with EE"... because you have NONE. The emperor has no clothes, but Napoleon did.
gnosis 15y ago
"As soon as EE introduced the concept of money they forced everybody to think of their work on EE as just that -- work." This is exactly why I stopped writing reviews on IMDB once they commercialized it, and why I once wrote reviews for Amazon until I thought better of it. If these people want to make money off of my work, they should pay me. On the other hand, I happily contributed to Wikipedia -- and would have continued to do so were it not for other reasons (having to do with point-of-view pushers dominating and subverting many of the articles I was interested in contributing to).
- Drbble 15y ago
  The line you quote is talking about paying the contributers, not the owners. You might want to know that wikipedia has paid staff as well.
  - gnosis 15y ago
    "The line you quote is talking about paying the contributers, not the owners." I didn't realize that. But, now that you point that out, I should say that I'm all for contributors getting paid for their contributions -- as long as there were some effective safeguards put in place to keep them from gaming the system. "You might want to know that wikipedia has paid staff as well." If they are paid a reasonable wage to maintain the system, from a site that subsists on the donation model, I have no problem with that at all. A for-profit entity that makes its money from my work is something quite different, however.
- icebraining 15y ago
  This is exactly why I stopped writing reviews on IMDB once they commercialized it, and why I once wrote reviews for Amazon until I thought better of it. If these people want to make money off of my work, they should pay me. Playing Devil's advocate, don't you benefit from other people posting reviews? And if so, is it really smart to lose those benefits just to avoid making Amazon or IMDB richer? I mean, EE was actively making the Internet a worse place, as Jeff has put it - it makes sense to avoid helping them. But Amazon is providing a valuable service by having a place where people can easily share and read each other's reviews, and they don't exactly force anyone to buy the product from them afterwards, so what's wrong with them taking a cut from it?
mathattack 15y ago
Much of the power of SO comes from twin occurrences: 1) Most answers are well indexed on Google. 2) They are right often enough that seeing SO in the search results generates a click over other options. The net is a very high brand value. Hard to monetize by putting up a pay wall and hard to beat too. Network effects suggest that one service with a million users beats ten with 100 thousand each.
justncase80 15y ago
The key difference for me is that when I would search for a question via search engine and an EE link would show up in the list of results it would look pertinent and I would go to the link only to find the answers blurred out and obfuscated. It's downright infuriating. If they want to keep their data private, fine, but don't show up in my answers list of open data. The faster EE is wiped off the face of the web the better. The guy who wrote this article just doesn't get it.

by spolsky 15y ago

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/)!
AznHisoka 15y ago
I agree with you on Quora.. they may have shot themselves on the foot there.. By introducing a barrier to post a question, they've just eliminated a huge % of user generated content. Now you're relying on your existing users to keep posting and answering questions, and inevitably it will keep decreasing.

ctide 15y ago

When you talk to them you realize that on Stack Overflow, answering questions is about learning I want to reiterate this point, for a while I would make it a point to check the latest questions on Stack Overflow for various languages I was decent at and try to answer a couple every day. There were lots of questions in which I knew 80% of the answer, and the process of discovering the last 20% always helped me learn something new. Between just reading answers to random questions and doing that, I found it to be a really awesome way to become a more knowledgable developer.

obituary_latte2 15y ago
Absolutely. To me, that is a large part of the value: learning while offering help. Points have no value but the knowledge does. Right now, SO offers a good platform for such.

HardyLeung 15y ago

Joel, I think you have the right product and are sincere about this, but I believe Greg Young, the author of the article, brought up a few good points. I read the article and one analogy quickly came to my mind. EE was like AltaVista/Lycos/Infoseek, and Stack Overflow is like the younger version of Google. + The latter is clearly superior in technology (or content) to the other. + The latter makes user happy by giving them real value, whereas the former focused on milking the users for revenue. + The latter made promises to the users (Google: "don't be evil", SO: "contents are the community's property") and the users liked it. + Last but not least, "the competition is only a click away" (Google). "You can start a SO competitor in a heartbeat" (SO). So far so good. But guess what happened to Google? They got good. They got big. They were no longer satisifed with being the king of search. They started Plus. They started saying "If you don't want people to know what you do, you shouldn't do that anyway". They now want your data to be shared among their properties and you cannot opt out. They got jealous of Apple. They got freaked out by Facebook. I don't doubt Google started with a conscience, and a genuine focus to build a better search engine. They succeeded. Wildly. But except for the most hard-core Google believers, I doubt that many people still trust their "Don't be evil" mantra in its absolute. Frankly, do people even say that with a straight face outside of comparison with Microsoft? I love SO and believe in the integrity of Joel and Jeff and others. You guys really rock. But time will change. Tide will change. A tidepool that is fun for little kids could become a fatal trap the very next day (sadly, this happens often). So please keep the warning in mind.

mchanson 15y ago
I think since the data is open if SO goes of the rails in the future someone can take the data and relaunch a new site and compete.
lukeschlather 15y ago
The game is still young even with Google. But as for SO, I would like to see SO close up their data. I don't even think they could legally get away with it. Google has always been closed, so the comparison doesn't make a lot of sense.
SideburnsOfDoom 15y ago

billybob 15y ago

Enthusiastic SO user here. The fact that the data is available puts SO in the same category as open source software for me. I use open source for all my tools of choice. My browser, editor, programming language, libraries, web framework, server operating system, etc etc are all open source. I get tens of thousands of dollars in value from open source. In gratitude for that, and to keep the ball rolling, I do spend some effort contributing back to open source. StackOverflow is no different, to me. The info on SO has saved me many hours of frustration and taught me lots of new things. Answering questions (and asking good ones) is my way of giving back. And in both cases, it's partly selfish, too: whatever I contribute back to open source or to StackOverflow is not lost to me when I move to the next job. Sure, I've given many hours to StackOverflow. But it's given many more hours to me in saved time. I want to keep that around.

robomartin 15y ago

Why isn't SO open-source? How do you feel about the many clones out there?

lloeki 15y ago
Although not open source: - content is openly CC-licensed - some components are open-source, like their thin ORM - the SE team regularly and openly discusses about their architecture through their blogs

Permit 15y ago

I think one of the most common ideas found in posts like Greg's is a gross misunderstanding of Stack Overflow's business model[1] which leads one to speculate that the only way to make a site like SO profitable would be to charge for access to answers. I've been a huge fan of SO for a few years and am happy to see you guys figured out a way to make the site profitable without resorting to a paywall. [1]http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/79435/what-is-stack-overflows-business-model http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/79435/what-is-stack-...

bryanlarsen 15y ago
It's profitable now, yes, and probably always will be. But what happens when the site inevitably stagnates but the investors keep demanding revenue growth?
- drumdance 15y ago
  More sites on different topics. Conferences. Books. Training courses. There are a lot of ways to monetize an enthusiastic audience that wants to learn.
- mutagen 15y ago
  Aren't 'the investors' the guys the built it: Joel Spolsky, Jeff Atowood, and originally a small engineering team? Edit: apparently I should have done just a few more searches before I answered this, it seems that SO did seek venture funding: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/02/14.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/02/14.html
- sounds 15y ago
  I know I'm just an armchair quarterback, but there's a revolution in moving university courses online. Surely some of that will stick to the stackoverflow/serverfault/superuser crowd...

lrobb 15y ago

I learned this from a very wise man* about why you shouldn't take VC money: "The fundamental reason is that VCs do not have goals that are aligned with the goals of the company founders." While I don't doubt your good intentions... Isn't the fact that WikiPedia is a 501(c)3 and you have outside influences a rather large difference? *you

tptacek 15y ago
Why stop there? Isn't it true that space aliens could in fact target Jimbo Wales' brain with their brain de-braining modulators to coerce Wikipedia into erecting a paywall? Sure it's unlikely! That's the point of bringing it up as if it were a real issue on a message board! Points for cleverness! What sucks is, in the meantime, until we can see the greens of the aliens zgrnkzorks, we're stuck judging people by their actions and sometimes even taking them at their word.
- asr 15y ago
  Your comment is rude and trollish. GP made the reasonable point that trust in Joel may not be enough because VCs always apply pressure to monetize. Agree or not (and I don't), it's not some beyond-the-pale view. Chill with the space aliens.

SteveJS 15y ago

I don't think he misunderstands at all. "value not just to the person they are helping but as a searchable help database over time." I think he is pointing out that what something looks like at one point in time, does not prove it will be that way forever: "It went defunct and was basically built up from community around 2000-2001. It was a community site at that point, and it grew rapidly as such. Everything was free and community driven." Most of the early items on SO that made it interesting to me are gone (deleted as not relevant) such as the _single_ question by Alan Kay! The guy isn't confused, he's just commiserating that things mature and change. It's highly likely that change for SO will be in the direction of a better business model. [Edit: A better business model does not imply bad for the community, but it does often imply change.]

mistermann 15y ago
"Most of the early items on SO that made it interesting to me are gone (deleted as not relevant)" Could you expand on this, I'm curious to know what you're talking about.
- Piskvorrr 15y ago
  "What Easter Eggs have you left in code" - gone. "What's your favorite programming cartoon" - gone. "What code would you have on your wedding cake" - gone. "Programmers' last words" - gone. "Most elegant, amusing or strange code one liners" - gone. And good riddance, I'd say. Interesting - perhaps. Fun - sometimes. Useful - rarely.
- m_myers 15y ago
  Some questions in the early days were more like lists than questions; for example, "Hidden Features of C#/Java/C++", "What is the single most influential book every programmer should read?", "How do you clear your mind after a day of coding?", or Alan Kay's question "Significant new inventions in computing since 1980". These really aren't a good fit for the Q/A model, so they've been gradually deleted over the past year or so. Now it's true that some of them did collect some useful content. Some of this content can be/has been migrated to tag wikis. Some of it could be blog material, but we haven't hammered out exactly how this will work. The bottom line is that big fun list-of-x questions are gone and won't come back. That said, we've just undeleted Alan Kay's question since it really should be visible somewhere in the interim. Here it is: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-inventions-in-computing-since-1980 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-in...

emp_ 15y ago

I come across at least two people every week wanting to learn how to program, instead of giving them a 500-page C book I tell them to go to SO and try to help someone, research on google a random subject/question etc, then they start the reverse approach towards tools such as "I think I know how to do this, but how can I run python on my computer?" instead of installing 80GB of IDEs without knowing what they are for. The results are amazing, they decide their favorite subjects without personal bias (a female friend got ultra hooked on SQL for example, even tho I hate it as a business language) and you just watch them fly. I also make sure to point out that the reputation is not a certification of authority or correctness, as I see they are just experience points, just how much you learned while being nice enough to share that experience. I am not a fan of the SE network splitting the subjects but understand why it exists right now, but I also think it is just an amazing problem to spend years on.

jason1178 15y ago

Joel, Not all of us misunderstand where SO is going or your motivations. I've posted as much here: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/92683/what-experts-exchange-thinks-of-stack-overflow http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/92683/what-experts-e... The facts are that despite what everyone thinks/hopes, EE isn't going anywhere anytime soon. SO rules the roost for programming but EE covers more than just programming topics and is still doing pretty well and, as a user of both sites, I'm happy both exist. Also: "The attitude of many EE contributors" [citation needed] "As soon as EE introduced the concept of money they forced everybody to think of their work on EE as just that -- work." [citation needed] It's okay Joel. I know you feel the need to demonize EE because it worked in the beginning. Keep up the great work and see you around the web. JCL

Eric_Peterson 15y ago

Senior Administrator at Experts Exchange, here. A lot of the people who are involved in some way in Stack Overflow don't know s--t from apple butter about Experts Exchange. "In that equation there's one person asking a question and one person writing an answer" Citation needed. As others have noted, never let facts get in the way of a good sound bite -- or blog post. There's no evidence I've seen -- and I'm pretty sure I've spent more time looking at Experts Exchange than Mr Spolsky has -- that indicates this is remotely true, any more than it is at Stack Overflow. "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." Usually at Experts Exchange, if only because it's been around a lot longer than most others... and if only because it takes steps to ensure that people get THEIR question answered (as opposed to what someone with a "rep" thinks of the question). "In our equation, we are a community of people writing answers that will be read by hundreds or thousands of people." Citation needed. You have 204,851 questions, as of this writing, that don't have any answers, let alone ones worthy of being read by hundreds or thousands of people. "Ours is a project more like wikipedia -- collaboratively creating a resource for the Internet at large." Explains why you don't have anything other than advertising (that's what your job board is) and a few partnerships as a revenue model -- a model that failed in the last century. You're sure not going to ask the people who use your site to pay for it -- even though that's what Wikipedia does -- because then all the promises Mr Atwood made would be ... untruths. "Because that resource is provided by the community, it belongs to the community." Animal Farm was a community too. We'll see how much it belongs to the community when someone tries to take it away from you. "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." Straw man, but I'll grant that it was the perfect rallying cry. Experts Exchange disclaims any and all ownership of content (which is all the creative commons license deals with) -- and that has been consistent since 1996. But... EE is also honest. It expects people who receive a benefit of its service to pay for it, either by paying or by contributing. The guy passing by once a year to get a quick and dirty answer to a programming question he's too lazy to figure out on his own is not, by any definition, a member of a community; he's a tourist. If SO wants to consider itself the Disneyland of Q&A sites -- a fantasyland in which everything is perfect and good -- then so be it, but you'd better be a lot more diligent about who actually provides your content. Hint: your question-answerers aren't the whole equation. There's no question EE made some amazingly stupid mistakes -- against the advice of people who have been around EE, the tech industry and subscription/advertising/membership businesses a lot longer than those making the decisions. In doing so, it opened the door for you and Mr Atwood to go FUD on it, and build yourself a lot of traffic, but not a business. But that also opened the door for EE to recognize the value of its community -- as opposed to the Del Webb-esque agglomeration you've assembled -- and include it into the planning and development of not just the site's features, but its agenda and planning for the future. And since it actually has a viable business model, it can do that. "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." You're probably right. Then again, you're also taking what he said out of context. For the record (and for those too lazy to actually read Greg's post), he said "Let’s do some quick math assuming 5 minutes per post thats 50,000 minutes of my time. Or roughly a half year full time weeks of work. I think the time is actually higher than that though." I can promise that when Greg posted, he did so thoughtfully, while doing his best to help the people he was responding to. I can also guarantee that he learned a lot at EE; if nothing else, he learned how to write, and speak to groups, and take criticism of his efforts. He learned that he was valued for something other than his ability to write code. He learned that there were a lot of people he had never met concerned with his well-being in the days, weeks and months following Hurricane Katrina. However, he was never compelled by anyone to do anything, and like most people who do volunteer work (there's that word again), it's usually a labor of love. You're welcome to make things up as you go along about EE-The-Company... but do not put words in the mouths of EE's members, and especially those who answer questions. You aren't worthy. "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." Neither you nor your partner has any experience to speak of with Experts Exchange. At least I've posted a few times at SO. At least I've taken the time to figure out how your site works, as has the Managing Director at EE and at least two of the other site administrators. I won't call you a liar, Mr Spolsky... but I will say you're playing fast and loose with the truth when you say you have "experience with EE"... because you have NONE. The emperor has no clothes, but Napoleon did.

gnosis 15y ago

"As soon as EE introduced the concept of money they forced everybody to think of their work on EE as just that -- work." This is exactly why I stopped writing reviews on IMDB once they commercialized it, and why I once wrote reviews for Amazon until I thought better of it. If these people want to make money off of my work, they should pay me. On the other hand, I happily contributed to Wikipedia -- and would have continued to do so were it not for other reasons (having to do with point-of-view pushers dominating and subverting many of the articles I was interested in contributing to).

Drbble 15y ago
The line you quote is talking about paying the contributers, not the owners. You might want to know that wikipedia has paid staff as well.
- gnosis 15y ago
  "The line you quote is talking about paying the contributers, not the owners." I didn't realize that. But, now that you point that out, I should say that I'm all for contributors getting paid for their contributions -- as long as there were some effective safeguards put in place to keep them from gaming the system. "You might want to know that wikipedia has paid staff as well." If they are paid a reasonable wage to maintain the system, from a site that subsists on the donation model, I have no problem with that at all. A for-profit entity that makes its money from my work is something quite different, however.
icebraining 15y ago
This is exactly why I stopped writing reviews on IMDB once they commercialized it, and why I once wrote reviews for Amazon until I thought better of it. If these people want to make money off of my work, they should pay me. Playing Devil's advocate, don't you benefit from other people posting reviews? And if so, is it really smart to lose those benefits just to avoid making Amazon or IMDB richer? I mean, EE was actively making the Internet a worse place, as Jeff has put it - it makes sense to avoid helping them. But Amazon is providing a valuable service by having a place where people can easily share and read each other's reviews, and they don't exactly force anyone to buy the product from them afterwards, so what's wrong with them taking a cut from it?

mathattack 15y ago

Much of the power of SO comes from twin occurrences: 1) Most answers are well indexed on Google. 2) They are right often enough that seeing SO in the search results generates a click over other options. The net is a very high brand value. Hard to monetize by putting up a pay wall and hard to beat too. Network effects suggest that one service with a million users beats ten with 100 thousand each.

justncase80 15y ago

The key difference for me is that when I would search for a question via search engine and an EE link would show up in the list of results it would look pertinent and I would go to the link only to find the answers blurred out and obfuscated. It's downright infuriating. If they want to keep their data private, fine, but don't show up in my answers list of open data. The faster EE is wiped off the face of the web the better. The guy who wrote this article just doesn't get it.