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 Expe

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.