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> SO users are still serfs building them a dataset for sale That is a very negative spin. Users get access to other people's answers for free. They get that f
by nox101 2y ago
> SO users are still serfs building them a dataset for sale
That is a very negative spin.
Users get access to other people's answers for free. They get that free service and are required to contribute nothing. Those that do contribute do it to help other users. S.O. isn't doing anything bad. They're providing a free service where everyone wins. Users get answers. Answerers get to help other humans at scale. S.O. makes a little money.
As for the dataset, it's been available under CC-BY-SA for years. The entire database is backed up and made available here for free every month.
https://archive.org/details/stackexchange https://archive.org/details/stackexchange
There are even free tools to query it here
https://data.stackexchange.com/ https://data.stackexchange.com/
- juleiie 2y agoWhy a company makes money on someone’s free work? This is obviously not okay. We have even more egregious examples but this is certainly one of them.
- nox101 2y agoThe company is paying the people working by providing a free service. It's like youtube. Youtube provides a free hosting of your videos. In exchange they monetize them. You're free to host them on your own servers. That will likely cost you way more than putting them on youtube. So you're getting something from them. You're also getting their advertising service to monetize your videos. You could do it yourself, hire a bunch of people and try to get companies to put ads on your self-hosted videos. Again, unless you're wildly successful it's unlikely you'll be able to do that and make a profit. So, youtube is effectively paying you. Same with Stack Overflow. They're providing the servers, the bandwidth, etc. It costs them $. They're providing that service to you.