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Get thousands of workers, to work thousandths of hours, to answer technical questions for free...In exchange for "Reputation". Sell for 1.8 Billion...The Americ
by belter 2y ago
Get thousands of workers, to work thousandths of hours, to answer technical questions for free...In exchange for "Reputation". Sell for 1.8 Billion...The American Dream...
- ktallett 2y agoThat is how any social media website works including this one.
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- netdevphoenix 2y agoIsn't it fascinating how even people that consider themselves rational and intelligent like developers would be happy doing work for a company for free in exchange for internet points?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- minitech 2y agoAnd places like Wikipedia don’t even give you internet points! What dummies these contributors are.
- swalling 2y agoExcept Wikipedia is a non-profit and the content produced is under a free license. The founder of Wikipedia and the few employees are the least wealthy people to run a top 10 website.
- minitech 2y agoI agree that the Wikipedia model is better, but Stack Exchange posts are also under a Creative Commons license.
- YetAnotherNick 2y agoNobody contributes to Wikipedia or Stackoverflow because of license. Most contribute because humans like sharing information with other people. If Wikipedia's eyeballs are low, people wouldn't contribute.
- LeonB 2y agoSome people would still contribute. It’s an intrinsic drive. (But I agree with your point in general)
- swalling 2y ago“If Wikipedia’s eyeballs are low, people wouldn’t contribute” People were contributing well before it was a top 10 website. That’s how it got kickstarted in the first place.
- YetAnotherNick 2y agoBut people knew that the content is easily accessible over internet and the usage would grow. If the content is only available in say one library in a random city, people wouldn't contribute for free.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- belter 2y agoExcept nobody is selling Wikipedia for 1.8 Billion. Do you see the difference? Congrats on totally missing the point.
- robertlagrant 2y agoSo what? That neither devalues the contributions nor the value given to other people through the content.
- belter 2y agoImagine this scenario: A group of volunteers builds a public park, putting in hours of work, landscaping, planting trees, and creating a beautiful space for everyone to enjoy. Years later, the park’s manager fences it off, sells it for $1.8 billion, and pockets the money. When questioned, the manager says, “So what? The volunteers enjoyed building it, and people got value from the park while it was open.”
- CaptainFever 2y agoYour story about a park going from "public" to "private", with the manager tricking the volunteers into making something that is no longer public and pocketing the money, is a false analogy for multiple reasons. 1. What do you mean by "open"? If you're talking about the company, the park was private -- fenced off -- from the start; there was no "bait and switch". This is the part which is worth 1.8 billion dollars: the brand name, network, software and system. 2. What do you mean by "open"? If you're talking about the content licenses, then the park is still open and public to this day. This is valuable too, of course, but no one will buy CC-licensed content for 1.8 billion dollars. It's just in the commons. Basically, while both the website and the content are valuable, the 1.8 billion dollars you're complaining about wasn't used to buy the content. Anyone can get that for free. It was used to buy the website, which has always been private and proprietary. Your story would make more sense if StackExchange was a non-profit started by a group of volunteers which somehow got turned into a for-profit and sold to the benefit of a single person, or if they somehow re-licensed everyone's content into proprietary. But neither happened. And that's why it's a false analogy.
- Johanx64 2y agoMany people landed good jobs that way. It was a good way for self-promo back in the day. Jobs stackexchange section was also way better than most other jobs boards at the time. It only went majorly downhill after the key people behind the site went away to work on other things and it got sold...
- arp242 2y agoI also learned a great deal from answering questions.
- 331c8c71 2y agoNot the least. Rational homo economicus pretty much doesn't exist in real life. The vast majority of us are driven by the essential motives and desires while the intelligence rationalizes already made decisions.
- robertlagrant 2y ago> Isn't it fascinating how even people that consider themselves rational and intelligent like developers would be happy doing work for a company for free in exchange for internet points? Is this how you'd characterise open source software contributions as well (minus the points, of course)?
- brudgers 2y agoIs that better or worse than the traditional route, wealth by birthright?
- layer8 2y agoHobson's choice?
- pdntspa 2y agoI remember reading Atwood's blog around the time he launched it, and from his writing, he seemed genuine in his desire to build a tool that would help developers write code. This was also right in the middle of the original gamification craze, so of course internet points lol
- DanielHB 2y agoI remember reading his rants about just how bad the current situation was (which was a terrible website called "developers exchange" or public phpBB internet forums). Never underestimate the passion derived from sheer hatred of the status quo. Also his backup strategies around 2008 were quite interesting.
- cyberax 2y ago> "developers exchange" It was "expertsexchange.com" initially. Then they disambiguated it by renaming to "experts-exchange.com", just to be clear.
- voidmain0001 2y agoAwesome! I didn't know that about the domain name.
- smitelli 2y agoAh yes, perpetually flagged by every corporate firewall that did substring keyword matching on DNS queries. Incidentally, the amount of sheer content-masking garbage on their pages was what originally prompted me to install and learn (IIRC) Greasemonkey and a bunch of DOM/CSS stuff.
- pdntspa 2y agoAh, good ol' Expert Sex Change I don't miss that site one bit!
- sien 2y agoBut my oh my, it was so much better than experts exchange.
- zem 2y agoi feel like a lot of people have forgotten that that was its initial impetus, literally "let's get together and collectively build a better expertsexchange without the dark patterns trying to monetize your need for answers"
- SnorkelTan 2y agoStack overflow was an invaluable resource for me as a developer. I got a wealth of knowledge about a bunch of thorny problems I was encountering with out paying anything. The people who answered the questions I had were able to help far more people than they ever could have individually without SO. I’m having a hard time being upset about his financial windfall. It’s really only a bait and switch for people who answered questions with some other unstated expectation than helping others or receiving help.
- kijin 2y agoIn aggregate, Stack Overflow probably saved developers far more time than anyone ever put in, and saved companies all over the world far more money than the founders made in their exit.
- milesward 2y agoCreating more value than you capture has ways been the jam.
- keybored 2y agoYou just need to be working class to fulfill that dream.
- fakedang 2y agoAlso saved AI companies far more effort in gathering correct code for training.
- kijin 2y agoNot just correct code, but also a whole bunch of incorrect answers, as well as votes and comments to help weigh the trustworthiness of each answer.
- belter 2y agoYour argument has nothing do to with the point I was trying to make.
- zem 2y agofor a lot of us it wasn't the reputation, it was the idea of a gift-economy help desk and knowledge base. i enjoyed being a part of it, both helping and being helped, back when it was still good.
- kstrauser 2y agoThe reputation was fun, but I saw it as a proxy for how much I’d helped people. That always felt good.
- LeonB 2y agoYou might find this hard to believe, but I find that helping other people is genuinely rewarding all by itself. And it’s rewarding in a way that money can’t buy. Stack Overflow helped it to scale really well, too. You could answer a question, just once, and over time it could help dozens then hundreds then thousands of people. It’s easy to be cynical, but actually that was really awesome.
- belter 2y agoAs I said above, your argument has nothing do to with the point I was trying to make. You call it cynical I call it 1.8 Billion.
- keybored 2y agoYeah I haven’t seen anyone in this thread being able to fit the square of selfless contribution to the developer knowledge pool with the for-profit round hole of StackOverflow.
- davidcalloway 2y agoI sometimes feel this way even about Google maps. On some level when I make a small contribution I'm aware that everyone doing so profits Google quite nicely. But then again, I think that I've profited quite a bit from having Google maps as a resource, far more than the contribution I've made. It feels much better to look at the fact that it's a place that people help share information useful to each other, which happens to profit a large company, than to only focus jealously on the fact that said large company has hit upon a way to monetize the sharing of this information. Both things are true, and whether you think it's great or horrid really is a matter of perspective.
- keybored 2y ago> You might find this hard to believe, but I find that helping other people is genuinely rewarding all by itself. And it’s rewarding in a way that money can’t buy. So Jeff took that money instead.
- weinzierl 2y agoThere was a time when StackOverflow already had considerable size and it still felt as if Jeff knew and moderated every single post. This is what made StackOverflow in my opinion. The excellent moderation in the beginning resulted in excellent quality. Now, not taking away from the other early moderators, Jeff was definitely a huge part of it and one thing is for sure: He busted his ass off for this site and he deserves the reward.
- scotty79 2y agoI don't think anyone deserves 1.8bln reward. Norman Borlaug perhaps. But good for Jeff. I think SO was immensly societally and economically valuable and most people who actually got 1.8bln are less deserving than Jeff is.
- davidcalloway 2y agoI cannot help but think of Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven... "Deserve ain't got nothin' to do with it".
- belter 2y agoI would say Jon Skeet busted his ass off :-) https://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet https://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet
- arp242 2y agoNo one is forcing anyone to do anything, and everyone always knew what they were getting themselves in to. It was always a deal where everyone wins. That you don't like that choice for yourself is fine. No need to be so negative, dismissive, and cynical about how other people choose to spend their free time.
- belter 2y agoIt's no different from creating an open source project, profiting from the free work of thousandths and then cash in a la JBoss or Redis. If he wanted to give back he could have started with John Skeet.
- scarface_74 2y agoDo you think that the expertSexChange site that it was designed to replace had a more appealing business model?
- badpun 2y agoWait till you see YouTube.com, they literally got millions of people to make videos for them, most of them for free!