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"Mistreating" is pretty strong language, don't you think? In the worst case, someone thought they were going to get an answer, and they didn't...IMO that deserv

"Mistreating" is pretty strong language, don't you think? In the worst case, someone thought they were going to get an answer, and they didn't...IMO that deserves a shrug, not a public campaign to take them down. I do appreciate your thoughtful comment.

jaggederest 13y ago
It functioned as a black hole of good advice, adding no useful value beyond acting as a gatekeeper, and made it more difficult to find actual help by both a) attracting answers that would have been publicly posted and b) obscuring search results making it more difficult to find other sources. They had a net negative effect on the world.
GrinningFool 13y ago
Not sure about the impact of the so-called public campaign(which - to my perspective - just seemed to be a few comments) - I just stopped using EE when the SEO crap started. I didn't start seeing SO links until some time later - until then I trawled through forums and other less centralized resources for answers. The problem I had with SE wasn't really the paywall (or fake-out paywall in case of below-the-fold). Well: okay, that was a problem in that once it started, I stopped using them. But I didn't blame them for that by itself - they have to make money. I just felt that the value EE gave me in terms of the quality of its answers didn't justify the money they wanted, so I moved on. The problem was really the spamming. This is when I took an active dislike to EE - paywall content completely consumed the first page or two of search results to any technical question I searched for on Google. Or link farms that fed into paywalled EE content. That was when I started getting actively annoyed about it - but this was several months after I stopped using it. I think "mistreating" is perfectly appropriate in this context - because during this window, it actually cost me valuable time to not use EE. Time spent paging through results, clicking on link farms before I realized they were link farms -- time that could have been spent actually working on the solution of my problem of the moment. I'm not disputing that the CEO did what he thought was necessary. But there's no questoin that he picked wrong, and it's a little disingenuous to claim that the fact the company needed to earn money somehow made his choice more acceptable.
300bps 13y ago
In the worst case, someone thought they were going to get an answer, and they didn't...IMO that deserves a shrug, not a public campaign to take them down. Sure, and a single spam message is a minor nuisance worthy of hitting the delete key. Until you get a sea of 1,000 daily spam messages drowning out the 100 legitimate emails you get per day. Slimy is slimy regardless of the scale the slime is distributed. Experts Exchange's business model was based on repeated and systematic abuses of people's time. That's worth more than a shrug.
- t50 13y ago
  Ever hear of a spam filter, Mine works extermely effective..
  - itsybitsycoder 13y ago
    Unfortunately Google doesn't let you manually filter out sites from your search results anymore. At one point EE was the only site on my filtered list...
    - t50 13y ago
      Exclude a word -query Add a dash (-) before a word or site to exclude all results that include that word. This is especially useful for synonyms like Jaguar the car brand and jaguar the animal. jaguar speed -car or pandas -site:wikipedia.org Tip: You can also exclude results based on other operators, like excluding all results from a specific site. FROM: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/136861?p=adv_operators&hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/136861?p=adv_ope... See how hard that is?
      - qu4z-2 13y ago
        You're suggesting I type -site:experts-exchange.com as part of every google query I make? I mean, it's a handy way of refining searches, but I don't want to have to type out my spam filter every time I search...
  - 13y ago
jrochkind1 13y ago
Well, sure, it may be that a competitor engaged in some highly negative marketting against them, and I can see how that would be annoying if you were them. But are you really surprised that their strategy made the public mad? If someone clicks on a google result, that looks like it's going to give them an answer to their question -- only to find that they have to pay to get the answer (whether that's true or whether you've tricked them into thinking that) -- are you truly surprised they would consider that mistreatment? you think it was only a competitor that convinced people to consider that mistreatment? There's a reason that Google requires that the content shown google -- which ends up in the google results summary/excerpts -- is the same content shown to the public. Because people get really mad and feel mistreated when it's not. If the content was 'really' there just hidden to make someone think it was paywalled -- maybe that helps you technically get around Google's rules (that's between you and Google), but it obviously won't make people any less mad about it (to the extent it works anyway).

jaggederest 13y ago

It functioned as a black hole of good advice, adding no useful value beyond acting as a gatekeeper, and made it more difficult to find actual help by both a) attracting answers that would have been publicly posted and b) obscuring search results making it more difficult to find other sources. They had a net negative effect on the world.

GrinningFool 13y ago

Not sure about the impact of the so-called public campaign(which - to my perspective - just seemed to be a few comments) - I just stopped using EE when the SEO crap started. I didn't start seeing SO links until some time later - until then I trawled through forums and other less centralized resources for answers. The problem I had with SE wasn't really the paywall (or fake-out paywall in case of below-the-fold). Well: okay, that was a problem in that once it started, I stopped using them. But I didn't blame them for that by itself - they have to make money. I just felt that the value EE gave me in terms of the quality of its answers didn't justify the money they wanted, so I moved on. The problem was really the spamming. This is when I took an active dislike to EE - paywall content completely consumed the first page or two of search results to any technical question I searched for on Google. Or link farms that fed into paywalled EE content. That was when I started getting actively annoyed about it - but this was several months after I stopped using it. I think "mistreating" is perfectly appropriate in this context - because during this window, it actually cost me valuable time to not use EE. Time spent paging through results, clicking on link farms before I realized they were link farms -- time that could have been spent actually working on the solution of my problem of the moment. I'm not disputing that the CEO did what he thought was necessary. But there's no questoin that he picked wrong, and it's a little disingenuous to claim that the fact the company needed to earn money somehow made his choice more acceptable.

300bps 13y ago

In the worst case, someone thought they were going to get an answer, and they didn't...IMO that deserves a shrug, not a public campaign to take them down. Sure, and a single spam message is a minor nuisance worthy of hitting the delete key. Until you get a sea of 1,000 daily spam messages drowning out the 100 legitimate emails you get per day. Slimy is slimy regardless of the scale the slime is distributed. Experts Exchange's business model was based on repeated and systematic abuses of people's time. That's worth more than a shrug.

t50 13y ago
Ever hear of a spam filter, Mine works extermely effective..
- itsybitsycoder 13y ago
  Unfortunately Google doesn't let you manually filter out sites from your search results anymore. At one point EE was the only site on my filtered list...
  - t50 13y ago
    Exclude a word -query Add a dash (-) before a word or site to exclude all results that include that word. This is especially useful for synonyms like Jaguar the car brand and jaguar the animal. jaguar speed -car or pandas -site:wikipedia.org Tip: You can also exclude results based on other operators, like excluding all results from a specific site. FROM: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/136861?p=adv_operators&hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/136861?p=adv_ope... See how hard that is?
    - qu4z-2 13y ago
      You're suggesting I type -site:experts-exchange.com as part of every google query I make? I mean, it's a handy way of refining searches, but I don't want to have to type out my spam filter every time I search...
- 13y ago

jrochkind1 13y ago

Well, sure, it may be that a competitor engaged in some highly negative marketting against them, and I can see how that would be annoying if you were them. But are you really surprised that their strategy made the public mad? If someone clicks on a google result, that looks like it's going to give them an answer to their question -- only to find that they have to pay to get the answer (whether that's true or whether you've tricked them into thinking that) -- are you truly surprised they would consider that mistreatment? you think it was only a competitor that convinced people to consider that mistreatment? There's a reason that Google requires that the content shown google -- which ends up in the google results summary/excerpts -- is the same content shown to the public. Because people get really mad and feel mistreated when it's not. If the content was 'really' there just hidden to make someone think it was paywalled -- maybe that helps you technically get around Google's rules (that's between you and Google), but it obviously won't make people any less mad about it (to the extent it works anyway).