
In defense of Experts Exchange - andy_adams
http://andyada.ms/blog/in-defense-of-experts-exchange/
======
jerf
There's this sort of idea that I can't wrap my head around, which is that if
there's this fact A, and you don't like it, you can somehow make it not true
by... explaining in detail why it is true. OK, so EE has its reasons for doing
what developers didn't like... the end result is still that developers didn't
like it. You explained that fact quite well, but I'm at a loss as to how
that's supposed to translate into a negation of what you just explained.

I see this argument pattern bizarrely often online. It boggles my mind.

~~~
andy_adams
So the fact A is that developers didn't like EE. I don't dispute that. What
I'm arguing is that sometimes it's worthwhile to take a nuanced view of
something that goes deeper than the surface level.

In this case, I'm asking you to consider EE from a different perspective, and
whether what they did was worthy of scorn. My hope is that you'll soften your
hatred of EE, but I don't expect everyone to come to that conclusion. Not
every argument is a total negation of the counter position, I suppose.

~~~
jerf
I don't care about their internal motivations. Why should I? It's not as if
what you said is even all that different than what we thought anyhow.

Now, I realize that may sound like snark, but I actually mean it on a deeper
level than that. _Why_ should I care about their internal motivations? EE
chose how they would interact with me. It was their choice. They get to live
with the consequences. If they had wanted to be perceived differently, it's
incumbent upon EE to decide to treat me differently. It's not my
responsibility to try to "understand" them, any more than it is my
responsibility to interact with any other company in exactly the way they
want. That's freedom, for the both me and EE.

You're equally free to defend them, and I was free to read the defense out of
curiosity, which is why I'm posting at all. But the end result is the same; I
know EE by their actions, and the result is what it is.

~~~
andy_adams
I get what you're saying, but haven't you ever made a judgement on someone
only to later learn more about the circumstances around them and then modify
your judgement?

To me, EE is not deserving of the campaign against them. They're not patent
trolls - they built a business that added value, and then they applied some
spammy marketing to it. Patent trolls deserve to be taken down with a passion.
EE, not so much. Thanks again for your comments.

~~~
jrs99
Yes, that happens all the time. But in that case, there was already a judgment
about someone and then I got to know them and then realized that what was said
about them was either gossip, or the person changed.

The thing about EE is that it is not gossip. People hate EE and they don't
hate it because someone told them to hate it--they already had come to that
conclusion on their own. I always hated EE and when I talked to other people
about it, I found out they also held the same opinion, many times a fierce
hatred of it. There was no campaign to build the hate; the hate was already
there, all discovered independently by frustrated coders looking for an
answer.

Maybe the evil intentions of EE were not real. But there are moments when I am
coding when I want to tear all of my hair out. That emotion is real and won't
be forgotten.

~~~
andy_adams
Admittedly, they generated plenty of frustration for me, as well. SO has
changed everything, but it's kinda funny to me that when we encounter content
that isn't free, we have a visceral reaction against it. Yet when people
demand our software be free, we'd laugh them to scorn. Thanks for your
comments.

~~~
qu4z-2
> Yet when people demand our software be free, we'd laugh them to scorn.

Speak for yourself. I think free software is pretty much a net good. It's a
shame we're not at a point yet where it's the status quo; I'm glad it is for
content.

------
mehrdada
I joined Stack Overflow about 4.5 years ago and I was one of the top 10 all
time users on Stack Overflow for a couple years or so, so I have seen my fair
share of SO/EE arguments on the web. What's interesting is that not a single
time I'd seen EE defended by anyone but its current or former employees.

Also, the blog post mentions "I think their public, negative campaign against
Experts Exchange was excessive, mean-spirited, and at the very least immature
and silly. Admittedly, it worked – they’ve achieved their goal, and “death to
EE” became the rallying cry." I don't really get this. Aside some joke-like
mentions in the podcast or blog entries, Stack Overflow did not really do
anything to harm EE specifically. They were just a better QnA platform and
much closer to what users wanted. No one rallied against EE just to kill EE;
whatever was done was to build a better QnA system and _that_ succeeded.
Experts Exchange is just something users don't want and it never reacted to
the presence of Stack Overflow and Stack Overflow eventually ate their lunch
in its entirety. Stack Overflow's mission was to become the wikipedia of
programming questions, which meant EE-like sites would eventually die should
SO becomes successful, but EE was never a specific target of a tactic or
anything beyond joke-like verbal _attacks_. It was, however, a good model of
"how not to do things"; something you'd learn from.

~~~
gknoy
My impression from reading Atwood's writings on the origins of SO was that
being Not Experts Exchange was a primary initial goal.

~~~
mehrdada
I know that was what he said, but I believe that sentence was just a simple
way to communicate their vision like using "XYZ done right" to describe a
company. He did not particularly care about Experts Exchange IMO.

------
swang
What did EE do that was worth of scorn?

Wasted our fucking time: I want to know how to do X, if you want me to pay for
that knowledge fine but don't do some shitty thing like cloaking the site so
people would get tricked into paying while at the same time gaming Google to
get these higher results.

Manipulated people into paying for the site: It's high up on Google so it must
have the answer right? OK I guess I'm going to have to pay or else my ass gets
fired.

But don't pretend like what EE did was "OK" because some Matt Cutts video said
it was. Obviously it was not because it got hit and sank in rankings. SO
wasn't what killed EE with it's "negative campaign," it was already well hated
before SO came onto the scene.

Good riddance.

~~~
andy_adams
If you're running a company with 50+ employees that is having success on
Google, and Google explicitly tells you what you're doing is OK, you'd
probably make a similar decision.

At the time of the Matt Cutts video, EE was serving the full content to users
who clicked through - the answer was just buried at the bottom of the page.
Crummy, sure. Definitely not going to win them many friends. Worth getting so
angry over? Not in my mind.

Clearly you disagree, and that's fine. I think your mind is made up and I
don't have hopes to change it.

~~~
taproot
> If you're running a company with 50+ employees that is having success on
> Google, and Google explicitly tells you what you're doing is OK, you'd
> probably make a similar decision.

Google doesn't click on the links it shows, your customers do. What google
says is "OK" for them, is not always going to be "OK" for your potential
customers.

Try giving this recent submission a read:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6399494](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6399494)

Also, what does running a company with 50+ employees have to do with making a
similar decision? You'd think with more employees you'd be more likely to find
the guy that stands up and says "this is fucking retarded what are you
thinking"

> At the time of the Matt Cutts video, EE was serving the full content to
> users who clicked through - the answer was just buried at the bottom of the
> page. Crummy, sure. Definitely not going to win them many friends. Worth
> getting so angry over? Not in my mind.

I don't know about you but when I have no idea how to fix a mission critical
bug and need a fix ASAP and I search google but all I get is pages and pages
of links to your site which "doesn't give me the answer" i get pretty pissed
off, especially because you're giving google the answer in order to clutter up
all those results pages and rank relevant.

And I say "doesn't give me the answer" because, just so you know, I never knew
there was answers at the bottom of the page until jeff pointed it out.

Look, I get it questions and answers are just metrics on a screen to you, but
questions and answers to the users are MUCH much more. You broke google,
fucking with us when we least needed a fucking with. And to me, that is worth
getting angry over.

------
300bps
_What great evil did Experts Exchange do?_

The very question that is asked is a straw man argument. Nobody is saying that
Experts Exchange did some great evil (ex: genocide). What they did was build a
business model based on taking from many and giving to nobody. Then to
preserve that unsustainable business model, they used various underhanded
search engine manipulations.

To me, they were jerks. When Google came out with the ability to filter
domains from your personal results, they were the first (and only) domain I
added.

Even to this day, they will show you the answer if you scroll through 5 pages
of gunk. They didn't do any "great evil". They're just slimy and I get a bad
taste in my mouth anytime I think about them. But at least they added that
hyphen to their name at some point because for a while I couldn't NOT see it
as ExpertSexChange.com.

~~~
andy_adams
> What they did was build a business model based on taking from many and
> giving to nobody

I'm not sure where you get this. EE treats those answering questions really
well, and nobody is forcing them to answer. Nobody forces EE's customers to
pay for access to their content, either. Behind the curtain they actually have
a lot of happy customers (and question answerers).

They didn't fit the "open source" model programmers like, but for the people
who need advanced help with Cisco routers or for the experts winning trips
around the world, they're actually not such a slimy company. Thanks for your
comments.

~~~
300bps
_I 'm not sure where you get this. EE treats those answering questions really
well_

From Wikipedia:

 _At Experts-Exchange, users are awarded points for answering questions_

Out of curiosity, what is the exchange rate between Experts Exchange points
and reddit karma?

Wikipedia goes on...

 _Experts (those who have reached 10,000 points overall and maintain at least
3,000 points per month)[15] and subscribers get the benefit of using the site
's search engine without limitations and no ads are shown._

What's the hourly rate on this work? Please explain how "EE treast those
answering questions really well". Because it seems to me these people are
doing work worth in the neighborhood of $100 per hour. You tell me how much
they're actually making.

~~~
andy_adams
I'm not sure I understand your point. You seem to be thinking that people
answering questions deserve to be paid - as if they're being forced into
answering at all. Experts on EE are answering questions for the same reason
users on SO are.

> Please explain how "EE treast those answering questions really well"

If you're a top contributor to EE, you get flown to really nice places and are
treated like a VIP by EE. Not everyone reaches this level, but those who do
get a really nice perk, in addition to the benefits of answering questions in
general.

~~~
300bps
_You seem to be thinking that people answering questions deserve to be paid_

If I may first pay you a compliment, you are very adept at twisting words and
building up straw man arguments.

What I actually said was:

 _What [Experts Exchange] did was build a business model based on taking from
many and giving to nobody_

Your response was then:

 _EE treats those answering questions really well_

But we both know this isn't true. It pays the vast, vast, vast majority of
question answerers in worthless or near worthless points. The average question
answerer, including the ones that get flown places and "treated like a VIP" is
probably actually getting less than minimum wage for their work. That's hardly
being treated "really well".

So we come back to my original statement. Experts Exchange built their
business on taking from many and giving to nobody. If you want me to add an
exception of, "giving to nobody except giving scraps to the very top of people
whose time they were taking to build their business on" I would be amenable to
that.

~~~
andy_adams
My friend, I do not intentionally twist words. I'm just trying to wrap my head
around how you can be upset that:

\- EE isn't paying people money for the answers they provide

 _when_

\- those persons answering questions are doing so with no expectation of being
paid in anything but points.

It's no different than Stack Overflow, but you seem to think otherwise. Just
trying to figure out what you're getting at.

~~~
300bps
_It 's no different than Stack Overflow_

You're being consciously or subconsciously obtuse.

With Experts Exchange:

1\. People answer questions for free

2\. People pay for the answers

3\. Google and other search engines are gamed

The only thing that is the "just like Stack Overflow" is #1. The other two
items are absolutely nothing like Stack Overflow. As I said, Experts Exchange
takes from many and gives to nobody. Stack Exchange takes from many and gives
to all. You really can't possibly not see the difference.

------
ceejayoz
Where's the defense? "Experts Exchange were dicks to users, but it was to make
money!" isn't a defense.

~~~
andy_adams
Being "dicks to users" is based on what, exactly? My point is that for EE to
not be "dicks to users" in the eyes of the tech community would mean to stop
charging for their content.

I linked a video of Google's Matt Cutts explaining that EE wasn't violating
their guidelines. So their infraction was hiding content below the fold.
Hardly an evil infraction, and not worthy of an attempt to sink them as a
company.

EE added real value, and their longevity is evidence that some people are
willing to pay for that value.

~~~
codezero
Unfortunately it's really hard to get any reasoned discussion about Experts-
Exchange on Hacker News. Ideologies are difficult to discuss. I'm reminded of
this:
[http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html)

It's part of the (on average) Hacker News identity to hate Experts-Exchange
and any resource that exposes itself in search results but requires sign-up to
access.

Anyone who tries to discuss something that is opposed to the HN identity is
quickly downvoted, they learn from the feedback and damaged karma not to
bother and you are left with only comments/commenters that say things they
know will get positive feedback/karma.

edit: I'm actually surprised that I got downvoted just for mentioning this, it
only serves to reinforce the reality of this ideological position.

~~~
mullingitover
> "exposes itself in search results"

'exposes itself' is a great euphemism for gaming the system in order to get a
search engine ranking that it couldn't earn on its merits. I remember the
first time I ran across EE, it was about fifteen seconds before the time I
blocked EE in my google search results.

~~~
codezero
Sorry, I didn't intend to play semantic games here. I don't think anyone has
disagreed that they gamed search results. I meant only to call out the
difference between sites that explicitly don't end up in search results
(because they don't want to) versus those that actively try to get indexed.

Hacker News requires a log in, but generally, HN links and discussions don't
show up in search results, this is, if I understand correctly, intentional. So
my statement was based on the idea that people on HN hate signing up for sites
that require login, but which also end up in search results they find, which
is why it's OK for HN to require a sign up for discussion, but not for
Experts-Exchange.

------
speeder
To me, EE being gone is good riddance, I HATED THEM, HATE HATE HATE HATE.

Most people might wonder: "why?"

It is because ANYTHING I searched on Google resulted into 3 pages of their
links, sometimes sorta hidden (ie: sites that republished their links for
example), and it resulted in:

When it started, I wasted lots of time visiting their links, seeing the stupid
paywall, and getting pissed off with the wasted time.

As I learned to not click on their links, then I clicked on other sites that
republished their links.

As I learned to filter those out, I had to expend time looking carefully
several pages of google results searching for what I really wanted.

So I hated them, because not only they provided nothing for me (I was not
willing to pay for whatever crap they were selling, I never saw a answer on
their site, since I never noticed the "below the fold" or whatever that means,
thus I still don't have a clue on the quality of whatever was their answers,
so to me it was just a scam), they also wasted my time, they made me lose my
valuable time working around their shady SEO tricks.

When they were gone from google, and thus made me stop wasting my time, I was
really happy.

And if a employee or ex-employee come complain that I want the demise of their
employer, all I can say is: "Don't work for people that do evil stuff." (this
also apply to anyone working for cigarrete manufacturer, US intel and DoD, US
private army contractors, some certain divisions of game publishers, some
banks, and so on...)

~~~
toki5
Man, this comment went from "fair frustration" to "crazy train" mighty quick.

Blanket statements like "don't work for [entire industry X]" generally make
you come off as a little tin-foil-hattish, just FYI. :-)

------
jawns
EE isn't the only company to have faced this conundrum (either you give away
the content for free, in which case it shows up in search results and you get
lots of search traffic, or you put it behind a paywall, in which case it
doesn't show up in search results and you get no search traffic).

In fact, pretty much any company whose primary asset is content faces a
version of this problem.

My take on it? This falls into the category of "3\. Come up with a totally new
business model":

I've often thought that it would be useful to have a search engine that
indexes paid content and then allows users to filter it out.

So, suppose you're searching for the answer to a particularly difficult
programming question.

You might start out with the filter on: "Only show me free results."

And then if your search turns up nothing, you might turn the filter off, and
maybe you'd discover that for a couple of bucks, you can get access to the
answer to your question.

So maybe EE, or some other enterprising company, could build a search engine
that fits their monetization model, rather than relying on a bunch of search
engines that don't.

~~~
mkr-hn
The trouble with this is that everyone with the answer has an incentive to
answer for free on an open site. The incentive is that others will do the same
if they feel like they got value for their time.

How does a paid site compete with something like Stack Exchange? SE has most
of the answers. People appreciate finding the answer they needed. Many of them
will turn around and pay it forward by answering questions or improving other
answers. It's the same reason Wikipedia killed paid encyclopedias.

~~~
jawns
Actually, anyone who actually wants to get compensated for their expertise or
research has an incentive to answer on a paid site, rather than a free site.

I think we're now starting to realize the repercussions of this emphasis on
free, free, free content online.

Look at newspapers. Nobody wants to pay for news anymore, and consequently,
the journalism industry is in shambles. And that's a real shame, because in
decades past, a robust metro newspaper used to be one of the best checks and
balances against government corruption and slimey business practices.

The model you propose -- freely sharing information so that everyone benefits
-- has its merits, but it's no way to make a living, and consequently the pool
of contributors gets whittled down to those who can afford to contribute
without any expectation of compensation. But what if the person who has the
expertise to answer a tough question isn't in that pool?

~~~
CodeCube
If the person that has the expertise doesn't want to answer the question for
free ... then the free market will deem access to that knowledge more
valuable, and his consulting fees will increase. Everything is an ebb and
flow. When the "value" of some knowledge goes down due to what some might call
oversupply, the value of other knowledge will go up because it is not shared
freely; those who need that knowledge or service will then be willing to pay a
premium for it since they could not find it elsewhere.

You're right that some things that were great ways to make a living are
starting to become less-so. The answer is to simply to not try to make a
living at that thing that is undervalued by the market. If enough providers of
that service leave the supply pool, then the value will increase and compel
the supply to return.

The market doesn't have an obligation to support journalists ... if no one
wants to pay them because they can get information on twitter, reddit, and
facebook ... well, that's how it is :)

------
debaserab2
That’s far from the worst atrocity that EE committed. What sent me over the
edge with Expert’s Exchange is the fact that to sign up for a “free trial”,
you had to enter in credit card information. That kept me away from the site
for a long time, until one day when I was desperate for an answer and it
appeared that EE might have one. I bit the bullet and quickly signed up, not
reading over the fine print. Next month, lo and behold, I see a charge on my
credit card for a full membership rate at EE.

Shame on me for not assuming this would happen when I signed up, but shame on
EE for implementing this scammy business practice in the first place. What
percent of EE’s revenue model came from unwitting free trial memberships that
rolled over into “VIP” memberships?

~~~
andy_adams
I was under the impression that pretty much any company that took CCs on
signups assumed you would stay signed up until you explicitly
cancelled...there are tons of examples of beloved companies doing this, so I
don't agree that this was so bad. I suppose they could've made it clearer...

~~~
jackmaney
And that impression is completely wrong.

Gods, how I wish I had enough karma to downvote on HN...

~~~
andy_adams
I just went through a list of companies that I personally use or have
considered using that take CC information on signup. All but one assume that
you'll be continuing unless you explicitly cancel. I don't think my impression
is so far off the mark, but eh, I could be wrong.

------
Zarathust
I really didn't care much about the google spamming if by some magic they
managed to get me right answers. The only problem with EE is that I couldn't
get anything from their spam, only links to pay for the answer.

SO solved this problem by making it free. You could ask questions for free as
well. I don't know if SO tries to game google, but their answers are pretty
close to the top results most of the time. I don't mind, because they are
usually relevant.

~~~
andy_adams
Depending on when you visited, you'd probably need to scroll to the bottom of
the page to get the answer and/or visit the cached version of the page.
Annoying, yes. Worthy of scorn? That's up for debate.

SO ate EE's lunch on the SEO front, to be sure. And I agree with Google that
SO offers better experience for searchers, so I'm glad they're winning that
battle.

~~~
chrismcb
You keep saying that they weren't really worthy of scorn, and yet they were
fairly scorned industry wide BEFORE stackoverflow came into existed. So, yeah,
obviously they did things that people disliked. I never saw a "kill EE"
campaign. Yes, SO wanted to "not be EE," because everyone hated EE. I don't
think a lot of people decided to hate EE because SO said to, they hated EE
because of EE's practices. Did EE change their practices? Perhaps, but it was
too soo, too late. And I never found out, because I blocked them as soon as I
could.

------
cgtyoder
From personal experience, I can tell you why I detest EE - their dark pattern
practices. I did sign up and pay for a subscription, and it was not a ripoff.
However - when I went to cancel it, I had to SEND A FAX (or use snail mail,
IIRC) to stop payments. That's right, you could not cancel online. See ya
later!

------
ajanuary
> Imagine you’re running EE in 2009 [...] You also have a new competitor who
> is doing everything for free. You have a few options, as I see it

This makes it sound like EE resorted in gray hat SEO at least in part as a
response to SO. A quick Googling found they were doing this from at least 2006
[1]

[1]
[http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=11974](http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=11974)

------
Lazare
I think the core point being made is that Experts Exchange was not _evil_.
They were _annoying_.

They had a business model that was never great, but worked okay until someone
came along with a better one. At which point they messily exploded because
nobody (with the exception of a few employees and top contributors) actually
liked them. They kept popping up in google results, but when they clicked on
them it never actually solved your problem. Their web design was annoying, the
cloaking was frustrating, and the actual content was often terrible. It often
read like a transcript of a tier 1 tech support call that had been conducted
in another language then translated into yours via google translate, and it
was rife with errors or the classic "I have a problem with X...nevermind, I
fixed it!", which is the sort of thing which fills everyone who finds it later
because they're having the same problem with RAGE. Did our friendly sexchange
experts deserve that rage? Not really, but it _was_ their fault. EE was setup
such that the average user saw tons of poor quality answers; SO was setup such
that the average user saw good quality answers. Ultimately that comes right
back to the door of the devs and designers.

I'd sum the blog post up as "Hey, Experts Exchange was annoying, mostly
useless, and vaguely scummy, but it was staffed with good people doing the
best they could, and it wasn't outright evil!" And he's right. Evil is a high
bar; EE never even approached it.

What they were was incompetent. And SO called them out on it, and Andy is hurt
by it. He has every right to be, but it doesn't change the fact that EE was is
effectively gone, and deservedly so. And 99.99% of the people who ever tried
to use EE will be pleased.

------
Spoom
Experts Exchange was and is adversarial to _its own users_. Not Google, its
own users. By charging for freely available content, they are making their own
users suckers. That's enough to avoid using it, in my opinion.

------
scj
What needs to be considered is what EE was good at. EE's speciality, as I
recall, was not tutorials, but quick problem solving advice. And it was very
Google friendly. It usually looked like it had a good answer whenever it
showed up.

That being said, when a person is looking for advice on how to fix a problem,
they are probably frustrated, stressed, or both.

So imagine going to Google for help to see a really promising link appear in
the results (not in the advertising section), and the content is hidden behind
a pay-wall. Almost like seeing an oasis in the desert only to realize it is a
mirage.

I don't know about other users, but I'd rather not see a link. From my
perspective, all EE did was make Google less effective.

Some might say that "there is no such thing as pad publicity." I would argue
that isn't true at all. The above describes my first and only reaction to
hearing about EE. And due to not being able to see the content, I lack any
personal positive stories on the matter.

------
austinz
There's a particular XKCD comic that used to constantly reflect my experience
while searching for the solutions to technical problems in one particular area
of expertise ([http://xkcd.com/979/](http://xkcd.com/979/)).

Seeing EE answers gumming up the search results (especially if you didn't know
the trick) was at least an order of magnitude more frustrating.

I'm glad EE treated its employees well, but the way a company treats its
employees can be completely unrelated to the way a company treats its
competitors, or its potential or actual employee base. And it seems pretty
clear that EE treated its potential customer base so poorly that Stack
Overflow was able to tap into latent frustration and anger and quickly corner
the market on community technical Q&A. The hatred for EE grew up organically,
and I doubt Joel's campaign did much more than giving direction and a voice to
pre-existing resentment.

~~~
Splognosticus
Oh man. The alt text. I want that _so much_ now. When I think of how much more
useful support forums would be if the first post in the thread were basically
a wiki...

------
nonchalance
One thing I wish the article pointed out was that Stack Exchange isn't
profitable whereas Experts Exchange is (this was true earlier this year; SE
may be profitable now). In general, it's difficult for a bootstrapped company
selling a service to compete with VC-funded free services, and choices have to
be made.

~~~
mehrdada
Note that Stack Overflow itself was not VC funded for a good amount of time.
They only raised VC funding when they wanted to push StackExchange towards
other areas outside programming. They certainly were not VC funded from the
beginning.

------
nswanberg
There is Experts Exchange, the company, and then there's experts-exchange.com.
The majority of folks complaining have had a bad experience with the latter,
while you are defending the former.

A reasonable person should be able to separate the two, and so it's nice to
hear more about the people behind the website. But that doesn't make the user
experience on the website any better than it is on StackOverflow, and it is
unlikely to change the fact that most folks memory of experts-exchange.com
before StackOverflow existed is one of disappointment and deception, which is
why it was so effective for Jeff and Joel to rally users around the notion of
being the anti-experts-exchange. (I think they themselves made a distinction
between the site and the people behind it at least once, and talked about
having a conversation with an experts exchange employee or two. And it's worth
remembering that that was only one of the few ways they desscribed their
vision: [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/04/introducing-
stackov...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/04/introducing-
stackoverflow-com.html))

So if you want to humanize your friends, keep writing about them, and I'm sure
you'll get readers. It sounds like an interesting story. But it seems mistaken
to expect that alone to counteract people's impression of the site itself. If
you want to hear people say nicer things about experts-exchange, either listen
to the folks who are happily using it and ignore the hate, or genuinely listen
to complaints, find a way to make more people happy.

------
6ren
When experts exchange first launched, it seemed like a clever concept to me,
in the abstract; a way to get paid for your expertise (although you couldn't
buy anything with it except answers to other questions). And they take a wee
percentage (but they're not greedy).

However, in practice, I only ever asked one question (they gave a free $50
credit at launch, worth 5 questions or something). I got a great answer - I
think better, and more insightful than I'd get on SO. But it was a horrific
experience, and I never used it again after that.

I guess, in the bigger picture, they were trying to monetize people's goodwill
in helping each other. Helping feels more valuable when done purely out of
goodwill; money can devalue. Not sure how big that factors in their failure -
but to the extent it created a competitor, it's a real factor. Your customers
disliking you is serious business problem.

Although it's the way of the world, there's something hollow and unsatisfying
about being motivated primarily by money. Most entrepreneurs - e.g. Elon Musk
- have visions bigger than themselves and their riches. Many of the best
developers, like many academics, believe everything should be free, or at
cost.

I'm inclined to think the above is the root problem, and the SEO tactics etc
are just a symptom. But hard to say.

~~~
codezero
Out of curiosity, how was asking a question and getting a great answer a
horrible experience? Or more specific, what made you not want to ask more
questions?

~~~
6ren
In general, I always felt a bit nervous about money being involved -
additional importance, security issues, etc. A certain seriousness, a
complication distracting from the actual technical issue.

But specifically, I couldn't log back into my account to mark the answer as
correct. The help people gave me a new password a couple of times, but they
didn't work. I eventually realized it was hopeless, and gave up. Later, I
tried again to find the question and reward the person (this time paying out
of my own pocket), but couldn't find it after intensive searching, many
keywords etc. It seems that my question and the answers had been lost.

I feel that the initial problem was to do with money being involved -
additional security around logging in, because mistakes with money are so
serious. Maybe combined with teething troubles. It was very very strange and
bizarre.

In contrast, I haven't had such problems with StackOverflow (or reddit or HN
etc), so other purchases online.

I still feel bad about this, after 10 years. :(

~~~
codezero
Very interesting, thanks for clarifying!

~~~
6ren
Just a quick thought: the help I got on EE was different from SO, so maybe
there's a niche for EE. Let me describe the help:

I'd been stuck, and pretty much given up. A friend wondered if there was
someone I could ask - but it was virgin territory, no one had done it before,
and so no one would know. I only tried EE because what the hell. I didn't get
a _specific_ answer, but _" X does that - why don't you see how X does it?"_
This was a clever, insightful, lateral point of view. I didn't think I'd be
able to use X's technique - but amazingly, it turned out I could! The
suggestion might seem obvious in hindsight, but it wasn't to me. It was just
what I needed to hear - a great answer.

I'd describe this as "micro-consultation" or "micro-mentoring", which differs
from SO's aim of specific concrete answers to specific concrete questions. I
think the money-motivation of EE helped encourage someone to spend a few
moments creative thought on my question. It's the kind of insight you get from
having many contributors to an open-source project - but who's going to
bother, for the case where only one person benefits?

So... I do think this _kind_ of service, sort of halfway between SO and full-
on consultancy, is valuable and has a role - but micro, like Amazon's
mechanical turk. I think Google Answers tried this (now defunct). A little bit
like that logo design site SO used ([http://99designs.com.au/logo-
design/contests/logo-stackoverf...](http://99designs.com.au/logo-
design/contests/logo-stackoverflow-6774)) - a sort of eBay for consultancy,
but a micro version.

Because consultancy is very question-specific, they'd be almost no question
reuse (unlike SO), which also fits with a money motive (i.e. people love
karma/fame; but if not available, fortune is OK). So I'm suggesting a micro-
consultancy facilitation site, where the _asker pays the answerer_ and EE
takes a wee percentage (a similar amount to crowd-sourcing sites). A different
niche from SO.

Maybe I should try EE again next time I'm stuck!

------
lutusp
The Fact is that Experts Exchange is a parasitic organism. It games Google
search results, then, when people click their links, they're confronted with
an infamous paywall instead of anything useful. If Expert Exchange had any
self-respect at all, they would survive by way of advertising alongside freely
available content, as their successful competitors do.

I've been filtering all Experts Exchange content from browsing results for
years now, and as time goes by, the justification only gets stronger.

------
clintcparker
”San Luis Obispo is an extremely desirable place to live and there are only a
handful of tech jobs in the area.”

This is definitely not true anymore (the handful of jobs part).

Shameless plug: I work in SLO for Mindbody and we're hiring.
[https://www.mindbodyonline.com/company/careers](https://www.mindbodyonline.com/company/careers)

------
agoandanon
It's better than an amateur sex-change...

------
hsmyers
One thing I've always wanted is to be able set a browser switch to delete any
returns from EE. There probably is a way that I've been too distracted to
find. BTW, my only reason for such dislike is the 'Ooh ooh---we've got the
answer' behind our paywall. Just don't like paywalls...

