
Expert Exchange gets narky after snub from Q/A site review - dolphenstein
http://www.experts-exchange.com/blogs/EE-Tech-News/B_3955-Question-Answer-Sites-A-Case-of-Mistaken-Identity.html
======
danilocampos
It's impressive to me that when the great minds behind Experts Exchange make
their voice known, they talk just like the kind of slimeballs you would expect
behind such an operation.

It's shameless. In their shoes, I'd just sit there quietly, take the snub on
the chin, keep plying my spammy trade, and have enough introspection to
realize that the reason no one wants to talk to me is because I've created one
of the shittiest, most user-hostile content abominations in the history of the
entire internet.

I guess the dangerous thing about dirtbags is that they have no idea they're
dirtbags. My only comfort in all this is the knowledge that Stack Overflow has
delivered us from evil.

~~~
fleitz
No kidding. If they displayed an answer or two I might have even considered
joining up. When EE was prevalent in Google Search results, it would always
make me upset when one of the results looked promising and then I realized I
had clicked an EE link. StackOverflow and its success should be a lesson to
EE.

~~~
alextingle
Just scroll to the bottom. The answers ARE there.

~~~
bennysaurus
Only when you directly link from Google. If you try to search anything on the
site itself? It tries to con you into signing up.

~~~
dansingerman
It's easy to find the link via google: search for 'site:experts-exchange.com
"<title of question>"'

~~~
tjogin
That's not easy.

------
kpanghmc
_One of the big things that makes Experts Exchange unique is a patented system
that requires askers to select their best answer. Most Q &A sites
(StackExchange included) let the community vote for the best answer, when
really the person whose opinion matters most is the one who asked the
question._

StackOverflow allows for both community voting AND for the original asker to
indicate which answer was the best answer. I suppose the only thing it doesn't
do is require the asker to select a best answer like EE does apparently.

Also, how in the world did they get this process patented?

~~~
MicahWedemeyer
I somehow manage to lose more faith in the patent system every day. I thought
it was at zero, but somehow it's lower.

Perhaps I should patent my faith system that allows for negative numbers.
Seems reasonable...

~~~
mkr-hn
I store faiths in ints so they roll over to positive and I feel better for a
while.

~~~
mkramlich
I have a patent on that. Pay up.

(had to get that out of my system. feel better now.)

~~~
mkr-hn
Stored my bank balance in an int too. You'll have to wait for it to roll over.

------
treeface
_Q: What makes Experts Exchange different from other Q &A sites on the
Internet?

A: Most of our nearly 3 million solutions revolve around specific technology
questions, and the majority of those have a sense of urgency to them._

Huh? How does this differ from StackOverflow? Other than, of course, that
those answers are hidden behind a paywall.

 _We switched to a premium model to keep out of the Venture Capital business
(been there, done that, got the t-shirt). Companies like StackExchange
couldn't do it without the VC cookie jar. Where's the model? Huh, Spolsky?
(I’m sorry. Did that slip out?)_

Maybe he hasn't noticed the ads running on every SO page? Or perhaps he
doesn't know anything about how careers.stackoverflow.com's billing works
(<https://careers.stackoverflow.com/billing/checkoutnew>)?

I hate saying things like this because it puts me into a position where it
looks like I'm saying too much sooth, but it kind of looks like the EE guys
are starting to miss the paradigm shift that's occurred and probably will
continue to occur in "long-tailed" question and answer sites.

~~~
bmuenzenmeyer
By the way, if you scroll ALL the way down to the bottom of any question page
you do see the best answer. Apparently they bank on the fact most people won't
scroll that far and get discouraged by the "paywall" on the top. The Google
crawler requires the text to be visible I've heard

~~~
Vivtek
Only if your referrer is google.com. If you link from here, for example (e.g.
[http://www.experts-exchange.com/Virus_and_Spyware/Anti-
Virus...](http://www.experts-exchange.com/Virus_and_Spyware/Anti-
Virus/Q_26636990.html)) you really will just see the paywall.

~~~
bmuenzenmeyer
Thanks, I did not know that nuance.

------
AndrewO
Jees. Talk about sour grapes... If EE wants to know why they weren't picked
for the Q&A site pow-wow while StackExchange and Quora were, they should look
no further than themselves. Let's take a look at one of their current top
answers:

[http://www.experts-exchange.com/Virus_and_Spyware/Anti-
Virus...](http://www.experts-exchange.com/Virus_and_Spyware/Anti-
Virus/Q_26636990.html)

30 day trial?! Subscribe now?! Who do they think they're kidding? Or really:
who actually uses this thing? Before the other sites came along, it was merely
a nuisance that showed up in your search results, mixed in with something that
would actually help. (Interestingly, now the problem is StackExchange content-
farms...)

This is exactly the kind of thing that inspired StackOverflow (a fact this
post even references!) and it's a key factor in its massive growth and
adoption on the part of fed up programmers and sysadmins.

~~~
phlux
>...Or really: who actually uses this thing? ...

The image I have always had of the userbase of EE is a middle aged vet wearing
a vest with a lot of pins and smells of cigarettes who sits in his trailer on
The Internet Forums answering computer questions such as "Which is better - a
3 1/2 inch floppy or 5 1/4 inch floppy" and is known to the other folks in the
park as "The Computer Guy"

His goto answer for anything being "Well, you're gunna hafta go ahead and
reinstall windows, because your monitor driver is out of date which is why you
cant change the resolution back to 640x480"

I also imagine them to be the type of person who is still hanging onto that
386 with the bad math co-processor because its still worth something.

~~~
jaysonelliot
My father, and his father before him, were military veterans in their middle
age.

I lived in a trailer park in Iowa when I was a kid.

Not sure why you think those are negative things.

~~~
phlux
Imagine John Goodman from Lebowski....

Frankly, that was the image I had in my head - I wasn't trying to offend or be
negative. Maybe you're sensitive?

~~~
hogu
isn't being negative exactly what you were trying to do? unless you were
trying to conjure up positive images of experts exchange.

------
bmelton
"What do YOU think makes this site different from other Q&A sites?"

Why, at one time, I was one of the highest ranked volunteer 'experts' on the
site, having amassed the EE equivalent of a zillion karma, or whatever they're
called, and then, literally, the first time I go there to ask a question,
they're all of a sudden premium? I literally helped build that site's content,
and not only got nothing for it, but I have to pay to see the answers that I
populated the site with?

~~~
pbiggar
Atwood talked about exactly this, calling it "digital sharecropping":
[http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/08/are-you-a-
digital-s...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/08/are-you-a-digital-
sharecropper.html)

What amazes me about StackOverflow is that Spolky and Atwood figured so much
of this out at the start.

~~~
docgnome
I'm not so sure that it's they figured it all out at the start. It's probably
more to do with mantra of "Experts Exchange with out the evil" Just figure out
what EE did, and then do the exact opposite.

~~~
pbiggar
> Just figure out what EE did, and then do the exact opposite.

Even if that was the mantra, that's figuring it out from the start.

That wasn't the mantra though; EE was only one of the influences.

Watch Joel's tech talk (www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWHfY_lvKIQ) - they really did
figure a ton of it out at the start. See Joel's tech talk

------
juddlyon
Experts Exchange is borderline spam, to put it mildly. They hide the answer at
the very end of an enormous scroll (of course after they try to sell you via a
pop-up). A reasonable user has no clue that the answer is on the page.

When I have made it all the way down, I have received a quality solution
perhaps 5 out of 500 times.

Stack Overflow realized there was a quality problem with the existing tech Q&A
services and ate their lunches. Ditto for Quora. Hopefully they can keep it
up.

~~~
dmfdmf
I always considered it spam. I wish Google allowed me to globally exclude the
domain from my searches. Moreover, given what I could read it didn't look
anymore promising or valuable that the various sites that come up, discuss a
problem to a dead-end with no resolution (usually posted by a clueless
Microsoft "MVP"). No thanks.

~~~
gstamp
... I wish Google allowed me to globally exclude the domain from my searches
...

You may have missed the news about this plugin for Chrome:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nolijncfnkgaikbjbd...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nolijncfnkgaikbjbdaogikpmpbdcdef)

------
thesethings
They're clearly freaked out about by Stack Exchange. They attacked them for
needing a "VC cookie jar," but couldn't actually saying anything bad about
their sites.

This was also surreal: "Sites like Quora seem more like Tumblr or other blog-
esque formats."

Wait. What?

Many here on HN have only ever seen EE when clicking on it _accidentally_
because of their SEO-fu.

The rise of more modern Q&A sites combined with Google's renewed commitment to
punishing automated/weak/content means this must be a challenging time to be
EE.

I admit I'm not mad at that.

------
jarin
Honestly, I'm just shocked to see that there's a real person behind the site.

I don't know why, but whenever I stumbled across an EE answer through Google,
it's always seemed like a place full of crystallized ancient knowledge.

~~~
icco
They are based in San Luis Obispo, CA, and I have met a few people that work
there. It's interesting to hear all of the complaints from people who work
there right out of college (Cal Poly is near by). Apparently they are not very
nice to their developers and many burn out after a year and quit.

~~~
htp
Speaking as a former straight-to-EE-out-of-college employee:

I didn't experience any of the "not very nice"-ness you're referring to- my
coworkers there were and are actually really nice folks.

I did, however, leave because of burnout.

~~~
jrockway
Did you get an office, free food, an on-site gym, etc., etc.? If not, then
that's what people call "not very nice" these days, at least for programmers.

~~~
htp
I didn't get a personal office, but barring a handful of individuals, nobody
did. Everyone worked in shared space. No cubes though- just adjoining desks,
grouped by department.

Everyone got free snacks and drinks, and free lunches delivered to the office
on Fridays. There wasn't an on-site gym, but the company paid for memberships
to a local gym. There was also the beginning of a game room with a ping-pong
table, a foosball table, and a dartboard.

The perks were by no means Google-scale, but they were nice nonetheless.

------
guywithabike
These guys tried to recruit me out of CalPoly. One of the most disgusting,
slimy companies on the internet, and the people behind the site are every bit
the sleezeballs you think they are. I believe this blog post adequately
supports my assertion.

(Also, who can resist the old internet joke about their original domain name?
expert sex change dot com made for good chuckles in Staley's class.)

~~~
icco
The sad thing? Staley founded them and still thinks that they are a good
company.

------
harold
From the article: "One of the big things that makes Experts Exchange unique is
a patented system that requires askers to select their best answer."

A great example of how broken the patent system is.

~~~
ncavig
I'm pretty sure that's how Yahoo! Answers works as well, no?

~~~
sibsibsib
and stack overflow...

~~~
damncabbage
Stack Overflow doesn't "require" it; it's encouraged, and people tend to look
down on you if you don't.

(Enforcement via culture instead of by rules.)

Having said that, given the amount of abandoned questions on EE, I don't think
their patent is quite working for them.

------
rdtsc
> At Experts Exchange, we know who we are.

Oh no they don't. Judging by their attitude these people are in complete
denial as to how they are perceived by others.

> Experts Exchange Experts are unpaid volunteers who give of their time to
> answer questions on the site.

Right. So if they are unpaid volunteers wouldn't they rather help the
community and provide the same answers at stackoverflow?

If I volunteer to serve soup on Saturday in a soup kitchen to the homeless,
why in the world would I want to have some third company take my soup and sell
it to the same homeless people and keep the profit.

And then of course, why would they name their site something that sound
exactly like "expert sex change"? Wasn't their domain listed as r-rated in
some porn filtering software a while back.

~~~
EEvangelist
I do actually. 9000 answers at EE (since 1998), 2.5K flair at SO (since last
year)

~~~
rdtsc
1998? I guess if you are just as good, you should have had over 32000 answers
then not just 9000 ;-)

Besides who cares to know if hp driver from '98 is compatible with windows Me
anymore.

------
peteforde
I find this exceptionally funny.

EE held me hostage for so many years, working as a young independent
contractor in a small town with far fewer tech resources to draw upon...
there's just no sympathy for their particular kind of slimeball tactics.

I remember that they even experimented with cutting off answers right before
the end, not to mention saying that they had an answer when it fact they
didn't. There was certainly no way to get your money back.

Thanks Google, Hacker News, GitHub, Quora, Ruby on Rails and even Facebook for
making my life so much better in less than a decade.

------
dablya
This is the first time I've read anything on that site without having to
scroll all the way down.

------
pi_neutrino
Hang on, Experts Exchange has actual people behind it? I thought it somehow
spontaneously congealed out of the random spam swirling around the Internet,
like how the Sargasso Sea forms in the dead zone of the North Atlantic out of
the detritus and flotsam there. It's where content goes to die. The notion
that some sort of malevolent intelligence fuels it is a disconcerting one.

~~~
jarin
I think it's more like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the Sargasso Sea at
least has really cool looking seahorses :)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch>

------
AndrewWarner
I have tried very hard to get an interview with ee for Mixergy and got
rejected.

------
rhizome
Rupert Pupkin, anybody? Experts Exchange is not a small site in general, and
has been around for like 15 years (per the article), so I'm a little curious
how this guy got so jaded on VC such that he "got the t-shirt."

Is EE really run by movers and shakers riding deals every few years in their
spare time? Until finally tiring of the rigamarole and retiring to their first
love, Experts Exchange. Isn't it more likely that they've hired various "been
through an acquisition and/or IPO" people to try and give them business ideas
over the years? No wonder the site is so annoying, these people would have
been bleeding the founders dry while suggesting a full campaign of popup ads
that worked a peach a few years back at Ask Jeeves. That doesn't work, so they
move on to the next guy who totally worked at Twitter in the early days.

I'm thinking lashing out at the world is at the unpaid end of the spectrum of
BizDev.

------
dolphenstein
There is also an earlier cry baby article titled "Blekko Bans Experts
Exchange....And No One Cares". Too funny!

[http://www.experts-exchange.com/blogs/EE-Tech-
News/B_3838-Bl...](http://www.experts-exchange.com/blogs/EE-Tech-
News/B_3838-Blekko-Bans-Experts-Exchange-And-No-One-Cares.html)

------
statictype
Possibly the first time I've gone to an EE page and didn't have to scroll down
several pages to see content.

------
philjackson
"Most Q&A sites (StackExchange included) let the community vote for the best
answer, when really the person whose opinion matters most is the one who asked
the question."

I'm not sure that's correct. Didn't the person ask the question in the first
place because they didn't know the answer? In the case of a technical
question, someone might give them an answer which produces the correct output
but in a terrible way, the person who asked the question might be tempted to
mark this as the best answer and move on.

------
FirstHopSystems
::SOB SOB:: looks like someone felt left out. Whoa! no VCs? I would just love
to see what would happen if they found out I didn't pick them for my kickball
team. Looks like Fortune magazine in the end all for what's right in this
universe.

Pretending like you took part in the interview. I can only describe it to my
self as...Desperation.

Maybe this is whine your-self some more recognition tactic? I've been out of
the game since I was 6 years old, I can't be sure.

------
wickedchicken
I wonder if the author is even aware of the ill will people have towards EE?
There are not many sites people _clamor_ to remove from Google listings.
You're probably doing something wrong if they are.

------
erik_p
I plan on asking quora what "narky" means

~~~
FirstHopSystems
Make sure you use a real fake name. Not a fake fake name.

~~~
endian
or a Fake name... <http://caterina.net/archive/000622.html>

------
arohner
When the article didn't load, it took me a minute to remember I'd blacklisted
experts exchange in my hosts file several years ago. Apparently I'm still not
missing anything.

------
jaredstenquist
Experts Exchange was the first site I blocked with the new Chrome plugin from
Google. Spam.

------
sudhirc
I am a registered expert and contributor and they reward me by locking me out
if I do not contribute for a month. I cannot even see my own answers. With
competition around I do not think they will be able to hold people hostage for
long.

~~~
docgnome
What exactly is keeping you there? Sounds a bit Stockholm syndrome to me.

~~~
sudhirc
Well you can say that. I am a system admin in my day job and technology area I
work is not really hot area in other places.

~~~
dolphenstein
Switch over to serverfault.com. Less evil!

------
cfontes
God I love how Stackoverflow kick those guys buts, and they don't even know
their concurrency enough to tell bad things about it, most things they said
it's theirs super duper feature is already at Stack.

~~~
Elrac
I think that by "concurrency" you meant "competition." Are you perhaps a
German speaker?

------
uvTwitch
It's a little sad that expert sexchange felt the need to respond to an
interview they weren't asked for in such an immature manner, and yet they
still haven't realized that they weren't invited to the party because their
content is paywalled, littered with ads, and generally considered spam by most
users who are seeking answers.

------
kunjaan
As a student, StackOverflow was one of the best thing on the internet. I would
be willing to even pay for its content.

------
_debug_
There was this time when Google used to let me remove links from the search
results (personalization, I presume) and I would RELIGIOUSLY remove
expertsexchange.com. It also used to fill me with warmth to know that several
other geeks probably did the same! :-)

------
knowtheory
Wow! I just read something on Expert Exchange and i didn't even have to pay
any money!

Expert Exchange is actually a legit company? I had no idea. I don't think i
know anybody who's ever used it. Hell, i've never _heard_ of anybody who's
ever used Expert Exchange.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>Hell, i've never heard of anybody who's ever used Expert Exchange.

I was an expert there about, oh I don't know, 8 years ago¹ - I got a months
free premium account for answering and getting X amount of points in a month.
Next time I went back (in common with another commenter here) I couldn't
generally access solutions despite having provided some of those solutions
myself.

However, I did find that it was, when I joined, the best place to get in depth
computing answers. My last question there was in 2009 and I still got a pretty
useful answer. I've used it since for a couple of specific searches.

Having looked there once again it still looks like I might get useful answers
there.

Sample of questions being asked now:

    
    
        16/02/11 	500 	Google Maps to be placed in a MS... 	Tavasan65 	0 	PHP Scripting... 	
        16/02/11 	500 	RHN registration 	AXISHK 	0 	Red Hat Linux 	
        16/02/11 	500 	Multiple domain names, multiple... 	bradpink 	0 	Lotus Domino Email... 	
        16/02/11 	125 	traceroute from Mac (Net Utility... 	squidzink 	0 	Apple Networking 	
        16/02/11 	500 	Oracle SQL query updating the... 	jvera524 	0 	Microsoft Excel... 	
        16/02/11 	250 	Regex to find relative filenames... 	crysallus 	0 	Regular Expressions 	
        16/02/11 	50 	Simple scalar tool 	Tom3333 	0 	Programming... 	
        16/02/11 	500 	Syncing Outlook Notes with iPhone 4 	richeyd 	0 	iPhone 	
        16/02/11 	500 	jquery thickbox tranaparent window ... 	dev09 	0 	JavaScript 	
        16/02/11 	500 	NetApp SAN Choice 	pitchford 	0 	VMware*
    

Their novel way of using points seemed to work pretty well at eliciting good
responses. One of the things I did was to build up a reserve of points when I
was volunteering with a computer refurb/education charity in case I had
specific questions about some obscure piece of donated hardware. The system
seemed to emphasise well that most people could trade knowledge.

StackOverflow started 12 years after Experts Exchange.

\---

1 - just looked it up via Google, 2001-06-06 was my join date apparently.

------
omarish
I resisted clicking the link because I thought I would have to sign up for an
account.

------
democracy
EE is the only site I would block in my google preferences, a really annoying
one...

~~~
rome
That was the first site I blocked. I've been wishing for Google Blocklist
every time "experts-exchange" came up in a Google search.

------
rbanffy
"best and brightest technology minds on our site, including over 300 Microsoft
MVPs"

That's an odd measurement of what it takes to qualify as one of the "best and
brightest technology minds"...

To be fair, I once was an MCP.

------
cft
I am mostly a coder, but running a small start-up, I encountered a need to
configure 3com and HP switches and routers (VLANs, routing, BGP, etc). Those
devices have a complex OS, and the documentation is usually cumbersome. To my
surprise, the only site where I got exact answers on this was experts-
exchange. Google did not help, stackoverflow did not help. I was about to hire
an consultant for a few thousand, but discovered that I could do it myself,
paying about $30/mo for e-e.

~~~
EEvangelist
Yes, you are typically the kind of person I help at EE...

------
pconf
What I'd like to know is how does EE always show up so well in Google search
results? Even when there are several better results to a particular technical
search query EE always shows up near the top of Google's results.

I can't speak for anyone else's queries but from my perspective EE is just
Google spam, and their "answers" aren't worth the HTTP traffic.

------
bensummers
Amusingly, you have to have a paid subscription to be able to comment on their
blog. No wonder it doesn't have any comments.

------
jonursenbach
Trying to load this on my phone and I was greeted with nothing but a pay wall.
Snarky indeed.

------
Dramatize
I went to ExpertSexchange.com and was very disappointed.

------
satori99
I sought out and installed a user-script addon for my favourite browser,
specifically to remove EE from search results for technical questions.

EE, I hate you.

------
sergimansilla
EE (ok, and W3Schools) was the main reason I started using Chrome's 'Personal
Blocklist' extension. I am loving it.

------
hackerku
"I guess the dangerous thing about dirtbags is that they have no idea they're
dirtbags."

This needs to be said again.

------
sgdesign
Seeing their site, I have no trouble believing they've been around since 1986…
I mean, 1996.

------
MortenK
I was kinda expecting to get hit by a paywall in order to see that post.

~~~
thenduks
Try to comment :)

------
AlexBlom
Go back to spamming Google and stop complaining

------
GrandMasterBirt
Wait, forgot to mention that now that google created the chrome anti-google
results plugin, expertsexchange is in trouble (missing hyphen there somewhere)

------
drstrangevibes
Whenever I am searching for an internet solution, if I see a result coming
from the EE domain I automatically pass over it, so why shouldnt the reporter?

