
Stack Overflow Community Reacts Against Stack Overflow Company - nsoonhui
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/387599/3834
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wtmt
1\. Company builds a product with no/minimal ads and uses community
involvement to grow.

2\. Company adds more ads to the system to earn money.

3\. Company adds more "features" to make money (for expenses and...to make
money).

4\. Company reduces consulting with the community because the purpose of the
community, to grow the site and userbase, has been served well and the
community's interests conflict, at times, with the company's commercial
interests and directions.

5\. Community complains that this is not good.

What would people expect after this? That the company would have a change of
heart and go back to how it was years ago? I don't think that's easily
possible nor desirable by the company. I'd expect that responses, or the lack
of appropriate responses, would be to have those who are unhappy to leave.

~~~
zepolen
Circle of life. Stack Overflow came about as a direct solution to Experts
Exchange that was doing exactly the same thing.

So now it's up to someone to build a new solution which will last for another
10 years until they too decide to cash in.

Probably the smart move from Stack Overflow is to secretly create the
competitor themselves.

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throwaway3627
I deleted all of my Stack accounts several months ago. Not all, but the vast
majority of programmers on there exude too much ego, self-centeredness, know-
it-allitry, unreasonableness, are too petty and/or are too unpleasant to make
me either a. want to ask questions or b. want to answer them. It's not a
community but a Twitter soundbite competitive résumé sausage factory. I'd
rather struggle and figure out whatever the issue is myself.

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goatinaboat
It’s clear now that Stack Overflow was a bait-and-switch play:

1\. get the high quality content through gamification of writing answers and
moderating the site with points and badges

2\. once a critical mass of content was captured and the competition
eliminated, tell the original creators they were no longer welcome

3\. profit with a new, ad-friendly userbase

~~~
lioeters
"Bait-and-switch" implies an intentional plan from the beginning.

What I suspect typically happens is that a company starts with good (or
neutral) intentions, grows a community that trusts them. Then it becomes
profitable, and a new set of C-levels and managers swoop in with a completely
different set of values, to exploit and squeeze more profit out of the
community they never contributed to building.

~~~
captainbland
Sure but the original intention makes no difference to the user base,
particularly those who've put in a lot of time and effort for little reward
other than community kudos.

I suppose there's a deeper problem of the difficulty of ethical profitability
over the long term. We seem to see this same pattern again and again with
startups that seem to grow out of their good intentions, particularly with
social media or otherwise community driven websites.

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jmkni
I feel like I'm out of the loop here, what specifically have SO done to piss
people off? What are the actual features they have they added that people are
annoyed about?

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tabtab
They need some good old-fashioned competition to light a fire under their
butt. The Network-Effect is poison to competition, but I hope somebody finds a
way around it.

