
StackOverflow - Garbage
http://codebetter.com/gregyoung/2012/03/02/stackoverflow/
======
spolsky
Co-founder of Stack Overflow, here.

A lot of the people who were involved in some way in Experts-Exchange don't
understand Stack Overflow.

The basic value flow of EE is that "experts" provide valuable "answers" for
novices with questions. In that equation there's one person asking a question
and one person writing an answer.

Stack Overflow recognizes that for every person who asks a question, 100 -
10,000 people will type that same question into Google and find an answer that
has already been written. In our equation, we are a community of people
writing answers that will be read by hundreds or thousands of people. Ours is
a project more like wikipedia -- collaboratively creating a resource for the
Internet at large.

Because that resource is provided by the community, it belongs to the
community. That's why our data is freely available and licensed under creative
commons. We did this specifically because of the negative experience we had
with EE taking a community-generated resource and deciding to slap a paywall
around it.

The attitude of many EE contributors, like Greg Young who calculates that he
"worked" for half a year for free, is not shared by the 60,000 people who
write answers on SO every month. When you talk to them you realize that on
Stack Overflow, answering questions is about _learning_. It's about creating a
permanent artifact to make the Internet better. It's about helping someone
solve a problem in five minutes that would have taken them hours to solve on
their own. It's not about working for free.

As soon as EE introduced the concept of money they forced everybody to think
of their work on EE as just that -- work.

~~~
HardyLeung
Joel, I think you have the right product and are sincere about this, but I
believe Greg Young, the author of the article, brought up a few good points. I
read the article and one analogy quickly came to my mind. EE was like
AltaVista/Lycos/Infoseek, and Stack Overflow is like the younger version of
Google.

\+ The latter is clearly superior in technology (or content) to the other.

\+ The latter makes user happy by giving them real value, whereas the former
focused on milking the users for revenue.

\+ The latter made promises to the users (Google: "don't be evil", SO:
"contents are the community's property") and the users liked it.

\+ Last but not least, "the competition is only a click away" (Google). "You
can start a SO competitor in a heartbeat" (SO).

So far so good. But guess what happened to Google? They got good. They got
big. They were no longer satisifed with being the king of search. They started
Plus. They started saying "If you don't want people to know what you do, you
shouldn't do that anyway". They now want your data to be shared among their
properties and you cannot opt out. They got jealous of Apple. They got freaked
out by Facebook.

I don't doubt Google started with a conscience, and a genuine focus to build a
better search engine. They succeeded. Wildly. But except for the most hard-
core Google believers, I doubt that many people still trust their "Don't be
evil" mantra in its absolute. Frankly, do people even say that with a straight
face outside of comparison with Microsoft?

I love SO and believe in the integrity of Joel and Jeff and others. You guys
really rock. But time will change. Tide will change. A tidepool that is fun
for little kids could become a fatal trap the very next day (sadly, this
happens often). So please keep the warning in mind.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
> Frankly, do people even say that with a straight face outside of comparison
> with Microsoft?

This week we saw a story in which YouTube (a Google subsidiary) took away a
guy's ad revenue because they claimed that someone else had the copyright on
random birdsong. [http://boingboing.net/2012/02/27/rumblefish-claims-to-own-
co...](http://boingboing.net/2012/02/27/rumblefish-claims-to-own-copyr.html)

Do people still say "google aren't evil" with a straight face _inside_ of
comparison with Microsoft these days? I'm curious what Microsoft has done that
compares in, say, the last year.

It's not 1999 any more - the biggest company in the world is is Apple (
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/aug/09/apple-pips-
ex...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/aug/09/apple-pips-exxon-as-
worlds-biggest-company) ) , Oracle owns Java and bundles crapware browser
toolbars with the download, and Facebook and Google, not Microsoft, are
totally dominant in their markets despite Microsoft's efforts. And if you're
looking for a company with really crappy practices, there's always Paypal/ebay
<http://www.regretsy.com/2012/01/03/from-the-mailbag-27/>

~~~
kwamenum86
That's not evil. Youtube is at the mercy of "big content " and they have to
comply with copyright claims. They're not in the business of judging whether a
something can be copyrighted - that's a job for the courts.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
Well, I disagree. it is evil.

The argument they "have to comply" due to third parties and presumption-of-
infringement laws may be true. If it is, that is beside the point; that
doesn't make it a good action.

~~~
tatsuke95
If you consider content removal _evil_ , I think you need to get your moral
compass re-calibrated. There are numerous adjectives that could describe that
specific situation, like _stupid_ or even _lazy_ , but _evil_ is a stretch.

When the Feds can come kick your doors down and haul your servers out for non-
compliance, what choice do you have? Not to say Google is _good_ either, but
the content mess isn't really their making. In fact, their technology has
helped more than hindered the spread of content.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
> If you consider content removal evil, I think you need to get your moral
> compass re-calibrated.

That's not what I consider in general, and I don't know how you came up with
that reading. I agree that it's not the worst action ever in the history of
evil (and most was just stupid), but you're not even arguing the right point:
_the content was not removed_ , it was a case of automated copyright abuse for
profit:

> "Youtube informed me that I was using Rumblefish’s copyrighted content, and
> so ads would be placed on my video, with the proceeds going to said company"
> [http://c4sif.org/2012/02/youtube-identifies-birdsong-as-
> copy...](http://c4sif.org/2012/02/youtube-identifies-birdsong-as-
> copyrighted-music/)

~~~
icebraining
First, why is Youtube evil? Wasn't the company that abused?

Second, how is Youtube evil for doing whatever they want with the ads in their
own website? Sure, they claimed it was due to copyright reasons, but that
doesn't make the action in itself "evil".

Google has done a lot of crap, from the obvious privacy problems to outright
fraud in Kenya. Picking on that seems ridiculous.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
> First, why is Youtube evil?

Youtube decided to enter into this agreement with Rumblefish. If Youtube
outsouces this abuse, does that put Youtube in the clear? See also: US Army
outsourcing to Blackwater, etc. It's too easy to avoid responsibility this
way.

~~~
icebraining
OK, but there wasn't actually any abuse. Youtube owns the site. Putting ads on
some page and giving part of the proceeds to any company they want is
completely within their rights.

Is Reddit evil because they don't share the ad income from a particular thread
with the submitter? Doesn't make much sense to me.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
If reddit offered you ad income (and there are people who make a living off
making youtube videos), then took it away arbitrarily and gave the income
instead to a big company that claimed copyright over random bits of birdsong,
without any appeal process, then that would be at best broken and at worst
abusive, yes. Also, not much sense either.

~~~
icebraining
Youtube only offers you ad income if you register (and are accepted) with
their Partner Program, not to any random user. The uploader said _and so ads
would be placed on my video_ , which means there weren't any ads before, which
means he wasn't offered any ad income. They took nothing away from her/him.

The only thing YT did was:

1\. Add ads to a video hosted on their website

2\. Take part of their ad income and give it to some company

I fail to see what exactly is evil about this.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
Falsely asserting copyright over bits of nature is OK for you then?

~~~
icebraining
That was Rumblefish, not Youtube. Youtube was a _victim_ of that, since they
could've made more money by simply putting the ads and not sharing them with
Rumblefish.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
And we're back here: <http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3659864>

------
AndrewHampton
Although one key difference is that EE kept the IP for all the user generated
content, but all SO content is licensed under Creative Commons.

<http://stackoverflow.com/faq#editing>

~~~
davweb
This is the key difference. Stack Overflow has said all along that it would
always be free and the CC license helps ensure this.

If Stack Overflow decides to put up a paywall anyone could simply put up the
all existing content, perhaps using one of the existing open source SO clones
[1]. Also, a lot of the current Google traffic would instead go to one of the
sites which currently legitimately repost all of SO's content [2].

[1] [http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/2267/stack-
overflow-...](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/2267/stack-overflow-
clones) [2] [http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/24611/is-it-legal-
to...](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/24611/is-it-legal-to-copy-
stack-overflow-questions-and-answers)

~~~
simonbrown
Of course, it would have to link back to StackOverflow with a non-nofollowed
link.

------
AshleysBrain
EE always had a dubious way of trying to game Google search results: have a
huge advert at the top making the content you're after look blocked, followed
by tonnes of filler content, then if you scrolled a looooong way to the bottom
there's the content in tiny text. So Google sees the content but most humans
don't. That always annoyed me sufficiently to block all EE results from search
and just use SO. SO have always stated they're trying to be helpful to
searchers and make the internet better. IMO it's no wonder they thoroughly
beat EE and I'd think twice about trying to bring anything like EE back...

~~~
davorak
EE only had the at content at the end of the human reachable page because
google was going to stop listing pages that had content only for the robot. Or
at least that is what I remember happening.

~~~
recursive
And at least at some point, it was only there if you had a google referer
header. Navigating directly to the page in question wouldn't show you the
answers at all.

------
krohrbaugh
The author's main point is that Expert's Exchange (EE) was very similar to
StackOverflow (SO) _until they needed to push up the S-curve_ from a
profitability perspective.

It's a valid concern since SO has relied on organic growth to fuel the
necessary returns in order to sustain its current business model and then,
more recently, attract VC investment.

What the author doesn't mention is what makes SO slightly different. One is
the licensing of the content, which the founders never fail to point out (and
has already been rehashed here by several SO defenders). This is hand-waving,
since they couldn't have achieved early success to drive organic growth
without this license in place (this isn't the first time EE has been compared
to SO).

The other more interesting difference is the StackExchange (SE) platform and
accompanying business model, which basically seeks to expand into an unending
array of fields and topics. SO & SE are likely to continue being pleasant to
use, as long as the StackExchange strategy is working and growth can come from
the platform extension. Should that strategy fail, SO will need a growth
strategy that provides the returns VCs expect and the company may be forced
into some inconvenient (to users) "monetization" decisions.

Essentially, when you're a for-profit company, it's easy to "do no evil" when
you're rapidly growing organically. EE is only one such example, it's easy to
come up with dozens of others: About.com, Mahalo, Digg, SourceForge, Google,
Ben & Jerry's, etc. Unless it's a non-profit or maybe one of those new
B-Corps, history provides much more support for skeptics. After all, company
leaders aren't just acting out of greed, they are _legally obligated_ to do
what is best for shareholders.

That said, let's hope Mr. Spolsky hasn't forgotten about his rant on platform
providers who don't realize they are platform providers
(<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Platforms.html>). He should be able
to make the case that treating users (which are like developers in a
traditional software platform) fairly will drive more long-term shareholder
value than tactics employed by those that came before SO.

Only time will tell.

~~~
yuhong
There is a reason why Google IPOed using dual class stock.

------
chrisaycock
> The idea of the business model is to pay people in imaginary currency and
> sell what they do for real currency.

That "imaginary" currency has paid off for me. I got my most recent job
through Stack Overflow.

~~~
NickLarsen
We're happy to hear you got your job with a little help from us! If anyone
else would like an invite to our careers site, you can use this link for an
invite. <http://bit.ly/A4CB1B>

Additionally we are actually hiring people to join the careers team right now,
<http://bit.ly/xXXewd> <\- developers, and <http://bit.ly/xthTi9> <\- product
manager.

I am curious how your Stack Overflow activity was used in the hiring process.
Would you mind sharing?

~~~
chrisaycock
> I am curious how your Stack Overflow activity was used in the hiring
> process. Would you mind sharing?

I searched on the Careers 2.0 site and applied to a few firms that looked
interesting. For one particular firm, my SO profile acted as my "code sample".
I got the offer within a few weeks and have been happy ever since.

I'll note that most of the firms that advertised on your Careers site were
very serious about software quality. The signal-to-noise of excellent
companies was far beyond what I've traditionally gotten through a head hunter.
I suspect that's because any hiring manager who actually knows what SO is has
probably had tons of hands-on experience with coding.

------
SideburnsOfDoom
> The whole point here is to make as much money as possible. If the goal were
> to build up community you wouldn’t need to set them up as a centralized
> broker of the information, it would be distributed

I don't think that he totally gets StackOverflow.

SO has demonstrated to my satisfaction that:

1) they care about other things besides money. Sure money pays the bills, but
if you do it right, being rich and famous is just a by-product to the main
accomplishment.

2) SO works far better at _getting stuff done_ in the technical QA space than
any "distributed" model so far tried.

------
pbreit
This article is terrible. First, it assumes no learning since the EE days.
Second, comparisons to EE are weak (I do't remember EE ever being good).
Third, he picked a lousy target (StackOverflow) given that FogCreek is well-
known for having extreme patience, especially as it relates to
commercialization. Finally, he leaves out the primary business: the
StackExchange software being offered to customers to create other verticals.

------
peeters
20k+ rep SO user here. Early on, reputation was an incentive to answer a lot
of questions because with it came graduated permissions. At 20k, there is no
further incentive besides vanity. So reputation isn't an incentive for me.

Has that stopped me from answering questions? Absolutely not. Joel is bang-on
that my take away from SO is not reputation, it's knowledge. It seems like
some people can't grasp that you learn just as much answering questions as you
do asking them.

StackOverflow could shut me out tomorrow (I hope it doesn't!) and I wouldn't
feel like I've wasted time on the site. I'd just find another site like it and
start over.

------
telent
Here's a rather less paranoid article that's (partly) about SO.

[http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2012/02/29/Undocument...](http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2012/02/29/Undocumentedness)

Seriously, _given_ that the data is freely available and for as long as it
remains so, "OMG you're making money from my knowledge how dare you you cad"
is about as valid a complaint as it would be if levelled at any of the ISPs in
days of yore that ran Usenet servers. And it's definitely saved me more time
(a factor of 100 - 10,000? I have no idea) than I've ever given back to it

~~~
michaelmior
I think you nailed it. I try to answer questions on SO when I have spare time.
But that's mostly because of the massive value I've gained from the site. Most
of the time it's not even asking questions, but looking at great answers to
questions that have already been asked.

If I continue to get the same value from SO, I'm happy to keep answering
questions where I can and they're free to profit off that in any way they
choose as long as everything remains public.

------
zvrba
SO has recently been flooded by people who create an account and post
questions in the "fix my problem" style, often also pasting a bunch of their
defunct code. There are also questions that would be more appropriate for
rent-a-coder.

All in all, I'm getting annoyed and considering to leave the community.

~~~
spolsky
"Fix my code" questions are considered "too localized" and should be closed as
such.

~~~
zvrba
I dare suggesting that this is a larger problem and trying to close individual
questions is not a scalable approach.

------
GregYoung
I was to point out that I never at any point suggested that SO would make the
same mistake as EE and put up a pay gate. This was a very stupid idea. There
are many less intrusive ways of capitalizing a community (I can think about a
dozen off the top of my head). I would hope Joel et al are smarter than to
make the same mistakes and kill the goose.

@Joel I think you need to learn more about EE's background (as do many here).
It was more community oriented than SO is at this point. Hell the community
even wrote large portions of the software thats still being used. They screwed
up in their attempts at capitalization and alienated their community. The
point of looking back at EE experiences has to do with their alienation of the
community. I was perfectly happy to do it at the time and it was learning
experiences. It was not also as you said "a customer getting an answer" any
more than SO is, that model came later.

If you believe that you are more like wikipedia then by all means feel free to
become a non-profit. Otherwise the stated goal of your company will be to grow
your community so that you can capitalize off of their efforts. We can spin
this in many ways but the stated goal of the company is to do this.

To the other people in this thread who think that SO is righteous. How do you
feel about Facebook? Google? There are loads of examples of these styles of
business models out there. The question with these business models is whether
they can squeeze the necessary revenue out of a community without alienating
it. Some have been good with it, some have not been so good at it.

Also for those who called me a hypocrite due to SO donating some money to
charity the difference is CB donates _ALL_ profits to charity. They operate
essentially as a non-profit.

~~~
GregYoung
Also how'd this turn out for people?
[http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/05/migration-of-
se-1-0-si...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/05/migration-of-
se-1-0-sites/)

------
instakill
I very much agree with Joel in that SO is about, at least to me, acting as
some kind of centralized destination where I know that somebody has had the
same problem I'm currently experiencing, has asked it before, and has been
given an answer or a few by the community. If no such question has been asked,
I'll ask it because chances are somebody else will want to ask it down the
line. SO is unlikely EE in that anyone in the community answers a question,
and popular ones generally become community wiki answers, and I know the
former to be true because after much learning, I (as a self-perceived noob)
started answering quite a few questions and have built up a reputation. Do I
think I wasted time in doing so? Of course not, I've helped others and I've
helped keep the Rails community noob friendly. That and I can show off my
earned reputation to any future potential employers.

------
lukev
This is roughly analogous to claiming that the iPad won't work because
resistive touch tablets didn't take off.

------
smsm42
Disclosure upfront: I'm an SO fanboy. I used EE back at its glory days, and I
can say there's a world of difference between EE and SO. EE felt as it was a
site built to make money, and the particular vehicle they used is to host
questions and answers. SO feels as a site built to create questions&answers
community, and they are making money out of it. There's a subtle difference
about it, but it felt throughout the site - how it was designed, how workflows
were organized, etc. Of course, I might be wrong and SO founders may be just
evil geniuses tricking myself and everybody else, but the feeling is
distinctly different from EE. Of course, SO also has much superior engine,
user interface and benefit of years of experience that EE didn't have back
then.

------
lukejduncan
Maybe this was before my time, but was experts-exchange ever anything more
than SEO spam with no content?

~~~
jasonkester
Sure. Early on, it was a scraper that pulled down usenet content and rebranded
it as its own with ads over the top.

I first found them via a Google search on my own name, to discover that in
addition to comp.sci.*, I'd also been answering questions there.

~~~
Nick_C
Yep, same here. Sort of amusing to see some historical revisionism going on
here from the E-E people.

I don't doubt that there were some genuine contributors, but claiming other's
hard work as their own tainted E-E's brand for me.

P.S. For the young 'uns, Google Groups isn't. It is usenet re-branded. Google
is now doing the same thing!

------
katbrisbin
I work for Google's Developer Relations department. My team just moved their
technical Q&A to Stack Overflow, as have other DevRel teams. We have several
sponsored tags on SO and make the effort to help respond to questions tagged
in our area of expertise.

------
apetresc
If this guy's writing is indicative of the quality of EE "experts"' prose,
then I'm even less surprised that place went down.

------
dbecker
Stack Overflow has made the internet a better "place"

Experts-Exchange just got in my way when I googled for answers.

------
skotzko
Regarding the undercurrent of anger that seems to exist regarding Stack
Overflow making money: SO has a great model that is incredibly useful and
helps many, many people. They have created massive value. SO making more money
means more people being helped, and yes, a well-deserved return for the
founders and team members who poured their lives into creating and supporting
such an amazingly useful resource.

This is a good thing.

------
syed123
Stackoverflow is one of the best things that have happened to tech community,
for that very purpose we have created a group to meet other engineers from
stackoverflow community for lunch <http://www.LetsLunch.com/stackoverflow>

------
yannis
I think spolsky hit the nail on the head with "answering questions is about
learning". If I profit from it and the site owners profit from it as well, so
be it. This is a very rare case of win-win.

------
meanguy
If by "StackOverflow" you mean "Tumblr" then yes, I agree totally.

------
recoiledsnake
Lets say you go to a dance club because people come there to hangout. Is the
discotheque ripping you off by not paying for making their dance club better?
Are you getting zero value for it? Are their expenses zero for taking the
effort to make it a good experience?

And StackOverflow does not even charge an entry fee. I believe almost everyone
on that site received more value from it than they put in. The amount of time
saved by SO is ridiculous and was painfully obvious before the Panda update to
Google which demoted the clones in the search results.

StackOverflow is the result of tons of hard work on both the technology and
the community by the founders and employees. The site scales very well inspite
of super heavy traffic and the UI/UX provide a great experience. In fact, the
site and their blog posts serve as a poster child for .NET based startups
while using OSS software like Redis.

Is it really the end of the world if they show an ad or two? The sense of
entitlement in the article is just too much for me to bear. The author can
take the CC licensed content and go build a Wikipedia style site for all SO
cares and instantly get a free bootstrap of millions of quality questions and
answers. I think they will actually be happy if it's a better place than SO,
because they set out with the aim of making the status quo better for
programmers all around the globe and succeeded wildly and raised the bar
pretty high.

------
rabc
"Hey, look! They're making money with my knowledge! How they dare to do that?"

Welcome to real world.

~~~
batista
_> "Hey, look! They're making money with my knowledge! How they dare to do
that?"

> Welcome to real world._

Have you READ the fucking article, or just came here to post your "cool" one-
liner reply?

Because in the article he mentions the REAL WORLD case of Experts-Exchange.
And he mentions his hard earned REAL WORLD experience that such things don't
end well as commercial entities, because when they are pushed for monetization
they become closed and/or ad-circuses.

He also suggests using a distributed model for such sites.

You know, like, Wikipedia, which also exists in the REAL WORLD, but is not in
it for making money with our knowledge, but for building a non profit
community for knowledge sharing.

~~~
mattmanser
Dude, the author and you are so far out of the loop on SO it's strange. How
long have you been in the SO and HN communities?

Joel and Jeff setup SO because EE sucked so bad, from the beginning they've
said 'we're not going to end up like the site with the hyphen'.

And now you're saying they're going to go against their entire raison d'etre?
They have been upfront about everything, they made the posts all CC
([http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/stack-overflow-
creativ...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/stack-overflow-creative-
commons-data-dump/)) so the old experts-exchange and IMDB bait and switch
can't happen to SO.

Go listen to their old podcasts and read their original blogs.

~~~
batista
_Dude, the author and you are so far out of the loop on SO it's strange. How
long have you been in the SO and HN communities?_

I'm on the SO since 2009 IIRC. (Btw, I'm over 16, non American, and my surname
is not Lebowski, so I'm not a "dude").

 _Joel and Jeff setup SO because EE sucked so bad, from the beginning they've
said 'we're not going to end up like the site with the hyphen'. And now you're
saying they're going to go against their entire raison d'etre?_

Yeah, and Google once said "don't be evil". Corporate promises don't mean
much, I'll take laws, signed contracts or systemic assurances over them
anytime.

When there's profit involved and especially investors, money has a way to
become the 'raison d'etre'.

Besides, Jeff has already quit Stack Overflow/Exchange:
[http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/02/farewell-stack-
exch...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/02/farewell-stack-
exchange.html)

(The downvote means what?

I haven't made a reasoned argument?

There have not been many cases of corporate bait-and-switch?

It's inconceivable that people running SO in the future could attempt one,
with investor money involved and Jeff retired?

Or is it simply a case of: "I disagree with you, la la la la la"?)

~~~
dangrossman
> Corporate promises don't mean much, I'll take laws, signed contracts or
> systemic assurances over them anytime.

Then you'll love the copyright license (CC) under which they offer the
questions and answers for free copying and redistribution, the contract law
that binds them to this license and the other terms of their site, and the
systemic assurance this creates that they cannot put up a paywall around the
answers we've provided. We can just take them with us to another site; many SO
clones including the full content already exist, entirely legally.

