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Comment by volaski | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why StackOverflow allows this, yeah creative commons is cool and all but it IS NOT COOL for actual users. I get so annoyed every time i search for something on Google and it leads to an its clone site. It's not like StackOverflow has better search than Google (which is ridiculous). I still have to search on Google if I want quality search result instead of StackOverflow. With more power comes more responsibility. StackOverflow's policy feels too irresponsible in this regard

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We use that license because it protects the content from us. No matter who comes along to run Stack Overflow in the future, Stack Overflow can't do something like put up a paywall and lock it up. Someone else'll just be able to host a copy.

Yes, look at what happened to imdb.

As an end user, I don't care about that at all. If StackOverflow does something like put up a paywall and lock it up, then it will die off and some other site will arise that will replace it, just like some other sites that came before StackOverflow which put up a paywall and faded away. Also, StackOverflow can always change the policy if they want (which probably won't happen for the reason I mentioned), so the license as an excuse doesn't really make sense to me. Especially when it comes at a cost of horrible user experience. Lastly it doesn't seem like StackOverflow is doing much to improve search on the site itself and that's what makes this even worse. I wouldn't be complaining if I could find more relevant StackOverflow results on StackOverflow than searching on Google. How is it that I can find more relevant results on a generic search engine than the site where the contents came from?

Wow i'm getting downvoted like crazy. I don't think I said anything that's not factual. At least explain why you think I am wrong if you're gonna downvote. To be clear, I love Stackoverflow and I don't know what the world would have been like if it wasn't around, but I do think there are things that are broken and I just mentioned them. Am I supposed to keep quiet because that's how it's been?

"Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(NB: I didn't, and tend to agree it's excessive here.)

> If StackOverflow does something like put up a paywall and lock it up, then it will die off and some other site will arise that will replace it

As others have already said that possible thanks to their liberal license, not despite of it, so you're wrong, hence the downvotes (though I haven't voted in any way).

As a thought experiment, do you think if StackOverflow changed their license tomorrow (hypothetically because of the spam problem) but assured all its users that they will never mess with them, all users will leave simply because of the license?

Basically, I'm not willing to supply useful data to a site which then profits off of it without also making it open.

So if they weren't open then they wouldn't be getting my answers (or a bunch of other people's).

Before StackOverflow existed sites like ExpertExchange. They are irrelevant now despite the fact that they had tons of content whereas StackOverflow started with 0. People ask questions and answer on StackOverflow not because that's where the most content is, but because that's where most people are. I think license is just a manifestation of the company's philosophy, and personally I don't think I would care much even if StackOverflow changed their license tomorrow BUT kept their philosophy and policy in tact. (Which they should, since they know better than to alienate their users and they've seen what happened to all the sites that alienated their users)

A new site may come to replace it, but what of the 10MM+ questions and scads more answers created by the Stack Overflow community over the last 7 years? Without the CC license all that hard work gets lost in the case SO goes rogue.

To be fair, useful life of many of those answers is likely only a few years at best. Though I generally agree: locking up contributed content is exceptionally poor Internet citizenship (Quora, Scribd).

The license means that even if SO changes its policy and puts up a paywall, a clone can come up, use the knowledge already present on SO that was scraped.

This means that even if SO puts a paywall, the knowledge gathered there is not lost. And this, IMO, is a very, VERY important aspect of StackOverflow.

As far as search goes, I didn't even know SO had a search function. I see nothing wrong with letting google handle it. Adding a search engine to your website is hard and takes time.

Thank you for doing this, by the way.

It'd be nice to figure out the whole Google link ranking thing, but I don't think switching away from Creative Commons is the way.

Well, that was a bad decision with regards to UX because now I have to dig through 20 look-alike sites that don't link back to SO and you're not doing shit about it. Yes, SO comes up first when I search for the exact question but I'm sure you're aware how useless that is. If I knew the exact question to ask, I probably wouldn't be searching around Google.

My time is the most valuable thing to me and with this decision, you've essentially costed me a lot of time and I already paid my way by adding content to your site. I would have much rather seen you enter a simple legal agreement where the content was placed in escrow.

I once contributed to a localized version of SO whose licence was not open. The startup backing it eventually shutdown and the site disappeared. All time invested in those answers is now irrevocably lost.

Non-open content licence is exactly what made me stop contributing to sites such as Wikimapia and start contributing to OpenStreetMap instead.

Once you get burned a few times, you learn it's better to have to put up with a few clone sites than risk losing all the data, or having to pay to read what you wrote yourself a few months ago.

Thanks for the answer. I just want to ask one more question. Don't you think StackOverflow is already too large to disappear suddenly like those startups you mentioned, and smart enough to NOT go the way of ExpertsExchange? (I think the founder explicitly mentioned StackOverflow wanted to be an anti ExpertsExchange when they launched. Also I don't think the company would be stupid enough to alienate their users which will lead to demise regardless of how much content they already have)

Just append your query text with 'site:stackoverflow.com'.

That or use the SO docset in Dash or StackStash https://itunes.apple.com/en/app/stackstash-stackoverflow-off...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7932477

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