My interview with Joel Spolsky on why Stack Exchange didn't work | Hacker News Reader

My interview with Joel Spolsky on why Stack Exchange didn't work

mixergy.com

89 pointsAndrewWarner21 comments

Here are some of my notes:

- It's hard to get a community going, and many of the sites what used SE couldn't do it.

- Joel says charging was an impediment.

- Building on someone else's platform is like picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. Businesses that were built on SE will have to find a new platform (meta.stackexchange.com has some good threads on that.)

- Joel raised money, but isn't ready to announce from whom or how much.

- Only 20-40 SE sites had any significant traffic.

Wow, timely reporting! Thank you.

It helps that they sent out a forewarning email to all SX site owners telling them about the impending change; Andrew has an SX site. Still a great effort on Andrew's part to pull it together, thanks!

I think the reason SO first took off was the same reason HN took off -- a person who was famous in the community the site was based on started it. Without some kind of catalyst, I'm not sure if I know a way to get a site like that going.

Building on someone else's platform is like picking up pennies in front of a steamroller.

I largely agree with this, and it is one of the reasons I don't do iDevice development, but I despair about changing it. We're all ultimately on someone else's platform these days: even those of us on the wild free Internet are, essentially, at the mercy of Google.

This is true but at least there are mild forms of other discoverability forming between facebook, twitter, etc due to link sharing/grassroots/etc. Still have to get those early users but there are ways to do it, the going is just a hundred billion times slower.

The difference is platforms like iPhone or even Facebook (pretty sure, I don't use that devilspawn site) is they can cut you off entirely if you tie yourself to them entirely.

Mixergy interview suggestion: Andrew, as part of your format, your face is visible for 50% of the interview. Trouble is, you always look like you're sitting in a dark storage closet. Get a better webcam, or at least orient your desk toward a window so that your environment looks brighter! :)

In general I think the video adds nothing to the Mixergy interviews -- I wish there were a way to subscribe to mp3 only.

Some kind of interview + screencast/demo would be vastly more interesting, but harder or impossible to do live.

I also appreciate the snowball microphone Andrew bought, and wish his guests had similar quality setups (a few have, many have not). It would also be nice to use a better audio codec and better buffering.

Here is the mp3 only feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Mixergy-main-podcast

its also on iTunes

Thank you! I love mixergy; it's probably my third favorite online news source after hn and news.google.com; it just beats out economist and quora.

A friend of mine launched a hosted service that allows people to build their own Q&A site for free. It's called QHub. Like any blog or forum it requires a lot of work to get the community built up but it's not impossible. I guess it all depends on the passion around that niche. http://www.qhub.com

Wow, it already did not work??? It seems it was only yesterday that Joel announced he would be raising money for it. Internet time is fast indeed.

The money raised is being used to support the new business model, which is described on another frontpaged article. The new business model was in response to the failure described here.

Joel and Jeff wanted to raise money for StackOverflow, not for StackExchange. But maybe the VCs couldn't see the value in having three site and licensing the software to another company(Fog Creek), so the obvious way was to fold StackExchange into the StackOverflow company. I think only time will tell if this was the right decision.

No. They successfully raised money for StackExchange. That is part of the reason for the change. Here is the post from the blog explaining the change. http://blog.stackexchange.com/post/518474918/stack-exchange-...

I meant, that the VCs didn't gave them the money for the old style of StackExchange sites. Before this change the StackExchange plattform was licensed from StackOverflow and operated by Fog Creek.

I guess the questions that now comes up is:

Did they make the change because they raised money and are now able to do this, or have they changed it because this was the only way to raise money?

Andrew, would an RSS feed with mp3 enclosures kill you?

It is easier to get people motivated with honey than vinegar.

Thanks. As dougmartin points out above, it already exists. (He links to it above.)

I'm also on iTunes with both a video and audio feed.

Thanks, is this linked from your main site somewhere? I couldn't find it last night.

Yeah, I'm the jerk for wanting to subscribe to his show. :]

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