If you are a student, use the money you would have donated to StackOverflow to purchase a book or a tool that will help you to learn better and become an expert.
If you are an expert, contribute your time to StackOverflow (instead of money).
Money is easy to get compared to content. What helps StackOverflow grow is quality content.
I am also interested how they approach the subject of money:
> How much money we make is a direct proxy for how much we are helping our users. We focus on maximizing how we help users in order to make a great business. Very few companies have done this successfully, and we take great pride in the fact that we’re one of them.
Personally, I would love to see how this works out and I wish them well. Hopefully they can prove this model works well. Users need this model to work well for other businesses to adopt.
I've tried that before, many times. Unfortunately when you are trying to do real work those books are many times useless. Example, I kept trying to build a newtonian physics simulator so I got a Statics and Dynamics mechanical engineering book. The book was a text book for Mechanical engineering students and yet the examples they teach you are for toy problems. I could not generalize them to real world scenarios. To actually build the physics simulator I had to scour the internet until I found something that actually explained what I needed in an easy to understand manner [1]. And that still was not enough. I still had to use more online sources to find out all the other pieces, like the separating axes theorem for collision detection.
So no, I would not rely on books anymore, at least not exclusively since they often do not provide a full picture. One last thing, books seem to be getting progressively worse in my experience. All of this is anecdotal of course.
* I do buy non-fiction for amusement and casual interests though, like Predictably Irrational.
Even if I'm going to get a formal reference text, instead of online resources, I probably want a digital copy. Otherwise, I find myself going "I wish I could do text search for this thing..." and wondering why I didn't get the version that actually allows that. When I read for pleasure I enjoy the physicality of books; when I read for technical reference I demand the interface of a computer.
I do, >10k rep on the security.stackexchange.com site. I just think it's an amazing platform that I'd like to support with hosting and development costs.
That's amazing! Thank you for your contributions. I meant to imply that donating money is usually the least fruitful way to contribute, in my experience. It should be your last resort; definitely not the first one.
Example: One way SO can really gain from your security expertise is for you to think about how anonymous answers can be supported. That will be far more valuable than $$$.
I posted about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12961447
I would love to read your opinions about this crazy idea!
I bet that happens on Stack Overflow too. People who'll never bother to create an account find a page about a problem through Google and they have something valuable they'd add it if didn't prompt them to sign up first.
I wonder how much trouble it'd actually cause spam wise.
It's been there for a long time. ;-)
But, Akshat has only 18 points. Even if you're lucky enough to have worthless suggested edits accepted, it's not a very good way to earn points.
That said, Developer Story / CV has been instrumental for me and has become my canonical resume. I'm a huge fan.
If I could make one feature request... it would be a way to indicate conference attendance. It's something I give extra credibility to, for both employers as sponsors / presenters and employees as attendees / speakers / volunteers, as not everyone is willing to put in the effort to give back. [You can see on my CV that I've tried to incorporate this as an "other" at the bottom, but it feels a little out of place.]
I would love to use developer stories but more importantly, would like to integrate my dev story with my website (as this would also keep the "recommended reading" section up to date as well). If there was some way to do this (we can discuss options) without using an iframe, I would LOVE to do so.
Just to mention...I want this on my website & stackoverflow. Updating recommended reading is of a lower priority than having it on my website in the first place.
Yes, which is why I assume they didn't even bother putting up a donate button. The thing that convinced me to post anyway is that it's probably very clear to a lot of people that it is definitely worth supporting. Much more than the Archive project or the Tor project, this is something I know people use so much every day and get tremendous value from. That's why it might just work in this case, similar to Wikipedia.
It's also not exclusive, they can totally put up donations and try to attract some attention for it by posting it to their own ad system, and at the same time continue with all the current efforts.
There's a word for this, it's called 'subscription' : )
They provide a service, you pay for it.
It's how most of the world works.
I think the underlying issue is price discrimination: how to get the large numbers of those unwilling/unable to pay some value, while providing value to the higher order users as well.
It's a paradox that people will pay more for a coffee than they will something that can help them substantially :)
I avoided that word because it's the wrong word.
A subscription implies I get something that normal users don't get. I don't want that. I hate services like Dropbox where the free users get benefits for installing it on their Android or from referrals (shitty stuff) and live off of the backs of paying users. Yet here I think it's much more akin to something like open source software, which is for the general good and is worth supporting for those who are able to afford it.
Edit: There is no need to downvote the person, though. To me he seems to be contributing to the conversation.
Fair enough - but there are very, very few value creating engines that can feasibly exist in such a context.
Wikipedia is one.
Stackoverflow probably could not.
Someone mentioned it creates 'billions' in value, well, that's probably not too far off.
There's nothing wrong with people paying for things.
But to your point - it would be nice to find a way to do intelligent price discrimination. Students, hobbyists get it free, other entities can pay. etc..
I don't think that would work for Stackoverflow either because there is an inherent 'open-ness' that it needs ... that said, again, there's nothing wrong with paying for things.