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Comment by iamaelephant | Hacker News Reader

The first half of the article contains a huge amount of gloating about the size and reach of Stack Overflow. Then the second half of the article has gems like

> in order to continue to fuel our growth

Why does it have to be this way? SO is an immensely useful resource and a sustainable business. Why does every company need to continue to grow until they lose the essence of what made them good? Why can't companies be satisfied with making a decent chunk of change, paying their employees a fair wage and delivering value to their customer base?

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The company took VC money, growing in a sensible and sustainable way isn't an option. They're targeting an IPO according to the former CEO and co-founder Joel Spolsky, which means they need to grow 10X in the near future.

They're making around 70 million a year now, 44 million from the job platform, 16 million from ads and the rest from the private SO Teams/Enterprise software (28 large corporations are paying 1 million+, I know this doesn't add up entirely, but that's the only information publicly available that I know of). The numbers are all from the following interview with Joel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1275&v=zMfxd9y0c...

I hate how hard it would be for a competitor to come into the market now and attempt to build the same knowledge bank StackOverflow can now gatekeep. We've commercialized data hoarding and segregation... is the end game for StackOverflow to become Elsevier for programming?

The knowledge bank itself is available under creative commons. You can download it here (updated quarterly): https://archive.org/details/stackexchange or query it online here: https://data.stackexchange.com/

At least until current leadership kills it. But it was one of the things Jeff and Joel did to convince the community that that was not their goal, and the previous market leader, experts exchange was fresh in people's minds at that time for hiding answers behind signup walls.

When googling for stuff I've sometimes come across other sites which make use of StackOverflow questions/answers. It feels tacky.

I don't know the chances of another site killing SO/SE the same way SO killed EE.. but I've noticed recently I visit SO less frequently than e.g. GitHub issues.

They can't really kill it, right? The content itself is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, Version... uh... well it's definitely Creative Commons.

They can stop providing updates and let it go stale.

Someone else can create a front end to the dumped data, similar to how you can run Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap locally (or from anywhere, really).

Good timing considering Distributed Web efforts [1]. Internet Archive is having a Dweb meetup tonight FYI if you're in SF [2], word is Twitter's team focused on the same goals will be in attendence.

[1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/07/introducing-the-d-web/

[2] https://www.eventbrite.com/e/dweb-sf-meet-up-january-tickets...

> Internet Archive is having a Dweb meetup tonight FYI if you're in SF

I'm not even being flippant here, this is an earnest piece of feedback.

Please don't call yourselves `dwebs`. That's just asking for people to not take you seriously.

No relation to any org in the meetup, just calling it what it was called in the online marketing of it. I’d agree the marketing needs some tweaks.

> Someone else can create a front end to the dumped data

only if SO allows them to (by licensing the contents of SO liberally as they are currently doing). But they can stop at any time.

They can only kill the license for future content, not for the existing content. And that would be a very clear sign that they're going to put up a paywall, and create a huge amount of pushback.

But the most convincing argument that they won't put up a paywall to me is that there simply isn't enough money in it. You won't get enough people to pay for it, and it will cripple the amount of answerers.

People said the same about expertsexchange until SO did it.

If they make it suck badly enough, something else will gain momentum and replace it. Get the Jon Skeets of the world onboard and you're most of the way there.

Quora had the right idea initially, by subsidizing quality answerers, but they went too broad, and it devolved to Yahoo Answers quality.

It wouldn't all be bad. So very many of the web development answers use jQuery. At least a clean start would mean a lot of those would go away.

I've often thought "What happened to companies that just make and sell things"

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