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Comment by villasv | Hacker News Reader

As evidenced by the struggle with StackOverflow too, who sits atop a trove of content

The StackOverflow thing is a bit weird, because what the owners have and consider valuable is "a place where people feel comfortable coming and asking questions", but what the core community values is "high-quality curated content", and they're very willing to do aggressive gatekeeping, thus conflicting with value 1, to preserve value 2.

High-quality curated content has been SO's goal since day one. The question/answer format is a means to this end. That's why it has come that most people can easily find a solution to their problem. https://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/991082088689381376

>I wish more people understood that the goal of Stack Overflow is not "answer my question" but "let's collaboratively build an artifact that will benefit future coders". Perhaps SO could be doing more to educate people about this. -Jeff Atwood

Yeah, this is the kicker. I think SO's primary intended audience is people clicking Google search results.

If I'm Googling something technical and I see Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange results, I always click those first, because I know I'm almost always going to attain the most helpful-information-per-unit-time that way. Even if an answer's many years old, it's usually going to be more helpful than most of the much more recent links, which are often just cookie cutter blogspam.

But the way to built that knowledge base is by answering peoples questions because the questions people ask indicate what is relevant to answer.

I was following StackOverflow back when it was being planned on a podcast. "High-quality curated content" was very much the original mission. This was the driving factor behind the wiki-like interface. In fact, if anything, I'd argue that the problem is that this didn't take off as much as was hoped.

Yeah but now StackOverflow we pay for it in my company. Their value is in the whole info sharing model of the tool, the public one becomes more useless as you grow and the private one is invaluable to ask crazy questions about ultra specific internal idiocy people lost the source code of.

I only go to the public one a few times a day now, compared to being wired to it as a beginner :D

I'm jealous. My company bought it and made a huge internal adoption effort, but it never really amounted to anything and is now pretty much dead.

StackOverflow should be cheap to operate and the value comes almost exclusively from the community. So I don't see any good reason why StackOverflow would need to earn much revenue. Probably an annual fundraiser like what Wikipedia does would be more than sufficient to cover the operating expenses.

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