Ask HN: Why don't we pay stackoverflow or medium?

Why would I pay to have my question downvoted, marked duplicate, etc when I've already done the research? If I don't say the right shibboleths the community on stack overflow will just downvote/mock my question.

I don't pay for medium because I don't pay for op-eds, and there's rarely good enough content on medium to justify spending anything for it.

Both the services in the examples you gave need ad power because I don't think anyone can justify the cost/benefit analysis of paying some number dollars a month for it. Moreover, we are inundated with subscriptions. In this light, both medium and stack overflow do not provide enough incentive to pay for them. In the case of stack overflow, many times I could just open a desk reference or think a little harder about the problem I'm trying to solve. It's a convenience, and one that isn't needed. Experts exchange had the same problem and we all saw how that went.

> Why would I pay to have my question downvoted, marked duplicate, etc when I've already done the research? If I don't say the right shibboleths the community on stack overflow will just downvote/mock my question.

Can you give some examples of questions that have been closed as duplicates despite not actually being duplicates, as well as the kind of shibboleths you're talking about?

I should not have to pay for stackexchange, serverfault and all the others. I edited posts, helped people revise their questions and format answers, answered a myriad of questions, linked questions to duplicate questions. All this will dealing with elitism and overall poor attitude from fellow editors. The bad atmosphere really took away from the pleasure of helping people solve technical problems for me. I don't even log in there any more. As a side note, a few of the other editors are over here at HN yet they are very friendly over here. I am not sure why the two sites evoke such different behavior.

Evaluate these two statements:

1. "I have top reputation on HN" 2. "I have top reputation on stack overflow"

(1) carries almost no weight anywhere you go, (2) is a value signal on an extremely well known website. Since this is the case, HN tends to be more _moderate_ with their moderation. Often times you'll see posters on HN say this makes HN somehow superior, but there are many problems with HNs voting system that makes any view that isn't stereotypically "valley programmer" get hidden very quickly.

Those damn internet points brings out the worst in people.

But there are almost no internet points on HN.

I do pay quite a bit for content. It needs to be high quality and I want to know what I'm getting before I pay for it.

I pay every month for the Financial Times - it's good quality news coverage. Though it often comes from a particular political standpoint it doesn't need to resort to all the outrage-bait clickbait articles that have consumed the output of other newspapers in the UK.

Medium is generally low quality, and there's nobody on there that I would pay monthly to receive whatever they feel like writing.

Stack Overflow is useful but answers are quite hit-and-miss. I pay for educational content/videos/etc on other sites, but I would probably want Stack Overflow to be better organised and more in-depth if I were paying for it.

Basically, it needs to be good quality and consistent content. If you want to make money by being a platform and gatekeeper for content produced by random external people, curate the content well and make sure that there's real value in paying for it.

Great answer. Thanks. I probably should have stated in my original question too

but though users help in content, there is a associated price for the company to keep the services running.

let's say a magic company decides to only pay its bills to keep infrastructure and basic development team running. let's also say because of costs associated with billing and taxes this gets to 1 use month

it is a pretty low value. I am not here to argue if ad companies are moral or not. I think the era of free content will be soon-ish over as costs with computing are, for the first time ever, rising independently on the amount of power delivered. this is because of war, inflation, etc.

I am supposing, with the little knowledge I have, that the return from ads is very subjective and rarely pays itself in years.

to support my pov, I would say some things about Alphabet and Meta.

Google know this and now show a dozen of ads wherever it can because, I suppose, the income from advertisement is going lower and lower. this might not yet be reflected in stock as Alphabet is a much bigger company than Google itself.

Facebook I suppose, or Meta, has ads as a side business. they track user behaviors, in my opinion, in a very invasive way. Even though FB still not presenting considerable earnings with their ad platform.

on the other hand, we see companies stop selling full products and selling smaller items. this has been pretty prominent with game industry but also with software companies such as Microsoft.

though medium and stack overflow are not nearly perfect content providers or communities, it would be somewhat shocking if they not pivot more their business to improve earnings to compensate for increasing costs.

for example, stack overflow could charge a monthly subscription fee to allow ordering the best working responses. I am not saying that I enjoy that, but I still would be surprised if nothing like this started happening in 5 years or so.

We can’t trust that paying for a service means respect for the user. Every time I looked, when a company offers a tier without ads they don’t stop with the data collection. I am not going to pay so they can have even better data on me (associated to a user account and payment method) and monetise me further.

If your company refuses to do either, I’d be interested in taking a look at what you do. Perhaps that’s your angle: make it clear how you respect the user and back up your claims. I speculate the market for people who care for this is growing, not shrinking.

> As consequence, the company struggles to make money in the west.

Does this mean the company doesn’t struggle to make money in the east, with the same model? I’d be interested in learning more.

While I agree that Medium is mostly clickbait and SEO optimised content with no added value I think paying SO would make more sense. There are black sheeps within the answers, but SO definitely helped me a lot when looking for solutions.

But would it make sense? It's a cooperartive platform. How would a payment system look like? It should benefit the community, the people writing answers, but also the question authors. But what would be the impact on the writing quality? People would spam the platform in order to get rewarded? I don't see how a payed answer-question community would work and I guess Quora is a good example how it went into the wrong direction.

Back in the day, expertsexchange was a paid version of stackoverflow. Needless to say, it was not as successful (their awkward name did not help)

This website was also a lesson to many back in the day how urls could be easily misinterpreted.

Eg “ExpertsExchange” vs “ExpertSexChange”

Memories of 4th graders preaching the joys of Pen Island

No, I don't pay anything with very rare exceptions. I do not need stupid Netflix/Disney videos, I use to adblock Youtube on devices supposed to give me relax and I use to not adblock Youtube on devices supposed for work, I would not pay to SO because I use it seldom, and I would not pay to Medium because last years their content became too lame for being worth of reading. BTW I do pay to Udemy sometimes, if the cost of some interesting course is 10 dollars, because I know that any course may be bought for 10 dollars as a minimum possible price and professors on Udemy use to help their students on regular basis.

I pay for a lot of services, ranging from YouTube Premium to Duolingo or Apple One. Also, I support a few independent content creators on Patreon.

The fact that there is a community where membership is free / ad-supported and is prominent in the developer community does not mean the paid access model does not work.

I wouldn't worry too much about content being stolen either. I could easily torrent any of the movies I watch on Netflix, but it's just not worth the hassle - and I live in Central Europe, not California or whatnot.

If your company is not doing well it might be because of more fundamental reasons.

Stack Overflow should just move to a Wikipedia donation model and we all can declare it is a public good for the world. There’s lots to learn about the open model there that SO could benefit from.

I don’t know if I’m right or wrong but I pay for services I really like. I would pay Stackoverflow in a heartbeat if they would just make their developer profile premium, and not entirely dissolve it. So many memories lost and I am still disappointed.

I pay for Reddit premium, since I am a mod of semi-large subreddit and giving out awards seems to be a game changer and kind of made the subreddit lively.

I also pay app subscriptions from indie devs and indie book authors. Hopefully it will inspire them to create more and make a living.

I think if you want good quality things you need to pay for things such as books, academic journals, University.

I am happy to pay for medium, the quality isn't high but it is modern. And I prefer the content to mainstream content producers.

The problem is there is a circular dependency between funding, work, time, revenue. This is a tragedy of society. Everyone wants things for free but doesn't want to be the first to pay for something that is empty or not proven. (Risk)

I'd pay for stackoverflow if it wasn't for the "but aktually, instead of $thingINeed, you should use my $shittyOpenSourceProjectWith5Downloads" low quality crap.

I pay for content where quality is high. Stackoverflow is hit or miss, Medium is mostly garbage. Substack hits well, I pay for a ton of those and prefer that authors get paid well to do what they do.

I don’t pay for StackOverflow or Medium for largely the same reason: too much variability in quality to take on a recurring subscription.

I buy Udemy courses pretty liberally, even though they also vary in quality. If I get a dud, maybe there’s a refund process but, more importantly, there’s no continual leak in the bucket going to them.

I do pay for Netflix (though consider canceling somewhat regularly), Comcast Internet, Ting mobile, and Amazon Prime, but no other subscription services (that I can think of). I’m generally opposed to time-based subscriptions, especially where the value (or significant costs) are not time-based.

I don't pay for SO but I do contribute both questions and answers. Asking a question is often as important as answering one. I actually think SO is how the internet should be: take little, give a little.

It depends, if you are aiming for the consumer market or mass market. There is less than 5% of your potential user willing to pay for it.

Business on the other hand is different. It depends on value extracted. That is why SaaS models works on the internet. But these people then assume the same model would work for consumers.

Apps, on the other hand scores a lot higher than on the Web. So even if your App is a simple wrapper around your web content the conversion rate is still much better.

I think the better question is why is Stack Exchange a private for-profit business? Why not a non-profit like Wikipedia?

Because paying for SO would be the opposite reason why it works. Its about community and helping others with technical questions, not about lets see how we can monetize it - never has. They have career ads that help with that and might provide value to technical users its more tailored to

I simply just don’t pay for anything at all online, unless I acquire a physical good.

I'm not sure I would pay for Stack Overflow at this point. Years ago, maybe, but these days it's full of so much obsolete content and I find myself using it less and less.

However, I do pay for MDN.

Did not know MDN had introduced a premium offering, missed that somehow. For others like me, info from this article[0]:

>The new subscription offering will introduce features like notifications, collections (think lists of articles you want to save) and MDN offline for when you want to access MDN when you’re not online.

>There will be three subscription tiers: MDN core, a free limited version of the paid plans; MDN Plus 5, with access to notifications, collections and MDN offline for $5 per month or $50 per year; and MDN Supporter 10 for those who are willing to pay a bit more to support the platform in addition to getting a direct feedback channel to the MDN team (as well as “pride and joy,” Mozila says). As the name implies, that more expensive plan will cost $10 a month or $100 for an annual subscription.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/24/mozilla-launches-mdn-plus-...

To be fair, content has always been free - all we ever paid for was the convenience of having it delivered.

I mentioned in an answer above, I will not repeat everything because it can get verbose. but if you could read it I think it contributes to my point.

we are seeing for the first time ever the increasing in computing costs without increasing power of computing.

I think tatics to monetize over users will get more aggressive but still ineffective.

I do prefer paying for services that not sell my data or at least do not associate my person to a profile that can be sold.

but it seems uncommon as people think internet is free of costs.

It's hard to find any article that isn't behind Medium paywall... Or are we talking about some other Medium, not https://medium.com/plans ?