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rabc

"Hey, look! They're making money with my knowledge! How they dare to do that?"

Welcome to real world.

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> "Hey, look! They're making money with my knowledge! How they dare to do that?"

> Welcome to real world.

Have you READ the fucking article, or just came here to post your "cool" one-liner reply?

Because in the article he mentions the REAL WORLD case of Experts-Exchange. And he mentions his hard earned REAL WORLD experience that such things don't end well as commercial entities, because when they are pushed for monetization they become closed and/or ad-circuses.

He also suggests using a distributed model for such sites.

You know, like, Wikipedia, which also exists in the REAL WORLD, but is not in it for making money with our knowledge, but for building a non profit community for knowledge sharing.

Dude, the author and you are so far out of the loop on SO it's strange. How long have you been in the SO and HN communities?

Joel and Jeff setup SO because EE sucked so bad, from the beginning they've said 'we're not going to end up like the site with the hyphen'.

And now you're saying they're going to go against their entire raison d'etre? They have been upfront about everything, they made the posts all CC (http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/stack-overflow-creativ...) so the old experts-exchange and IMDB bait and switch can't happen to SO.

Go listen to their old podcasts and read their original blogs.

Joel and Jeff setup SO because EE sucked so bad, from the beginning they've said 'we're not going to end up like the site with the hyphen'.

Jeff has already left the company. When Joel leaves who is going to be the antihyphen then? All it would take is a new board with some short term thinking(perhaps post IPO) to get them to hyphen land. As pointed out in the article EE started with high ideals too.

Their statement of CC licensing isn't clear. Do I license them my content CC or is it theirs and they license it back to me CC?

Google has already decided that anyone who tries to take the content and launch a SO a like is going to get penalized to death, so good luck on forking if they go evil.

Google has already decided that anyone who tries to take the content and launch a SO a like is going to get penalized to death, so good luck on forking if they go evil.

Did they really say that? I am a bit skeptical that they would do that, but maybe they made an exception with the "Panda" update thing.

Google hasn't said it they have done it(I don't follow Google that closely so I don't know if it is the Panda update or what). There have been several SO content clones. Some ranked higher than SO for given queries even after the update that was aimed at low quality content(the only reason I heard of it is because it generated a few HN articles). When that was mentioned on HN a couple of Googlers asked for examples so they could "Fix it".

Dude, the author and you are so far out of the loop on SO it's strange. How long have you been in the SO and HN communities?

I'm on the SO since 2009 IIRC. (Btw, I'm over 16, non American, and my surname is not Lebowski, so I'm not a "dude").

Joel and Jeff setup SO because EE sucked so bad, from the beginning they've said 'we're not going to end up like the site with the hyphen'. And now you're saying they're going to go against their entire raison d'etre?

Yeah, and Google once said "don't be evil". Corporate promises don't mean much, I'll take laws, signed contracts or systemic assurances over them anytime.

When there's profit involved and especially investors, money has a way to become the 'raison d'etre'.

Besides, Jeff has already quit Stack Overflow/Exchange: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/02/farewell-stack-exch...

(The downvote means what?

I haven't made a reasoned argument?

There have not been many cases of corporate bait-and-switch?

It's inconceivable that people running SO in the future could attempt one, with investor money involved and Jeff retired?

Or is it simply a case of: "I disagree with you, la la la la la"?)

> Corporate promises don't mean much, I'll take laws, signed contracts or systemic assurances over them anytime.

Then you'll love the copyright license (CC) under which they offer the questions and answers for free copying and redistribution, the contract law that binds them to this license and the other terms of their site, and the systemic assurance this creates that they cannot put up a paywall around the answers we've provided. We can just take them with us to another site; many SO clones including the full content already exist, entirely legally.

The way the SO content is licensed and the API creates a powerful disincentive for a malevolent corporate overlord from putting a paywall up.

A paywall would dramatically reduce the amount of new content being generated, and the open license of the existing content lowers the entry barriers for a competitor. Even an MBA can figure out that a paywall is a bad idea.

That's not to say that there isn't some other creative way that a malevolent overlord could do evil with SO, but in any case, you or I can pick up the back catalog of data and do whatever we wish.

Dude, you don't get it. Lebowski is "The Dude". And you're just a dude.

It was a more of a 'dude, calm down'. You're shouting and swearing and getting angry at a couple of guys who's declared motive was to try and fix the information exchange model for everyone and make the world a better place.

I for one am immensely grateful to both of them for making my job a lot, lot easier, has given me pride in the answers I've provided and also for creating something that's a pleasure to use.

I assume none of us here are naive enough to think that there's not a chance that at some point in the future it might get worse, but their actions so far show nothing to be concerned about.

It was a more of a 'dude, calm down'. You're shouting and swearing and getting angry

Swearing? You mean the "have you read the fucking article" kind of swearing? And shouting? You mean emphasizing "real world" with uppercase, because HN doesn't allow bold? ...

at a couple of guys who's declared motive was to try and fix the information exchange model for everyone and make the world a better place. I assume none of us here are naive enough to think that there's not a chance that at some point in the future it might get worse, but their actions so far show nothing to be concerned about.

One of them has already quit. VC money are in. Since you agree there is such a chance, then I merely pointed out that it's reasonable to "be concerned about" it.

A big difference between EE and SO that is not being talked about is the fact the EE used to pay people for answers. There was a practice of monetization from the very beginning. SO has never attempted to pay people for their answers (in fact they have been vehemently against it). While I agree that you cannot make a supposition that since the site has not tried to capitalize on it's user base that it will forever continue to be the same, I have seen no evidence that there are changes afoot. I think that people are putting the semi-colon before the code block here.

The fact of the matter is that at any time, any site that we know and love can change or go away forever. Jeff and Joel have built something that is great. They have put everything in place to try and prevent their gift from being twisted into evil. These preventative measures are the largest difference between EE and SO, and they should be applauded for their efforts and contributions not maliciously attacked by some guy who is paranoid about the actions of a community that he plainly states he is not a contributing member of.

Experts Exchange NEVER paid cash for answers. People answered questions to earn t-shirts or free memberships but never money.

It's an idea that has been discussed for as long as I've been involved with EE and prior but never implemented. It's too complicated given taxes and the international user base to be at all feasible.

I said that EE paid people for answers, I never mentioned cash. SO has only every used earned reputation (as a form of gamification) to entice users to answer questions.

SO has swag for top rep earners so it's a distinction without a difference. The original article talked about getting paid for answering and I thought you were reacting to that with your post.

The point of my argument is that SO was built to create a better source of reliable information 1st and make money 2nd, while it always appeared (at least to me) that EE was built to make money 1st and it's usefulness always seemed like a secondary priority (again this is just my opinion).

Once VC money gets involved there has to be a path to monetization somewhere. I don't want to argue the virtue level of the founders because there's no point in it. EE started off as a community and still is a community. The paywall is what it is because EE will not take any more VC money.

Wikipedia is exactly as centralized as StackOverflow, in that it's all in a single site but licensed under Creative Commons.

Only from a technical point. From a business point, it's also a non profit.

Churches are also non-profit. As is Scientology. Just being a non-profit isn't insurance against evil.

Being a non-profit does not make you decentralized.

Barnum, that great scholar of suckers, said it better.

I don't get this attitude toward SO. Most of the people who go there get the answers they seek, including experts with questions outside their domain of expertise.

I hear all sorts of people fretting about how to give back to the community to make their lives more meaningful. Isn't this an ideal win/win?

Stackoverflow is not a community, it's a business, and their business is reselling that sense of community to third parties.

I've no quarrel with Stackoverflow, it's a very nice site and a useful project. I do have a quarrel with people whose brains seem to turn off once anything 'Web2.0' is involved. Just because it's on the web doesn't mean that the laws of economics and common sense no longer apply.

Why must community and business be mutually exclusive? Hint: they're not, and SO is both.

Because to survive as a business SO needs to sell your sense of 'comunity' to a third-party resource.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, just be aware that when you're participating on SO you're only a 'human resource', to be marketed and sold sometime later in the future. Hopefully SO is run by decent guys and the buyer will be ethical.

By "sell" you're implying that the sense of community is in some way diminished by selling advertising. I don't find this to be the case, unless it leads to a conflict of interest (i.e. SO deletes all Linux articles at the behest of Microsoft).

Now if you were to use "capitalize on", "monetize", or one of the many verbs that don't imply a transfer of ownership, then I would agree with you.

Well, check the article again. You had that win/win situation with experts-exchange too.

Then they baited and switched upon their users, putting up a paywall.

> Then they baited and switched upon their users, putting up a paywall.

Which StackOverflow's Creative Commons license and public data dumps make very difficult to implement.

There's no value in SO's database of questions and answers, they might as well give it away under whatever liberal license they want.

The real business value of SO is the engaged ("community") web traffic it receives. ("Community" == "higher ad CPM" and "highly contextual advertising" in business terms.)

That community would become rather less engaged, and thus less valuable, if a paywall were implemented.

The user you are talking to is "qwe123_troll"

qwe123[4] is a troll account name with a storied history: http://www.reddit.com/user/qwe1234

Implementing a paywall would be rather pointless, since that's a very bad way to monetize traffic.

However, StackOverflow can make big money by cleverly partnering with corporations: instead of a site that answers "how do I do XYZ with ABC toolkit" they could gradually shift to a site that answers "doing XYZ with BigCorp ExpensiveSolution: how I increased ROI and fixed my dental problems".

The point is that between "comunity" and "traffic monetization" there is a clear and obvious conflict of interest, and it's pretty obvious which side of this conflict will be taken by SO's sponsors.

Incidentally, this is also exactly why Wikipedia doesn't display ads or monetize traffic.

At which point someone would download the complete StackExchange data dump[1], import it into one of the dozens of SE engine clones like Shapado and compete with them without having to bootstrap the content.

[1]: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/09/creative-commons-data-...

Yeah, guys, I know that.

Problem is data and engine just being available does not take care of everything.

First, someone has to decide to offer this as a service to other people. Nothing assures that.

He then would have to upload the data on his servers and have S.O. grade server setup, that costs a fortune, to serve all the traffic.

Then there would be the problem of transferring the actual user accounts and their credit and status.

So, this line of argument (you can always get the data out and serve them) is more like the classic "it's open source, you can fork it if they choose do something you don't like". Sorry, but this is only realistic if you have the knowledge AND the resources to do so.

But the fact that they make the dumps available shows that they do in fact "give a flying @#$! about the community" and they don't "only care about keeping the community happy enough that they keep giving them intellectual property for imaginary currency so they can sell it for real currency".

The community would be happy enough by just getting a decent alternative to EE - the data licensing and dumps go well over and beyond that.

The blog post is essentially criticizing them not for something they did, but for having the mere possibility of doing something to screw up the community, even when they took important steps to reduce that risk. Seems completely unfair to me.

Nobody is saying "StackOverflow gives you a one-click tool to create their competitor sites!" They're just saying that 1) SO has made it impossible for themselves to set up a paywall around the content and 2) if they go evil, it's POSSIBLE to take your data and leave. The fact that they have open sourced some of their tools and that competing frameworks already exist make this easier, but no, still not easy.

But is that SO's fault? What more could SO do to earn your trust? And what alternative to SO do you propose?

There are already a ton of clones doing this. We keep a list. http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/2267/stack-overflow-...

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