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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, the original intent of a startup almost doesn't mater.

What a business does is always an intersection of what the producers and the consumers want. If users want something divergent but reasonable, the answer shouldn't be, "Well, fuck you then." The right response is, "Boy, that's a a great opportunity."

As proof, look at Friendster. They owned the social networking space before Facebook even existed. But it had started out as a dating site, and the founder stubbornly insisted that it stay a dating site no matter what the users wanted. At this point they're not even a punchline; MySpace has now taken over the spot of best-known failure.

I've stopped contributing to StackOverflow because I'm tired of them killing good discussions. Why take the risk that yet another good answer will get eaten?

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Um, the MySpace reference seems to highlight Joel and others' point: practically limitless user choice on MySpace turned it into such a boundless cacophony of gangsta rapping cat gifs that it was noisy and unusable, and got devoured by Facebook's "express yourself within our clean, limited-styled approach". It's a bit like Apple's thinking: I know you want true multitasking and dancing wallpaper, but that tells me you'll use it if I give it to you, and I know you really don’t want battery life that is measuresd in standby minutes. Since most people aren't willing to have their phone die after 4 hours of use in exchange for more whimsical, athletic wallpaper, their aporoach was to limit you to what most people would really want if they weighed all the tradeoffs and consequences.

"Shhh, child. Mother knows best." That's why a massvie amount of apple mobile devices jailbreak them, why their competitor has aimed enormous traction, right? At least be honest about the it - it's your aesthetic taste that interests you, that'll be offended, not someone else's. If your going to pull a Steve Jobs, just say so. It's a valid (and successful) point of view, but it's not a universal truth.

The original intent of a startup doesn't matter much if your real goal is just to get a lot of users and sell them to advertisers. Then, who cares what you build, as long as it attracts users? The original intent matters a lot more if your goal is to build something you want to see exist.

I, for one, am glad Stack Overflow is the site that it is today. There are plenty of other places on the Web for more open discussion… like here, for instance.

How you make money is irrelevant for this.

Original intent doesn't really matter if you intend to serve your users. What you want to do matters, and what they want to do matters. Startups are a learning process where you explore the intersection.

If you hold on too tightly to original intent, exploration is impossible. You either end up frustrated that the people won't do what you want, or you end up trying to force them to do what you want. Both suck.

Nothing will satisfy everyone. Stack Exchange is great at serving people who want to ask and answer well-formed questions with specific answers. It doesn't even pretend to be good at serving people who want to have long, open-ended discussions about fuzzier topics.

What's wrong with that? Judging by the activity on the sites, they're serving plenty of users pretty well.

What's wrong with Friendster? It has millions of users and makes money, after all.

Personally, I think Friendster could have been something more if they had been less arrogant, more willing to listen to their users. They only had to give up the belief that the users were Doing It Wrong.

The problem I have with what Stack Overflow is similar. By your very metrics, these questions get plenty of activity, and many users feel very well served by them. What's wrong with that?

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