Get thousands of workers, to work thousandths of hours, to answer technical questions for free...In exchange for "Reputation". Sell for 1.8 Billion...The American Dream...
A system designed to extract free labor for massive financial gain, while offering only gamified rewards, reflects exploitative design, not fairness.
Websites cost money to run, and I’m glad SO was so well monetized that it didn’t run out of money and get deactivated like so many of the old school forums we used to go to for help before.
What is incomprehensible is developers confusing the value created by the site, with the means of production of said value.
While contributing to the site might provide you with some personal feelings of value, maybe even a rush of altruistic euphoria... :-) An illusory sense of digital sainthood...Your unpaid work directly enhances the value of a platform that profits from selling the collective output, including yours.
This means you’re effectively donating your expertise to a for-profit entity, with no equity or share in its success
Many sports clubs work with the help of many volunteers. If they were not available to help for free, the practitioners of the sports would need to pay more. That would mean, only the richer part of the candidates could do the sport. A side effect is as well, that the club itself gets bigger, more famous, and richer as a whole. All thanks to the help of volunteers. There is just no way around that.
In SO/Jeff's case this was beneficial for him in the form of a huge selling price. I would say luckily he was, as I read in the comments, a great contributor to the SO organisation.
Your analogy about the public park is wrong btw. A better analogy is if someone ran a private park for years where musicians can come and collaborate with each other and expertly exchange ideas, and then after 20 years of running the park they sell it and move on with their life.
Stack Overflow helped it to scale really well, too. You could answer a question, just once, and over time it could help dozens then hundreds then thousands of people.
It’s easy to be cynical, but actually that was really awesome.
But then again, I think that I've profited quite a bit from having Google maps as a resource, far more than the contribution I've made.
It feels much better to look at the fact that it's a place that people help share information useful to each other, which happens to profit a large company, than to only focus jealously on the fact that said large company has hit upon a way to monetize the sharing of this information.
Both things are true, and whether you think it's great or horrid really is a matter of perspective.
So Jeff took that money instead.
This is what made StackOverflow in my opinion. The excellent moderation in the beginning resulted in excellent quality.
Now, not taking away from the other early moderators, Jeff was definitely a huge part of it and one thing is for sure: He busted his ass off for this site and he deserves the reward.
Also his backup strategies around 2008 were quite interesting.
It was "expertsexchange.com" initially. Then they disambiguated it by renaming to "experts-exchange.com", just to be clear.
Incidentally, the amount of sheer content-masking garbage on their pages was what originally prompted me to install and learn (IIRC) Greasemonkey and a bunch of DOM/CSS stuff.
I don't miss that site one bit!
If he wanted to give back he could have started with John Skeet.
People were contributing well before it was a top 10 website. That’s how it got kickstarted in the first place.
A group of volunteers builds a public park, putting in hours of work, landscaping, planting trees, and creating a beautiful space for everyone to enjoy.
Years later, the park’s manager fences it off, sells it for $1.8 billion, and pockets the money.
When questioned, the manager says, “So what? The volunteers enjoyed building it, and people got value from the park while it was open.”
1. What do you mean by "open"? If you're talking about the company, the park was private -- fenced off -- from the start; there was no "bait and switch". This is the part which is worth 1.8 billion dollars: the brand name, network, software and system.
2. What do you mean by "open"? If you're talking about the content licenses, then the park is still open and public to this day. This is valuable too, of course, but no one will buy CC-licensed content for 1.8 billion dollars. It's just in the commons.
Basically, while both the website and the content are valuable, the 1.8 billion dollars you're complaining about wasn't used to buy the content. Anyone can get that for free. It was used to buy the website, which has always been private and proprietary.
Your story would make more sense if StackExchange was a non-profit started by a group of volunteers which somehow got turned into a for-profit and sold to the benefit of a single person, or if they somehow re-licensed everyone's content into proprietary. But neither happened. And that's why it's a false analogy.
The brand, network, and proprietary systems you emphasize are valuable only because of the knowledge and content the community created.
The "bait and switch" lies in fostering a community-driven mission only to commoditize the platform for personal enrichment.
Is this how you'd characterise open source software contributions as well (minus the points, of course)?