Hacker News Reader

Experts Exchange has betrayed their users / community numerous times over the years in experimenting with how to make money. So far I would say that Stack Overflow has done a great job of not compromising their mission in the name of revenue. That's a very difficult balancing act.

Very tight focus and strict rules.

Some people don't like that, and they kind of have a point, but Stack Overflow has a mission and they stick to it.

The big reason is the purpose was to create the best Q&A site for programmers (Quora is better than most Stack Exchange sites, just not Stack Overflow) and there was a relentless focus from the very beginning on making that happen. Compare to Expert's Exchange where the whole thing is designed like a liquidation sale flyer. It feels like a cheap commercialization of knowledge that is freely shared and thus feels exploitative, like it runs directly against the hacker ethos that enabled it to collect that information. Stack Overflow is very clearly designed by programmers to help programmers, and it was seeded with a great community to start it off on the right foot.

I strongly think that expertsexchange is a poor name for a website.