Where's the defense? "Experts Exchange were dicks to users, but it was to make money!" isn't a defense.
If you want to steal users from your competitor, why not name names?
"I have absolutely nothing against Experts-Exchange. Realize that I've been a fan of the smackdown learning model for a long time; it's like kayfabe in professional wrestling. There are no hard feelings; this 'rivalry' is mostly useful as a way to explain what it is we do. This internet is certainly big enough for the both of us -- big enough, in fact, for hundreds of Q&A websites."
There's no conspiracy here. If you're an asshole to everyone and they hate you, it's not because you have powerful enemies engaging in some kind of evil marketing agenda. It's just what happens when you're an asshole to everyone.
I linked a video of Google's Matt Cutts explaining that EE wasn't violating their guidelines. So their infraction was hiding content below the fold. Hardly an evil infraction, and not worthy of an attempt to sink them as a company.
EE added real value, and their longevity is evidence that some people are willing to pay for that value.
Any reasonable person not aware of the trick would believe they had to pay for the answer.
Why not pay a computer shop or a programmer 3-4 times the amount for the same thing, only with EE, you can learn how to do it yourself.
I mean would you you rather have a electrician come out and change your light bulb for you, or would you rather learn to do it yourself.
It's part of the (on average) Hacker News identity to hate Experts-Exchange and any resource that exposes itself in search results but requires sign-up to access.
Anyone who tries to discuss something that is opposed to the HN identity is quickly downvoted, they learn from the feedback and damaged karma not to bother and you are left with only comments/commenters that say things they know will get positive feedback/karma.
edit: I'm actually surprised that I got downvoted just for mentioning this, it only serves to reinforce the reality of this ideological position.
'exposes itself' is a great euphemism for gaming the system in order to get a search engine ranking that it couldn't earn on its merits. I remember the first time I ran across EE, it was about fifteen seconds before the time I blocked EE in my google search results.
Hacker News requires a log in, but generally, HN links and discussions don't show up in search results, this is, if I understand correctly, intentional. So my statement was based on the idea that people on HN hate signing up for sites that require login, but which also end up in search results they find, which is why it's OK for HN to require a sign up for discussion, but not for Experts-Exchange.
Then what the hell are you talking about? I am yet to see a reasonable argument in support of their business practices. Please link me to one if I missed it - because I don't think it exists.
The only thing I seem to see repeated is "some googley company did what we did but offered it for free and we have kids to feed so let us do shady things to keep our dated business model afloat and don't hate on us over it!"
The second one would destroy their business as much as the first though, yeah.
But yes, trying to get paywalled results high in google results is mistreating users (or, rather, mistreating the public at large; most of those people weren't their users (yet, they hope!)).
So is trying to trick people into thinking the results are paywalled when they are not. That's mistreating em too.
Yes, they had a business model that required them to a) get on google results so people would click and visit them, and then b) make those people pay (or _think_ they had to pay) to see what they clicked to see.
Yeah, they didn't arrive at this out of a desire to be evil or mistreat users, they were just people trying to figure out how to make a business like everyone else, sure. But what they ended up with, at one point, was a business that required mistreating the public. shrug.
They had a net negative effect on the world.
The problem I had with SE wasn't really the paywall (or fake-out paywall in case of below-the-fold). Well: okay, that was a problem in that once it started, I stopped using them. But I didn't blame them for that by itself - they have to make money. I just felt that the value EE gave me in terms of the quality of its answers didn't justify the money they wanted, so I moved on.
The problem was really the spamming. This is when I took an active dislike to EE - paywall content completely consumed the first page or two of search results to any technical question I searched for on Google. Or link farms that fed into paywalled EE content. That was when I started getting actively annoyed about it - but this was several months after I stopped using it.
I think "mistreating" is perfectly appropriate in this context - because during this window, it actually cost me valuable time to not use EE. Time spent paging through results, clicking on link farms before I realized they were link farms -- time that could have been spent actually working on the solution of my problem of the moment.
I'm not disputing that the CEO did what he thought was necessary. But there's no questoin that he picked wrong, and it's a little disingenuous to claim that the fact the company needed to earn money somehow made his choice more acceptable.
Sure, and a single spam message is a minor nuisance worthy of hitting the delete key. Until you get a sea of 1,000 daily spam messages drowning out the 100 legitimate emails you get per day.
Slimy is slimy regardless of the scale the slime is distributed. Experts Exchange's business model was based on repeated and systematic abuses of people's time. That's worth more than a shrug.
jaguar speed -car or pandas -site:wikipedia.org
Tip: You can also exclude results based on other operators, like excluding all results from a specific site.
FROM: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/136861?p=adv_ope...
See how hard that is?
-site:experts-exchange.com
I mean, it's a handy way of refining searches, but I don't want to have to type out my spam filter every time I search...
So wait, now that I've read up on these, you're suggesting that it's not treating people poorly to send them spam... because most of them will never see your spam becuase they have effective spam filters?
Wait, why would you want to send something that you know nobody will ever see because of their highly effective spam filters?
But are you really surprised that their strategy made the public mad? If someone clicks on a google result, that looks like it's going to give them an answer to their question -- only to find that they have to pay to get the answer (whether that's true or whether you've tricked them into thinking that) -- are you truly surprised they would consider that mistreatment? you think it was only a competitor that convinced people to consider that mistreatment?
There's a reason that Google requires that the content shown google -- which ends up in the google results summary/excerpts -- is the same content shown to the public. Because people get really mad and feel mistreated when it's not.
If the content was 'really' there just hidden to make someone think it was paywalled -- maybe that helps you technically get around Google's rules (that's between you and Google), but it obviously won't make people any less mad about it (to the extent it works anyway).
My reaction was the same reaction we have when Google tries to foist G+ real-names on Youtube accounts, or when I see Quora's hidden results: "Oh, screw you!" It's not logical, but it's the feeling I (and I'm sure others) feel.
Quora is actually good, in that at least the first answer (usually very good) is usually visible, but as a user it's easy to see why I would want to use StackExchange rather than Experts' Exchange. I see all the answers, and am free to lurk. As a student, I would have been able to learn a lot about best-practices, or why X doesn't work with Y, where before I was stuck in ignorance due to not being able to justify the $ on a membership.
The main reason I turned to Wikipedia and Stack Overflow is not because they rank well on Google, but because they are free sources of information. Moreover, they don't constantly pester me to sign up, log in, or pay them anything. (I actually have an account at SO, but haven't posted anything: I don't feel like an expert on anything enough to write an answer that would actually earn points.)
The best way to learn something is to teach - pick a question that you can't answer and spend some time researching it. Then write it up as if you were explaining it to yourself before you started looking.
You'll come away with both points and more knowledge.
It's competition. Someone makes something people like better and they win, you lose. If at the same time you helped them with intentionally poor UX, well there may be some negative sentiment about that which your competition will undoubtedly capitalize on. That's it though, EE chose their strategy, it failed and failed hard. I don't get what about that is hard to understand?
A lot of people, including me, have derived extreme value from EE over the years. And anything useful in SO is "closed as not constructive" anyway - so SO basically has 0 utility for me. (I am not saying this is true for everyone)