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Comment by andy_adams | Hacker News Reader

Being "dicks to users" is based on what, exactly? My point is that for EE to not be "dicks to users" in the eyes of the tech community would mean to stop charging for their content.

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.

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Well, stop charging for their content _or_ stop trying to get in google results.

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.

"Mistreating" is pretty strong language, don't you think? In the worst case, someone thought they were going to get an answer, and they didn't...IMO that deserves a shrug, not a public campaign to take them down. I do appreciate your thoughtful comment.

It functioned as a black hole of good advice, adding no useful value beyond acting as a gatekeeper, and made it more difficult to find actual help by both a) attracting answers that would have been publicly posted and b) obscuring search results making it more difficult to find other sources.

They had a net negative effect on the world.

Not sure about the impact of the so-called public campaign(which - to my perspective - just seemed to be a few comments) - I just stopped using EE when the SEO crap started. I didn't start seeing SO links until some time later - until then I trawled through forums and other less centralized resources for answers.

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.

In the worst case, someone thought they were going to get an answer, and they didn't...IMO that deserves a shrug, not a public campaign to take them down.

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.

Ever hear of a spam filter, Mine works extermely effective..

Unfortunately Google doesn't let you manually filter out sites from your search results anymore. At one point EE was the only site on my filtered list...

Exclude a word -query Add a dash (-) before a word or site to exclude all results that include that word. This is especially useful for synonyms like Jaguar the car brand and jaguar the animal.

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?

You're suggesting I type

  -site:experts-exchange.com

as part of every google query I make?

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...

No, I've never heard of that, thanks!

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?

Well, sure, it may be that a competitor engaged in some highly negative marketting against them, and I can see how that would be annoying if you were them.

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).

Let me put it another way. I can understand why a CEO might choose that, but as a user (especially as a user trying to find an answer, or a noob programmer trying to understand something better) all I would ever get was, "Hah! We've got answers .... and you've gotta pay."

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.)

> (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.

People were searching google for answers to their questions. EE hijacked the results with pages that hid the answers. That's how they were dicks. They intentionally wasted our time. Far from "evil," but annoying enough to nourish resentment against EE.

Were the answers readily available elsewhere in most cases? If so, the main "wrong" done by EE was simply placing inaccessible results higher than otherwise accessible ones, which is pretty rubbish, but if instead, a bulk of the content was unavailable elsewhere, this doesn't seem that bad. I'm guessing it was more of the former though, lending to the general ire towards EE.

Generally you could find the answer elsewhere. They made it more difficult to find the answer's elsewhere, as they were generally in the top of any query. If it happened occasionally, it would be no big deal. But when it happened every single time, it gets frustrating. You have a deadline, and you have a problem that is already frustrating. Now you have to wade through EE results trying to find another site that has an answer.

Huh? You are making it sound that EE answer ranking highly in Google is EE's fault and not the Google search algorithm. I would argue that almost any useful programming question I search for has SO as the first link which is then "closed as not constructive". It is behavior even worse than EE - at least for EE, I knew that their pay-wall would block me.

Yes the answers were available elsewhere. And if EE hadn't resorted to scumbag-SEO, you'd have been able to find them sooner.

EE users added this value, and its highly questionable that they would have done so if they had known that their expertise would be locked behind a paywall.

"not worthy of an attempt to sink them as a company"

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?

People are fooled into paying for many things. That doesn't prove anything.

Does someone who pays EE for the answer to their question get what they were paying for? Yes. My point would be: how is EE charging for content any different than someone else charging for content? The great evil they seemed to commit was ranking highly in Google while following Google's guidelines, and then hiding the content below the fold.

They didn't just hide it below the fold. They made it look like it wasn't there at all, by showing blurred-out content first, along with text along the lines of "subscribe to see the answers".

Any reasonable person not aware of the trick would believe they had to pay for the answer.

"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.

no.. not only with EE. Usually the answer was out there somewhere else free on a different site, but EE serp spam was just an obstacle in the way.

I'd rather learn to do it myself, which is part of what makes Stack Overflow great. I can learn and teach there. EE raised barriers to consumption and participation.

To be clear, they were charging to access answers written by people who weren't employees that wanted to help others.

And why couldn't they switch to an advertising-based revenue stream (like pretty much everyone else in Web 2.0 and beyond).

Unfortunately it's really hard to get any reasoned discussion about Experts-Exchange on Hacker News. Ideologies are difficult to discuss. I'm reminded of this: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

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 in search results"

'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.

Sorry, I didn't intend to play semantic games here. I don't think anyone has disagreed that they gamed search results. I meant only to call out the difference between sites that explicitly don't end up in search results (because they don't want to) versus those that actively try to get indexed.

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.

You're getting downvoted because your comment is just complaining about hivemind, followed by a typical proof-by-downvotes addendum.

It's not a complaint, it is an observation, I quite like most of the HN hivemind. It was meant to warn the OP who seemed to think his post, being in an agreeable tone, in general, would be well received.

And I don't understand what makes you think annoyance/hatred of EE has to do with HN identity. You seem to have drawn this conclusion based on the fact that most HN users dislike EE. I would posit that most developers and IT workers who used search engines prior to StackOverflow would dislike EE quite a bit. It is not surprising that the sentiment you see on HN would correlate with that.

You are definitely right that this sentiment is strong throughout the tech industry, so it's just by coincidence that it is strong on HN, however, it does define a strong position in voting behavior on HN. Even when there are reasonable arguments in support of non-open models (and I'm not saying this is one of them), downvotes fly and little discussion is had, it creates a feedback loop that reinforces an entrenched ideology and shuns opposing view points. I'm not making a value judgement about one or the other view, but it does affect how interactions on HN take place.

> reasonable arguments in support of non-open models (and I'm not saying this is one of them)

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!"

So true. You get an up vote for me.

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