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How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

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Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#91

Post by overcast »

Zergy wrote: post #40
overcast wrote: post #31

At this point, I have no desire to participate in or help stackoverflow. The attitudes there are such hostile, elitist garbage, where someone is incapable of asking a question, because it will instantly be closed by the mods. God forbid they are a newbie to the site. Responses essentially amount to go RTFM. This sums it up well. https://hackernoon.com/the-decline-of-stack-overflow-7cb69fa...

I used to be very active on SO and I stopped because dealing with new people to the site is a waste of everyones time. SO has the goal of being a Q to A catalog. You're not contributing unless you are asking a new, answerable question or providing and answer to a new or existing question. There are tons of people asking questions that are already answered, tons of people asking questions that would take a book to ans…

Your core group of know it all people, won't be around forever. If you keep discouraging new users, by treating them like second class citizens, and a "waste of time". Then the old boys club, is not going to last. I agree entertaining basic programming questions is foolish, but I've seen many examples of legitimate questions, that get the boot because they've been addressed(poorly) previously. At what point do you start just running a Wiki of programming answers, and not a community of programmers. Because the former sounds like what the programming police at stackoverflow want.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#92

Post by Bartweiss »

brianzelip wrote: post #13

Great answer to a related FAQ in a post[0] linked from this article, about why !SO doesn't care about ad blockers: > The truth is: we don’t care if our users use ad blockers on Stack Overflow. More accurately: we hope that they won’t, but we understand that some people just don’t like ads. Our belief is that if someone doesn’t like them, and they won’t click on them, any impressions served to them will only annoy the…

And a great explanation in the piece of how SO works to serve only quality ads.

Good enough, in fact, that I'm whitelisting Stack Overflow from my adblocker. I don't do it often, I don't even do it for sites I like; the reality is that anyone using an automated ad network is at significant risk of serving malware, and I don't approve even if I'm protected. I don't visit Forbes at all anymore, ever, because they broke their users basic faith in "see our ads, and we won't destroy your machine".

But a promise to serve relevant, low-impact ads, chosen by actual humans? That's something I'm willing to support.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#93

Post by Bartweiss »

user837387 wrote: post #61
subhobroto wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My following suggestion is a very unpopular one, but it is this: If you are a student, use the money you would have donated to StackOverflow to purchase a book or a tool that will help you to learn better and become an expert. If you are an expert, contribute your time to StackOverflow (instead of money). Money is easy to get compared to content. What helps StackOverflow grow is quality content. I am also interested…

>>book or a tool that will help you to learn better and become I've tried that before, many times. Unfortunately when you are trying to do real work those books are many times useless. Example, I kept trying to build a newtonian physics simulator so I got a Statics and Dynamics mechanical engineering book. The book was a text book for Mechanical engineering students and yet the examples they teach you are for toy pro…

As an aside, buying a print reference book frequently feels counterproductive.

Even if I'm going to get a formal reference text, instead of online resources, I probably want a digital copy. Otherwise, I find myself going "I wish I could do text search for this thing..." and wondering why I didn't get the version that actually allows that. When I read for pleasure I enjoy the physicality of books; when I read for technical reference I demand the interface of a computer.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#94

Post by clay_to_n »

rbobby wrote: post #87
tedmiston wrote: post #58

> We are in the process of sending out an email now announcing Developer Story to the larger community in the hopes that we can help some percentage of developers. If that email is rejected, we’ll unsubscribe you. If you’re unresponsive to emails we send, we’ll unsubscribe you. If you mark it as spam, we’ll unsubscribe you. How great it would be if every site would subscribe to such high standards. Bravo, SO.

> If you mark it as spam, we’ll unsubscribe you. How would they know?

In the comments, they explain that Sendgrid gets notified of spam marks, and Sendgrid gives SO a webhook whenever someone marks as spam. So they then unsubscribe that user.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#95

Post by breakingcups »

rbobby wrote: post #87
tedmiston wrote: post #58

> We are in the process of sending out an email now announcing Developer Story to the larger community in the hopes that we can help some percentage of developers. If that email is rejected, we’ll unsubscribe you. If you’re unresponsive to emails we send, we’ll unsubscribe you. If you mark it as spam, we’ll unsubscribe you. How great it would be if every site would subscribe to such high standards. Bravo, SO.

> If you mark it as spam, we’ll unsubscribe you. How would they know?

You can include a header in your email message where, if a user marks a message as spam, Gmail / Hotmail / whatever will let you know.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#96

Post by ssharp »

tedmiston wrote: post #58

> We are in the process of sending out an email now announcing Developer Story to the larger community in the hopes that we can help some percentage of developers. If that email is rejected, we’ll unsubscribe you. If you’re unresponsive to emails we send, we’ll unsubscribe you. If you mark it as spam, we’ll unsubscribe you. How great it would be if every site would subscribe to such high standards. Bravo, SO.

Most sites do this already, at least they should if they want to make sure more of their emails don't end up in junk folders. Deliverability is really important to both businesses and email service providers, so a lot of the time, bounce unsubscribes and spam unsubscribes are baked in and easing off subscribers who don't open or click emails is a best practice for deliverability purposes.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#97

Post by tgb »

breakingcups wrote: post #95
rbobby wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you mark it as spam, we’ll unsubscribe you. How would they know?

You can include a header in your email message where, if a user marks a message as spam, Gmail / Hotmail / whatever will let you know.

Why do they do that? Seems great for this use-case but terrible information to give bad actors.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#98

Post by [deleted] »

ComteDeLaFere wrote: post #78
antaviana wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Hoovers, their revenue is $11.33M. Source http://www.hoovers.com/company-information/company-search.ht...

How do they employ almost 300 people on $11 mil / year? Also, why are these posts getting downvoted? The title of this article is "How We Make Money at Stack Overflow".

[deleted]

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#99

Post by TheHegemon »

tgb wrote: post #97
breakingcups wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can include a header in your email message where, if a user marks a message as spam, Gmail / Hotmail / whatever will let you know.

Why do they do that? Seems great for this use-case but terrible information to give bad actors.

Would make sense to prevent themselves to be marked as spam in the future.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#100

Post by fredley »

chubot wrote: post #59
dolguldur wrote: post #24

Stackoverflow is the prime example for how a company can generate tremenduous value without making that much money. It's difficult to estimate its contribution to the world economy quantitatively, but I'd definitely say billions, many many billions.

How do you know they don't make that much money? I didn't see that anywhere in the blog post. I agree that they make an enormous contribution to the world economy. Joel really did knock it out of the park -- remember expertsexchange? His goal was to get rid of that and it worked.

Or as Joel likes to call it 'that hyphenated site'
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