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How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

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Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#111

Post by arjie »

Bartweiss wrote: post #92
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…

Did you only do it today? 8 months after the announcement, because someone happened to mention it in a comments thread? Doesn't speak very much to that approach's effectiveness. Especially since you've got a strong opinion on it.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#112

Post by edblarney »

lucb1e wrote: post #81
edblarney wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"a yearly donation would definitely be something I'd do for a substantial amount" There's a word for this, it's called 'subscription' : ) They provide a service, you pay for it. It's how most of the world works. I think the underlying issue is price discrimination: how to get the large numbers of those unwilling/unable to pay some value, while providing value to the higher order users as well. It's a paradox that peo…

> There's a word for this, it's called 'subscription' : ) I avoided that word because it's the wrong word. A subscription implies I get something that normal users don't get. I don't want that. I hate services like Dropbox where the free users get benefits for installing it on their Android or from referrals (shitty stuff) and live off of the backs of paying users. Yet here I think it's much more akin to something li…

"A subscription implies I get something that normal users don't get."

Fair enough - but there are very, very few value creating engines that can feasibly exist in such a context.

Wikipedia is one.

Stackoverflow probably could not.

Someone mentioned it creates 'billions' in value, well, that's probably not too far off.

There's nothing wrong with people paying for things.

But to your point - it would be nice to find a way to do intelligent price discrimination. Students, hobbyists get it free, other entities can pay. etc..

I don't think that would work for Stackoverflow either because there is an inherent 'open-ness' that it needs ... that said, again, there's nothing wrong with paying for things.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#113

Post by secretRubyDev »

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.

When I've usually clicked the report spam and unsubscribe button after reporting spam in gmail it usually immediately opens a tab with the unsubscribe URL.

I've since stopped doing it since the last thing I want to do is open up some random page belonging to the person who spammed me.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#114

Post by aalear »

ocoster wrote: post #70
Pica_soO wrote: post #48

Would it be thieving, if i made a NN-Crawler, that condensed the Stack overflow-Conversations into a query able chat bot?

Did you know that we provide the complete set of questions and answers (from all sites, including Stack Overflow)? No need to crawl anything. You can find it on the internet archive: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

And there's also the API - http://api.stackexchange.com

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#115

Post by 0xmohit »

subhobroto wrote: post #9
lucb1e wrote: post #5

StackOverflow is an extremely valuable resource for all programmers. I've not seen the option anywhere, but a yearly donation would definitely be something I'd do for a substantial amount (substantial to me as a student, so it's not the moon but not a beer either).

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…

Contributing is wonderful, but those internet points (reputation) screws it up. An edit would give you 2 points if you have a rep http://stackoverflow.com/posts/21023161/revisions for example. There is no change between the original answer and the latest revision after 3 edits.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#116

Post by jobu »

openasocket wrote: post #105
tgb wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

idk, I'm trying to find a way a bad actor could take advantage of that information. Kind of helpful for spammers to get a sense of what does and does not get marked, but they can just see how many people clicked the link.

In the past (10+ years ago), clicking the Unsubscribe link in a spam email was a sure way to get your email address sold to every spammer out there.

Most of those bad actors seem to have been weeded out, but some still might try it.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#117

Post by yuhong »

arjie wrote: post #111
Bartweiss wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Did you only do it today? 8 months after the announcement, because someone happened to mention it in a comments thread? Doesn't speak very much to that approach's effectiveness. Especially since you've got a strong opinion on it.

The fun thing is that I think Reddit once used both types of ads. I don't think they do that anymore though.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#118

Post by subhobroto »

Shog9 wrote: post #108
subhobroto wrote: post #7

Thank you for submitting this on HN. I am really happy to see the site grow. > I am extremely protective of our users. You can ask anyone who works here. It’s is my very strong belief that we have a built up a trust with the community that is not easily earned and is impossible to replace. I want to work for a company that respects that trust, and I do. > How much money we make is a direct proxy for how much we are h…

FWIW, you don't have to create an account to answer questions on Stack Overflow. We'll encourage you to do so, because it generally makes things easier... But if you want to just enter an email address (can be fake) and some sort of name (doesn't have to be one you use anywhere else), you can post without registering or revealing any personal details. We don't require folks to associate an account on another site, or…

> but not have those answers associated publicly with that account

Correct!

Joshua, thank you for the response. I was going to reach out and point you to this sub-thread, so you saved me time.

There are some excellent programmers I know who would like to post answers on SO/SE without being able to trace the source of answers to them.

The reasons can be many: some dont want to be bothered with random people tracking them down and contacting them to as involved as having the ability to say (as an example): "ahem, don't depend on this API because it's going to be deprecated in the next 3 months".

I am sure there are other useful reasons.

People might be concerned about misuse and spam, but I have been told Smoke Detector has been doing a pretty good job with that.

A random idea: SO is full of developers who are ready to give back. Why don't you ask the community how they can implement a solution that is not too bad?

Thank you again for the comment. Really appreciate the thoughts.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#119

Post by subhobroto »

lucb1e wrote: post #74
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…

> Money is easy to get compared to content. What helps StackOverflow grow is quality content. I do, >10k rep on the security.stackexchange.com site. I just think it's an amazing platform that I'd like to support with hosting and development costs.

> I do, >10k rep on the security.stackexchange.com site

That's amazing! Thank you for your contributions. I meant to imply that donating money is usually the least fruitful way to contribute, in my experience. It should be your last resort; definitely not the first one.

Example: One way SO can really gain from your security expertise is for you to think about how anonymous answers can be supported. That will be far more valuable than $$$.

I posted about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12961447

I would love to read your opinions about this crazy idea!

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#120

Post by subhobroto »

jc4p wrote: post #15
subhobroto wrote: post #7

Thank you for submitting this on HN. I am really happy to see the site grow. > I am extremely protective of our users. You can ask anyone who works here. It’s is my very strong belief that we have a built up a trust with the community that is not easily earned and is impossible to replace. I want to work for a company that respects that trust, and I do. > How much money we make is a direct proxy for how much we are h…

For my own curiosity, when you mean anonymous answers do you mean by people who don't have accounts on our platform at all, or do you mean people who already have accounts disconnecting their persona from a specific answer?

You got it in the latter (former would be even better). Explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12961447
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