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How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

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Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#121

Post by subhobroto »

0xmohit wrote: post #115
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…

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.

Excellent insight. I am hopeful SE will figure out a way to stop/reduce this arbitrage opportunity.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#122

Post by JeremyBanks »

overcast wrote: post #91
Zergy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

I don't agree with your premise. I've seen many users join the site and succeed in recent years, because they cared to understand what they were joining, and how they could contribute to it. If you're only looking for an answer for yourself, people are not going to cater to you. It's not a great environment for random newbies looking for personal help because that was never the primary goal. They're more expected to benefit as consumers of the content that more experienced programmers generate.

From the announcement of Stack Overflow, before the site was even in private beta (https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/):

> Stack Overflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange meets wikipedia meets programming reddit.

The community elements of the site are nice, and I have made some friends there, but "wiki of programming answers" is much closer to the original vision of the site than "community".

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#123

Post by Zergy »

overcast wrote: post #91
Zergy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

Old boys club is a misleading way to describe the scenario.

There is content that doesn't belong and content that does, this is established by the company at a broad scale and customized for various boards by the community.

I haven't seen the case where content belongs but is denied because you're not well enough know or w/e. If by old boys club you mean long standing members are preventing new members from changing policy then yeah thats true.

Another thing you're failing to realize is that that plenty of people who do RTFM, become contributors, and stick around. More than enough to keep up with demand.

> that get the boot because they've been addressed(poorly) previously

This is a valid complaint. I believe SE needs the Karma system to do a better job at rewarding cleaning up existing questions.

> At what point do you start just running a Wiki of programming answers, and not a community of programmers.

Its more we want a community to create a q/a based wiki. There needs to be a question answering community (no need to focus on the asking one it will come) and strict question moderation helps attract and retain the answering community. Retraining and attracting 15+ year industry vets is much more vital to SE's health than retraining new users.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#124

Post by Zergy »

tedmiston wrote: post #63
collyw wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A more recent problem with Stack Overflow now that its a few years old. The tech gets updated, and previously good answers are now out of date, as libraries and frameworks have changed.

We have an edit button though! And edits are community validated before being merged. I use it regularly to update other people's answers. If the update breaks backwards compatibility, I'll just add a separate section "For Python 3.x, use .items() instead of .iteritems()" etc.

Very true but I think SE does a poor job incentivizing upkeep. Its very little Karma compared to new contributions. Honestly the only thing I with they would change.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#125

Post by cdnsteve »

A reminder that you don't need to use the latest or fanciest tech stack to achieve success in business. In the case of SO, boring wins, it's proven and seems like it allows them to focus on their product and to create new value for users.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#127

Post by Manishearth »

kjhughes wrote: post #68
BipolarElsa wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ask a lot of question, and thus get banned from asking more... I wish they would have a "luxury" option for like 49.99 a year where students could ask like unlimited questions. Is this crazy?

Almost certainly the quality, not the quantity, of your questions was responsible for your ban. See http://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask

After many years of being part of the Stack Exchange community I have come to the conclusion that folks will do whatever they can to avoid actually reading that page.

I've seen folks post questions on meta about how to get out of the ban (used to be a very regular occurrence, a bunch a day). I've seen folks post on other stack exchange sites asking how to get out. People even get emailed for this. All to ask questions which are answered perfectly well by the page they were linked to in the ban.

I've seen this so often that I can still remember the goo.gl URL that the old FAQ used to be behind (http://goo.gl/C1Kwu).

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#128

Post by JeremyBanks »

Zergy wrote: post #124
tedmiston wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have an edit button though! And edits are community validated before being merged. I use it regularly to update other people's answers. If the update breaks backwards compatibility, I'll just add a separate section "For Python 3.x, use .items() instead of .iteritems()" etc.

Very true but I think SE does a poor job incentivizing upkeep. Its very little Karma compared to new contributions. Honestly the only thing I with they would change.

I agree, and would like to see a change like that in Q&A, but it would be a pretty big deal at this point in the site's life. However, the new Documentation section does a much better job with this. Each edit is worth +2, and upvotes give points to all significant contributors (+5 or +1 depending on size of contribution), not just the author!

This system has had some issues and may still be adjusted, but I think it's a lot closer to the mark. I've probably gained close to 1000 rep so far from documentation I contributed to but did not author.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#129

Post by overcast »

wool_gather wrote: post #35
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...

That post contains quite a few inaccuracies and misunderstandings about SO functionality. It has been discussed on HN recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12576124

Looks like that discussion talks about the same issue.

joekrie 51 days ago [-]

I find it to be a great resource if someone has already answered your question, especially if I find it via Google. As for asking questions, it's a bit off-putting to be immediately downvoted without explanation, and to not get a single answer.

Point is, it's good resource to free-ride but not actively participate.

city41 51 days ago [-]

That's basically the point of the site. I think SO's owners are ok with this trade off.

FWIW it wasn't always like this. I have a lot of points on SO mostly acquired about 5 years ago. Back then SO was a much friendlier, and much more interesting place to participate in. I haven't actively participated in about 3 years or so.

CaptSpify 51 days ago [-]

I've always thought this described it best: SO is a great place to find answers to your questions, but SO is a terrible place to ask questions.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#130

Post by tedmiston »

Zergy wrote: post #124
tedmiston wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have an edit button though! And edits are community validated before being merged. I use it regularly to update other people's answers. If the update breaks backwards compatibility, I'll just add a separate section "For Python 3.x, use .items() instead of .iteritems()" etc.

Very true but I think SE does a poor job incentivizing upkeep. Its very little Karma compared to new contributions. Honestly the only thing I with they would change.

This is fair. I think it's +2 for an accepted edit vs +10*n upvotes +15 for accepted. Another approach is to just make a new answer on the original question later. I see that a lot for Python 2/3 stuff too.
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