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Expert Exchange gets narky after snub from Q/A site review

experts-exchange.com

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Re: Expert Exchange gets narky after snub from Q/A site review

#21

Post by joblessjunkie »

juddlyon wrote: post #7

Experts Exchange is borderline spam, to put it mildly. They hide the answer at the very end of an enormous scroll (of course after they try to sell you via a pop-up). A reasonable user has no clue that the answer is on the page. When I have made it all the way down, I have received a quality solution perhaps 5 out of 500 times. Stack Overflow realized there was a quality problem with the existing tech Q&A services an…

IIRC, there was a time when EE pages didn't provide any answer at all without registration.

To keep their search ranking up, they'd show this hidden content to the Googlebot, but not to unregistered users.

Google cried foul about this, and thus was the long scroll to an answer invented.

EE's web site was never designed around giving the user an answer as quickly as possible. It has always been designed to maximize its tiny paid account conversion rate. That's a spam business model, no "borderline" about it.

Re: Expert Exchange gets narky after snub from Q/A site review

#22

Post by archangel_one »

kpanghmc wrote: post #10

One of the big things that makes Experts Exchange unique is a patented system that requires askers to select their best answer. Most Q&A sites (StackExchange included) let the community vote for the best answer, when really the person whose opinion matters most is the one who asked the question. StackOverflow allows for both community voting AND for the original asker to indicate which answer was the best answer. I s…

It seems like 90% of the EE questions I see, the asker has vanished before accepting one of the answers - in those cases this patented system is effectively worthless since I have no idea which answer is best. At least on SO I can still get an idea if some answers are better (or if some are flat-out wrong, as happens).

Re: Expert Exchange gets narky after snub from Q/A site review

#23

Post by rhizome »

Rupert Pupkin, anybody? Experts Exchange is not a small site in general, and has been around for like 15 years (per the article), so I'm a little curious how this guy got so jaded on VC such that he "got the t-shirt."

Is EE really run by movers and shakers riding deals every few years in their spare time? Until finally tiring of the rigamarole and retiring to their first love, Experts Exchange. Isn't it more likely that they've hired various "been through an acquisition and/or IPO" people to try and give them business ideas over the years? No wonder the site is so annoying, these people would have been bleeding the founders dry while suggesting a full campaign of popup ads that worked a peach a few years back at Ask Jeeves. That doesn't work, so they move on to the next guy who totally worked at Twitter in the early days.

I'm thinking lashing out at the world is at the unpaid end of the spectrum of BizDev.

Re: Expert Exchange gets narky after snub from Q/A site review

#25

Post by cfontes »

jarin wrote: post #9

Honestly, I'm just shocked to see that there's a real person behind the site. I don't know why, but whenever I stumbled across an EE answer through Google, it's always seemed like a place full of crystallized ancient knowledge.

second that.

Re: Expert Exchange gets narky after snub from Q/A site review

#26

Post by knowtheory »

Wow! I just read something on Expert Exchange and i didn't even have to pay any money!

Expert Exchange is actually a legit company? I had no idea. I don't think i know anybody who's ever used it. Hell, i've never heard of anybody who's ever used Expert Exchange.

Re: Expert Exchange gets narky after snub from Q/A site review

#27

Post by danilocampos »

It's impressive to me that when the great minds behind Experts Exchange make their voice known, they talk just like the kind of slimeballs you would expect behind such an operation.

It's shameless. In their shoes, I'd just sit there quietly, take the snub on the chin, keep plying my spammy trade, and have enough introspection to realize that the reason no one wants to talk to me is because I've created one of the shittiest, most user-hostile content abominations in the history of the entire internet.

I guess the dangerous thing about dirtbags is that they have no idea they're dirtbags. My only comfort in all this is the knowledge that Stack Overflow has delivered us from evil.

Re: Expert Exchange gets narky after snub from Q/A site review

#28

Post by phlux »

AndrewO wrote: post #12

Jees. Talk about sour grapes... If EE wants to know why they weren't picked for the Q&A site pow-wow while StackExchange and Quora were, they should look no further than themselves. Let's take a look at one of their current top answers: http://www.experts-exchange.com/Virus_and_Spyware/Anti-Virus... 30 day trial?! Subscribe now?! Who do they think they're kidding? Or really: who actually uses this thing? Before the o…

>...Or really: who actually uses this thing? ...

The image I have always had of the userbase of EE is a middle aged vet wearing a vest with a lot of pins and smells of cigarettes who sits in his trailer on The Internet Forums answering computer questions such as "Which is better - a 3 1/2 inch floppy or 5 1/4 inch floppy" and is known to the other folks in the park as "The Computer Guy"

His goto answer for anything being "Well, you're gunna hafta go ahead and reinstall windows, because your monitor driver is out of date which is why you cant change the resolution back to 640x480"

I also imagine them to be the type of person who is still hanging onto that 386 with the bad math co-processor because its still worth something.

Re: Expert Exchange gets narky after snub from Q/A site review

#29

Post by [deleted] »

dmfdmf wrote: post #16
juddlyon wrote: post #7

Experts Exchange is borderline spam, to put it mildly. They hide the answer at the very end of an enormous scroll (of course after they try to sell you via a pop-up). A reasonable user has no clue that the answer is on the page. When I have made it all the way down, I have received a quality solution perhaps 5 out of 500 times. Stack Overflow realized there was a quality problem with the existing tech Q&A services an…

I always considered it spam. I wish Google allowed me to globally exclude the domain from my searches. Moreover, given what I could read it didn't look anymore promising or valuable that the various sites that come up, discuss a problem to a dead-end with no resolution (usually posted by a clueless Microsoft "MVP"). No thanks.

[deleted]

Re: Expert Exchange gets narky after snub from Q/A site review

#30

Post by ROFISH »

kpanghmc wrote: post #10

One of the big things that makes Experts Exchange unique is a patented system that requires askers to select their best answer. Most Q&A sites (StackExchange included) let the community vote for the best answer, when really the person whose opinion matters most is the one who asked the question. StackOverflow allows for both community voting AND for the original asker to indicate which answer was the best answer. I s…

http://www.google.com/patents?vid=6064978

IANAL, but it appears that simply having a "question and answer" site doesn't apply to this patent. If you read the patent, it's mostly related to the idea of asking a question costs points and giving the best answer, as chosen by the asker, receives points.

Any variation on this scheme, such as a general moderator or the public via voting choses the best answer, or not having the asker assign points to a question to be received (avoid the economy, still have asker chose best answer) can avoid this patent.

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