Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

Post by nhzmju » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 6:58 PM UTC

smackfu wrote: post #65

troymc wrote: post #28

I often ask a question on Google, get taken to a Stack Exchange site, and find that yes, they have my question, but some moderator closed it before it got answered. SE got my traffic, but I didn't get my answer. Isn't that broken?

More often, I find a question that is closed and frozen in time that does have answers, because the answerers were faster than the moderators. For instance, "Where can I download Spring?" The top Google result is a StackOverflow page that is closed as off-topic.

Post by matthewcford » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 6:59 PM UTC

tieTYT wrote: post #71

timdev2 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I posted a employer ad on SO Careers, and also GitHub Jobs. The SO post resulted in a satisfyingly large set of high-quality candidates. I was satisfied with the value. In contrast, GitHub was surprisingly disappointing. Maybe one or two worthwhile candidates, and a ton of junk. It appears that GitHub's jobs get scraped and posted elsewhere, and the bulk of responses to my ad were low-quality (and that's being genero…

Interesting theory. What prevents other sites from scraping SO posts? If the answer is "nothing", that suggests it's just a matter of time until it's just as bad. Right?

Post by gildas » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 7:12 PM UTC

cheald wrote: post #30

troymc wrote: post #28

I often ask a question on Google, get taken to a Stack Exchange site, and find that yes, they have my question, but some moderator closed it before it got answered. SE got my traffic, but I didn't get my answer. Isn't that broken?

Can you provide examples of some of those questions? Usually when I encounter that, it's been closed as a duplicate with a link to the original.

Post by blumkvist » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 7:17 PM UTC

Alupis wrote: post #25

briholt wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I posted a decent programming job in a decent market on there about a year ago, but didn't get any qualified applicants.

Stack Exchange is to Jobs postings as Facebook is to Advertising. Both have massive potential audience, but both don't deliver engagement and effectively eat your budget. Facebook isn't largely effective (in part) because the audience isn't there to be advertised to, their busy socializing with friends/family. Stack Exchange isn't effective as a Job Bulletin because the audience isn't there to find a job (they probab…

Post by Kalium » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 7:19 PM UTC

jordanpg wrote: post #70

troymc wrote: post #28

I often ask a question on Google, get taken to a Stack Exchange site, and find that yes, they have my question, but some moderator closed it before it got answered. SE got my traffic, but I didn't get my answer. Isn't that broken?

There is an ongoing religious war among avid SO users (don't know about the rest of SE) about what kinds of questions should be allowed. Roughly, there are two camps. Those who say that any well-formed, non-dup question of interest should be let in and those who think it's a stop of last-resort after checking all conceivable documentation and scouring the internet. I believe the latter viewpoint is pretty run-of-the-…