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

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

#111
post #75

What will they use the money for? If they're not expanding, and are profitable (and so don't need to cover running costs), I can only guess at retiring founder debt.

They're expanding. It's a land grab, so gaining market share is more important than profitability. Spolsky wrote about it here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/02/14.html

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

#112
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The latter group sounds like people who are sick of seeing SO being a place where people are rewarded for regurgitating documentation. I've some sympathy for that.

This viewpoint only makes sense if you subscribe to the (very silly) ideas that there are a limited number of internet points available and that they matter. Why does it matter to you which people are being rewarded for what?

I could see an argument that the people more equipped to answer more technical questions may leave if they have to wade through a bunch of questions that could be answered in the docs. If those sorts of answers "take over" then you'll have to wade through them to find more novel questions to post answers to.

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

#113
post #91
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The first two results that point to SO, give a useful answer, one is marked as a duplicate and points to the other one with 7 highly upvoted answers. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19124445/how-to-download-... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19082860/where-can-i-down... The question is off-topic, but as you can see it was still answered. Still, to solve that problem, a new site was opened per request of users:…

Heh, looks like that was reopened in the last hour.

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

#114
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This viewpoint only makes sense if you subscribe to the (very silly) ideas that there are a limited number of internet points available and that they matter. Why does it matter to you which people are being rewarded for what?

It matters because people respond to incentives. If what you want to see encouraged is good answers to novel questions, you need a system that rewards that over copy-pasting from documentation. What do you think happens when the two are rewarded equally, but the latter can be done much more frequently per unit of time?

Fair point on the question of why it matters. On the question of what should be encouraged, I think "good answers to novel questions" is only one of many possibilities. In my opinion, what should be encouraged is simply "people quickly and easily finding good answers to their questions", and I think copy-pasting (or linking to) the relevant section from documentation serves that goal just fine, and that voting is a good system for indicating what answers are useful, regardless of the form they take.

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

#115
post #4

One interesting nugget: more than half of the 200+ employees at Stack Exchange are working on StackOverflow Careers. Has anyone used SO Careers? Opinions?

I've been hired through SO Careers and also hired 1 developer through it. Neither was through a job posting - both were through using their candidate search service.

Posted my opinions here a few months ago: http://noxad.com/technical/hiring-using-careers-2-0-stackove...

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

#116
post #106
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Post a technical question about how to make your single page application crawlable, if it includes the word "SEO", there are great chances it will be closed. Some examples: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21044302/make-ajax-loaded... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26298780/how-to-make-ajax... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14887710/ajax-deep-linkin... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21785074/seo-with-si…

Questions that imply you're looking for better ways to spam also tend to fair poorly; can't imagine why. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3905734/how-to-send-100-0... FWIW, legit SEO questions do have a home on SE: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/seo

> Questions that imply you're looking for better ways to spam also tend to fair poorly; can't imagine why.

I do not follow you.

> FWIW, legit SEO questions do have a home on SE: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/seo

I know that Webmasters SE is supposedly the right place to ask questions about crawling issues and Ajax, but in fact you will find more questions on SO (see links below) because this is mainly related to technical issues with JavaScript.

234 questions tagged http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/seo+ajax?sort=newe...

74 questions tagged http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/seo+aja...

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

#117
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty much my experience. The site is read-only for a lot of people. I think I was rejected the other day because I didn't have the 50 reputation to comment on a reply that had other comments on an older question. They need to lessen restrictions that got too strict out of fear of the site becoming worthless. Right now the scales aren't balanced.

Comments on SE are meant to be temporary( in their value, not duration ). If you had to raise an important issue about something, you should have instead asked a question about it, where you could leave a link to the problematic answer/question and explain the problem. In fact that is the usual procedure in case of conflicts. There is no restriction on that. If your point is valid, the community does the rest.

....why?

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

#118

"Spolsky says that two-thirds of its revenues today come from recruitment services, via its Stack Overflow Careers site, and one-third from advertising." I found this very interesting. Stack Exchange is an insanely useful service, but I struggled to figure out how they would monetize it. (Similar to Wikipedia) They're received enough money that exit valuation expectations are high. I guess the cash flow projections f…

They're getting that revenue because they've got high-quality candidates.

I worked at a firm that was also doing well in the careers space, and that was because when CVS/Walgreens/RiteAid was looking for pharmacists (for example), we could ensure that their ads were only shown to pharmacists, and not plumbers, cashiers, truck drivers, etc.

So the chain stores knew that not only that their ad dollars were being well-spent, but that the candidates they were getting were already well-qualified, saving their HR departments time & effort in filtering out those that weren't. Frankly, I feel we were under-charging them, even though we had excellent revenue figures.

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

#119
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?

This has not been my experience when searching for programming questions. The threads I see closed is when I search for "what is the best ...", and while I find them very useful to read, I understand why SE do not like them.

Sometimes, I also see threads closed as homework questions, but those tend to have several duplicates which do have the answer in them, so it has so far not bothered me.

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

#120
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When searching for the best tool for the job, I often get pointed to SE and the questions are closed as "not constructive". I seem to recall, however, that they opened a separate site for such discussions?

"Best tool for the job" doesn't sound like something that should be on SO. Far too subjective and likely to result in stupid opinionated arguments that go nowhere.

So instead people just pick whichever thing is first on Google. Is that better?
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