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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

#201
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?

Have you seen the ads? If you did, it's not broken from their point of view.

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

#202

I have basically zero imagination about big dollar numbers, but I just don't see what they are going to do with $40,000,000 that would generate more than $40,000,000 in value. Without that context, I have no way of seeing this as anything other than a "bubble" investment, even in a pretty awesome product/team.

They are hiring lots of people to provide new features and keep growing. To add $40m value you've got to add of the order of 4m users which seems quite doable.

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

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

Agreed. In fact, there was a HN thread a while back about this very topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4494016 It's unbelievably annoying when this happens. I have a number of bookmarks to incredibly insightful posts, whose usefulness has been corroborated by literally hundreds of people...all closed because they are deemed "off-topic" or some such by an admin. My theory is that SO was essentially "done" yea…

Most SO moderators are unpaid volunteers. Not that this stops the effect, though, much the same is visible on the English Wikipedia as well.

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

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

Agreed. In fact, there was a HN thread a while back about this very topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4494016 It's unbelievably annoying when this happens. I have a number of bookmarks to incredibly insightful posts, whose usefulness has been corroborated by literally hundreds of people...all closed because they are deemed "off-topic" or some such by an admin. My theory is that SO was essentially "done" yea…

I think the thing missing in this is all the low-quality questions that end up getting closed due to lack of solvability. One of the objectives of SO's rules is to avoid flame wars and ambiguous answers.

Imagine the question : "What is the best templating engine to use for Django?" This question doesn't have an answer, because it's so dependent on use case (even that statement is controversial). So if it's on SO and not closed, you'll get a bunch of answers that are contradictory, and people flaming in the comments.

I think the main objective for the SO team is to have people land on the site and _have their answer right there_. By removing possibilities of these off-topic questions, you're less likely to land on answers that help your specific thing.

End result is "when I land on SO I get an answer every time" instead of "when I land on SO sometimes I get a flame war". For branding, at least, I think it works in their favor to close those questions

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

#205
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?

The moderation is ridiculous. Useful questions get closed all the time for nebulous "fit" reasons. My opinion is if the community thinks it's a valuable question by voting it up, it should stay.

well the moderators are part of the community (voted in!), and have decided its off-topic. So the community did decide to keep the question out.

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

#206
post #95
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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…

I'm surprised these questions aren't marked too broad instead as off-topic.

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

#207
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?

That pissed me off so many times that once the mods actucally got into an argument over whether my question should be allowed, that was the last time i ever posted or answered a question on SE. That being said that site is super helpful, i just wish they could make the moderators more tolerable. You would be surprised how many times a question is closed yet will have so many upvotes and answers.

Interestingly i have noticed that Quora has some nice thoughtful answers to tech questions, especially questions that have no shot in hell of being answered on SE.

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

#208
post #32
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 found that it's quite a good source of information on legitimately good or interesting technology companies in various cities. Once you look outside Silicon Valley, it can sometimes be surprisingly hard to figure out what the good companies are, if any, in a given city. My experience is that the good companies typically have at least a profile or job posting on there. (And if you're a good company and you have n…

Creating a company page is free: http://careers.stackoverflow.com/products/company-pages

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

#210
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?

somehow this ends up on every thread about SO.

I sometimes feel as if there could be a thread titled 'SO pivots into airplanes' and the top comment would be about whether flight attendants would call some questions off topic.

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