I'm so happy we have stack overflow. Do you guys remember experts exchange.com?
That site made me wish I could set up a "exclude from search results forever" on Google.
How We Make Money at Stack Overflow
101–110 of 227 posts
Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Responses essentially amount to go RTFM. Let's be honest, reading the docs should be everyone's first step before posting a question. So many questions follow the template of "I want to know how to do this but I don't want to put in any effort." The volume of those kinds of questions are what drove me away - not the moderation.
And, on the flip side; people who do RTFM will only ask relatively esoteric questions looking for help on a difficult problem. Good luck getting any answers to that. It happens, but it's pretty rare. Everyone jumps on the latest "why is my hash map implementation crashing?" (It's a bad pointer) in the race for rep. I am still pretty highly ranked on SO (top 1%), but I haven't been active for nearly two years now.
> Everyone jumps on the latest [bulk question] in the race for rep.
You have just nailed the problem with their gamification.
It takes effort - and thus time - to write a good answer. Since everyone is trying to score the easy wins, you get a flood of mediocre boilerplate answers. In the time it takes you to write a quality answer, the question has been answered multiple times. Likely one of these boilerplates has even been accepted by OP.
For a company that obviously considers the long game over immediate and cheap gains, they haven't managed to impart these values to their userbase.
Incidentally that was also my gripe about SO job ads two years ago. (Iow. when I considered posting something.) At the time their candidate search only allowed to search by answer scores. I had pretty simple needs: What if I'm not looking for developers who can recite trivia? What if I want to seek out the thoughtful ones who actually know how to ask good questions?
Their answer at the time: sorry, we don't have that.
It shouldn't even be that hard: eliminate the insane outliers and jackpots, find the people with matching skill sets who consistently ask decently scored questions.
Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow
#103[deleted]
Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow
#104Earlier 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?
How many questions does it take before you are banned?
If they started banning users for asking questions or even for asking poor (read extremely poor) questions, then the overall traffic would reduce significantly.
Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can include a header in your email message where, if a user marks a message as spam, Gmail / Hotmail / whatever will let you know.
Why do they do that? Seems great for this use-case but terrible information to give bad actors.
idk, I'm trying to find a way a bad actor could take advantage of that information. Kind of helpful for spammers to get a sense of what does and does not get marked, but they can just see how many people clicked the link.
Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow
#106At 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...
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…
Exactly. How many times would you want to answer (or even read different questions and answers for) how to compare strings in Java? And it's not limited to one programming language. There was a time that I used to answer but then it started to suck.
Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow
#107At 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...
> Responses essentially amount to go RTFM. Let's be honest, reading the docs should be everyone's first step before posting a question. So many questions follow the template of "I want to know how to do this but I don't want to put in any effort." The volume of those kinds of questions are what drove me away - not the moderation.
Bring an alternative to reading the docs is the very essence of SO.
Why read the docs when you can google for the exact single question you have and be looking at the answer a second later?
Especially on technologies you are diving into just to quickly do something, and that you don't have time to learn in any depth.
Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow
#108Thank you for submitting this on HN. I am really happy to see the site grow. > I am extremely protective of our users. You can ask anyone who works here. It’s is my very strong belief that we have a built up a trust with the community that is not easily earned and is impossible to replace. I want to work for a company that respects that trust, and I do. > How much money we make is a direct proxy for how much we are h…
FWIW, you don't have to create an account to answer questions on Stack Overflow. We'll encourage you to do so, because it generally makes things easier... But if you want to just enter an email address (can be fake) and some sort of name (doesn't have to be one you use anywhere else), you can post without registering or revealing any personal details. We don't require folks to associate an account on another site, or silly "real name" requirements, or anything else that'd force you to identify yourself.
But, I'd guess what you're probably after is something else entirely: a way to have an account, and post answers using that account, but not have those answers associated publicly with that account. This has been requested a few times over the years, but... It's a bit of a troublesome idea:
- Spam / trolling (the kind performed by humans, not bots) often depends on being able to stay just a little bit ahead of the folks who are trying to stop you. Anything that can buy you a few more minutes of activity before being blocked can upset that balance; sure, we could remove anonymity for moderators, but there's a psychological impact here: if you think you can get away with something, you're more likely to try.
- Reputation is tracked on a per-account basis, and most of the accounting there is public: again, this serves multiple purposes, both for the author themselves (they're encouraged to become "invested" in the site by contributing in exchange for privileges) and for the greater community (privileges aren't handed out capriciously, they're earned in ways that can be tracked).
- What about things like edits and comments? Presumably you'd want to be able to respond to comments on your answers, or make edits that correct problems - for "unregistered" answers, that's solved by giving you a temporary account that retains edit rights, comment rights, etc. (at least until you lose the cookie); if you posted anonymously under a normal account, would your edits and comments also be anonymous, or would you show up incongruously as yourself?
- We periodically publish a full set of data on posts, comments, edits, etc. that anyone can use; we'd have to decide whether or not to preserve anonymity in this data, and not just for authorship but also for edits, commentary, etc.
It's a big can of worms, which is why we've so far avoided opening it... But I do see the advantages as well.
Related:
- http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/198/should-there-be-...
- http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/177154/posting-anony...
Disclaimer: I work for Stack Overflow.
Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow
#109Another good article linked from this one: https://stackoverflow.blog/2016/02/why-stack-overflow-doesnt... . Stack Overflow is IMO the site to look to if you want to do ads correctly. So many big sites have incredibly trashy ads, SO shows that they care to not subject their users to that junk.
I'm actually surprised ads work at all on StackOverflow. I would have guessed that most of their visitors are blocking ads.
Stack Overflow is highly targeted tech content with a variety of detailed, popular and niche posts.
I suppose that they get high quality ads (i.e. pay lot more than the average ad + highly relevant so people click it).
Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow
#110Great answer to a related FAQ in a post[0] linked from this article, about why !SO doesn't care about ad blockers: > The truth is: we don’t care if our users use ad blockers on Stack Overflow. More accurately: we hope that they won’t, but we understand that some people just don’t like ads. Our belief is that if someone doesn’t like them, and they won’t click on them, any impressions served to them will only annoy the…
But then you also have trackers [0].
[0] http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/237062/does-stack-ex...