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How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

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Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#131

Post by tedmiston »

JeremyBanks wrote: post #128
Zergy wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very true but I think SE does a poor job incentivizing upkeep. Its very little Karma compared to new contributions. Honestly the only thing I with they would change.

I agree, and would like to see a change like that in Q&A, but it would be a pretty big deal at this point in the site's life. However, the new Documentation section does a much better job with this. Each edit is worth +2, and upvotes give points to all significant contributors (+5 or +1 depending on size of contribution), not just the author! This system has had some issues and may still be adjusted, but I think it's…

> and upvotes give points to all significant contributors (+5 or +1 depending on size of contribution), not just the author

That's interesting. I wasn't aware of the trickle down karma like that.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#133

Post by jeffasinger »

beachy wrote: post #101
mrfusion wrote: post #62

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.

I installed a firefox plugin to specifically remove those results from Google.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#134

Post by wool_gather »

overcast wrote: post #91
Zergy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your core group of know it all people, won't be around forever. If you keep discouraging new users, by treating them like second class citizens, and a "waste of time". Then the old boys club, is not going to last. I agree entertaining basic programming questions is foolish, but I've seen many examples of legitimate questions, that get the boot because they've been addressed(poorly) previously. At what point do you st…

So your premise is that the site will die because only people who know what they're talking about will use it?

I have to admit some skepticism of this idea.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#135

Post by gus_massa »

tgb wrote: post #97
breakingcups wrote: post #95

Earlier 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.

Many times when you hit the spam button, gmail ask if you want to "only mark as spam" or "mark as spam & unsubscribe".

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#136

Post by andreasklinger »

ssharp wrote: post #96
tedmiston wrote: post #58

> We are in the process of sending out an email now announcing Developer Story to the larger community in the hopes that we can help some percentage of developers. If that email is rejected, we’ll unsubscribe you. If you’re unresponsive to emails we send, we’ll unsubscribe you. If you mark it as spam, we’ll unsubscribe you. How great it would be if every site would subscribe to such high standards. Bravo, SO.

Most sites do this already, at least they should if they want to make sure more of their emails don't end up in junk folders. Deliverability is really important to both businesses and email service providers, so a lot of the time, bounce unsubscribes and spam unsubscribes are baked in and easing off subscribers who don't open or click emails is a best practice for deliverability purposes.

Yes it's pretty much common best practice

Mail providers offer sending to your webhooks or block them directly on their side (so you dont have to worry about it)

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#137

Post by cullenking »

rbobby wrote: post #87
tedmiston wrote: post #58

> We are in the process of sending out an email now announcing Developer Story to the larger community in the hopes that we can help some percentage of developers. If that email is rejected, we’ll unsubscribe you. If you’re unresponsive to emails we send, we’ll unsubscribe you. If you mark it as spam, we’ll unsubscribe you. How great it would be if every site would subscribe to such high standards. Bravo, SO.

> If you mark it as spam, we’ll unsubscribe you. How would they know?

In addition to the header info mentioned in other comments, email providers let you subscribe to email Feed Back Loops. You register for FBLs (man it's a neverending process since there's a never ending pile of new email providers), and when someone marks something as spam, the email provider (gmail/outlook/etc) will send an email to a registered address, you just listen for emails on that address. I wrote a custom handler to do this, as we already had a system in place to process incoming email from users (respond to comment email instead of replying on web form etc). I then unsubscribe the address in question.

Not all providers offer FBLs, in that case my internet provider gets an abuse notice which is forwarded along to me. Not a ton of activity there on a 500k person mailing list, the FBLs are pretty effective.

Also, since we have the email processing system in place, it's easy to detect bounces and auto unsubscribe people. I immediately unsubscribe on a hard bounce, and wait for 5 soft bounces before doing the same thing.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#138

Post by tracker1 »

tedmiston wrote: post #58

> We are in the process of sending out an email now announcing Developer Story to the larger community in the hopes that we can help some percentage of developers. If that email is rejected, we’ll unsubscribe you. If you’re unresponsive to emails we send, we’ll unsubscribe you. If you mark it as spam, we’ll unsubscribe you. How great it would be if every site would subscribe to such high standards. Bravo, SO.

I spent a big part of the past year in email marketing for another company... It is a huge job for any organization, I'm glad that SO has such high standards. Making the product as good as possible, over making interaction the goal in and of itself without thinking of the need for that interaction.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#139

Post by slavik81 »

0xmohit wrote: post #115
subhobroto wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My following suggestion is a very unpopular one, but it is this: If you are a student, use the money you would have donated to StackOverflow to purchase a book or a tool that will help you to learn better and become an expert. If you are an expert, contribute your time to StackOverflow (instead of money). Money is easy to get compared to content. What helps StackOverflow grow is quality content. I am also interested…

Contributing is wonderful, but those internet points (reputation) screws it up. An edit would give you 2 points if you have a rep http://stackoverflow.com/posts/21023161/revisions for example. There is no change between the original answer and the latest revision after 3 edits.

That example is all on Emil Vikström, who unilaterally accepted a bad edit from Akshat (with minor corrections of his own) after two reviewers had already voted to reject. That's two edits. The third edit was undoing the bad change they accepted. The undo was also contentious, with 2 votes to reject and 3 to accept.

But, Akshat has only 18 points. Even if you're lucky enough to have worthless suggested edits accepted, it's not a very good way to earn points.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#140

Post by ocoster »

aalear wrote: post #114
ocoster wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you know that we provide the complete set of questions and answers (from all sites, including Stack Overflow)? No need to crawl anything. You can find it on the internet archive: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

And there's also the API - http://api.stackexchange.com

And the Data Explorer (use SQL in the browser to query the Stack Overflow database): http://data.stackoverflow.com
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