12 ms·

"Hey, look! They're making money with my knowledge! How they dare to do that?" Welcome to real world.

by rabc 15y ago

qwe123_troll 15y ago
Barnum, that great scholar of suckers, said it better.
- h_r 15y ago
  I don't get this attitude toward SO. Most of the people who go there get the answers they seek, including experts with questions outside their domain of expertise. I hear all sorts of people fretting about how to give back to the community to make their lives more meaningful. Isn't this an ideal win/win?
  - batista 15y ago
    Well, check the article again. You had that win/win situation with experts-exchange too. Then they baited and switched upon their users, putting up a paywall.
    - ceejayoz 15y ago
      > Then they baited and switched upon their users, putting up a paywall. Which StackOverflow's Creative Commons license and public data dumps make very difficult to implement.
      - qwe123_troll 15y ago
        There's no value in SO's database of questions and answers, they might as well give it away under whatever liberal license they want. The real business value of SO is the engaged ("community") web traffic it receives. ("Community" == "higher ad CPM" and "highly contextual advertising" in business terms.)
        ceejayoz 15y ago
        That community would become rather less engaged, and thus less valuable, if a paywall were implemented.
        lurker17 15y ago
        The user you are talking to is "qwe123_troll" qwe123[4] is a troll account name with a storied history: http://www.reddit.com/user/qwe1234 http://www.reddit.com/user/qwe1234
        qwe123_troll 15y ago
        Implementing a paywall would be rather pointless, since that's a very bad way to monetize traffic. However, StackOverflow can make big money by cleverly partnering with corporations: instead of a site that answers "how do I do XYZ with ABC toolkit" they could gradually shift to a site that answers "doing XYZ with BigCorp ExpensiveSolution: how I increased ROI and fixed my dental problems". The point is that between "comunity" and "traffic monetization" there is a clear and obvious conflict of interest, and it's pretty obvious which side of this conflict will be taken by SO's sponsors. Incidentally, this is also exactly why Wikipedia doesn't display ads or monetize traffic.
    - icebraining 15y ago
      At which point someone would download the complete StackExchange data dump[1], import it into one of the dozens of SE engine clones like Shapado and compete with them without having to bootstrap the content. [1]: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/09/creative-commons-data-dump-sep-11/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/09/creative-commons-data-...
      - batista 15y ago
        Yeah, guys, I know that. Problem is data and engine just being available does not take care of everything. First, someone has to decide to offer this as a service to other people. Nothing assures that. He then would have to upload the data on his servers and have S.O. grade server setup, that costs a fortune, to serve all the traffic. Then there would be the problem of transferring the actual user accounts and their credit and status. So, this line of argument (you can always get the data out and serve them) is more like the classic "it's open source, you can fork it if they choose do something you don't like". Sorry, but this is only realistic if you have the knowledge AND the resources to do so.
        icebraining 15y ago
        But the fact that they make the dumps available shows that they do in fact "give a flying @#$! about the community" and they don't "only care about keeping the community happy enough that they keep giving them intellectual property for imaginary currency so they can sell it for real currency". The community would be happy enough by just getting a decent alternative to EE - the data licensing and dumps go well over and beyond that. The blog post is essentially criticizing them not for something they did, but for having the mere possibility of doing something to screw up the community, even when they took important steps to reduce that risk. Seems completely unfair to me.
        cruise02 15y ago
        There are already a ton of clones doing this. We keep a list. http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/2267/stack-overflow-clones http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/2267/stack-overflow-...
        15y ago
  - qwe123_troll 15y ago
    Stackoverflow is not a community, it's a business, and their business is reselling that sense of community to third parties. I've no quarrel with Stackoverflow, it's a very nice site and a useful project. I do have a quarrel with people whose brains seem to turn off once anything 'Web2.0' is involved. Just because it's on the web doesn't mean that the laws of economics and common sense no longer apply.
    - dolbz 15y ago
      Why must community and business be mutually exclusive? Hint: they're not, and SO is both.
      - qwe123_troll 15y ago
        Because to survive as a business SO needs to sell your sense of 'comunity' to a third-party resource. Not that there's anything wrong with that, just be aware that when you're participating on SO you're only a 'human resource', to be marketed and sold sometime later in the future. Hopefully SO is run by decent guys and the buyer will be ethical.
        tadfisher 15y ago
        By "sell" you're implying that the sense of community is in some way diminished by selling advertising. I don't find this to be the case, unless it leads to a conflict of interest (i.e. SO deletes all Linux articles at the behest of Microsoft). Now if you were to use "capitalize on", "monetize", or one of the many verbs that don't imply a transfer of ownership, then I would agree with you.
batista 15y ago
> "Hey, look! They're making money with my knowledge! How they dare to do that?" > Welcome to real world. Have you READ the fucking article, or just came here to post your "cool" one-liner reply? Because in the article he mentions the REAL WORLD case of Experts-Exchange. And he mentions his hard earned REAL WORLD experience that such things don't end well as commercial entities, because when they are pushed for monetization they become closed and/or ad-circuses. He also suggests using a distributed model for such sites. You know, like, Wikipedia, which also exists in the REAL WORLD, but is not in it for making money with our knowledge, but for building a non profit community for knowledge sharing.
- mattmanser 15y ago
  Dude, the author and you are so far out of the loop on SO it's strange. How long have you been in the SO and HN communities? Joel and Jeff setup SO because EE sucked so bad, from the beginning they've said 'we're not going to end up like the site with the hyphen'. And now you're saying they're going to go against their entire raison d'etre? They have been upfront about everything, they made the posts all CC (http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/stack-overflow-creative-commons-data-dump/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/stack-overflow-creativ...) so the old experts-exchange and IMDB bait and switch can't happen to SO. Go listen to their old podcasts and read their original blogs.
  - batista 15y ago
    Dude, the author and you are so far out of the loop on SO it's strange. How long have you been in the SO and HN communities? I'm on the SO since 2009 IIRC. (Btw, I'm over 16, non American, and my surname is not Lebowski, so I'm not a "dude"). Joel and Jeff setup SO because EE sucked so bad, from the beginning they've said 'we're not going to end up like the site with the hyphen'. And now you're saying they're going to go against their entire raison d'etre? Yeah, and Google once said "don't be evil". Corporate promises don't mean much, I'll take laws, signed contracts or systemic assurances over them anytime. When there's profit involved and especially investors, money has a way to become the 'raison d'etre'. Besides, Jeff has already quit Stack Overflow/Exchange: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/02/farewell-stack-exchange.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/02/farewell-stack-exch... (The downvote means what? I haven't made a reasoned argument? There have not been many cases of corporate bait-and-switch? It's inconceivable that people running SO in the future could attempt one, with investor money involved and Jeff retired? Or is it simply a case of: "I disagree with you, la la la la la"?)

"Hey, look! They're making money with my knowledge! How they dare to do that?" Welcome to real world.

by rabc 15y ago

"Hey, look! They're making money with my knowledge! How they dare to do that?" Welcome to real world.

qwe123_troll 15y ago

Barnum, that great scholar of suckers, said it better.

h_r 15y ago
I don't get this attitude toward SO. Most of the people who go there get the answers they seek, including experts with questions outside their domain of expertise. I hear all sorts of people fretting about how to give back to the community to make their lives more meaningful. Isn't this an ideal win/win?
- batista 15y ago
  Well, check the article again. You had that win/win situation with experts-exchange too. Then they baited and switched upon their users, putting up a paywall.
  - ceejayoz 15y ago
    > Then they baited and switched upon their users, putting up a paywall. Which StackOverflow's Creative Commons license and public data dumps make very difficult to implement.
    - qwe123_troll 15y ago
      There's no value in SO's database of questions and answers, they might as well give it away under whatever liberal license they want. The real business value of SO is the engaged ("community") web traffic it receives. ("Community" == "higher ad CPM" and "highly contextual advertising" in business terms.)
      - ceejayoz 15y ago
        That community would become rather less engaged, and thus less valuable, if a paywall were implemented.
        lurker17 15y ago
        The user you are talking to is "qwe123_troll" qwe123[4] is a troll account name with a storied history: http://www.reddit.com/user/qwe1234 http://www.reddit.com/user/qwe1234
        qwe123_troll 15y ago
        Implementing a paywall would be rather pointless, since that's a very bad way to monetize traffic. However, StackOverflow can make big money by cleverly partnering with corporations: instead of a site that answers "how do I do XYZ with ABC toolkit" they could gradually shift to a site that answers "doing XYZ with BigCorp ExpensiveSolution: how I increased ROI and fixed my dental problems". The point is that between "comunity" and "traffic monetization" there is a clear and obvious conflict of interest, and it's pretty obvious which side of this conflict will be taken by SO's sponsors. Incidentally, this is also exactly why Wikipedia doesn't display ads or monetize traffic.
  - icebraining 15y ago
    At which point someone would download the complete StackExchange data dump[1], import it into one of the dozens of SE engine clones like Shapado and compete with them without having to bootstrap the content. [1]: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/09/creative-commons-data-dump-sep-11/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/09/creative-commons-data-...
    - batista 15y ago
      Yeah, guys, I know that. Problem is data and engine just being available does not take care of everything. First, someone has to decide to offer this as a service to other people. Nothing assures that. He then would have to upload the data on his servers and have S.O. grade server setup, that costs a fortune, to serve all the traffic. Then there would be the problem of transferring the actual user accounts and their credit and status. So, this line of argument (you can always get the data out and serve them) is more like the classic "it's open source, you can fork it if they choose do something you don't like". Sorry, but this is only realistic if you have the knowledge AND the resources to do so.
      - icebraining 15y ago
        But the fact that they make the dumps available shows that they do in fact "give a flying @#$! about the community" and they don't "only care about keeping the community happy enough that they keep giving them intellectual property for imaginary currency so they can sell it for real currency". The community would be happy enough by just getting a decent alternative to EE - the data licensing and dumps go well over and beyond that. The blog post is essentially criticizing them not for something they did, but for having the mere possibility of doing something to screw up the community, even when they took important steps to reduce that risk. Seems completely unfair to me.
      - cruise02 15y ago
        There are already a ton of clones doing this. We keep a list. http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/2267/stack-overflow-clones http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/2267/stack-overflow-...
      - 15y ago
- qwe123_troll 15y ago
  Stackoverflow is not a community, it's a business, and their business is reselling that sense of community to third parties. I've no quarrel with Stackoverflow, it's a very nice site and a useful project. I do have a quarrel with people whose brains seem to turn off once anything 'Web2.0' is involved. Just because it's on the web doesn't mean that the laws of economics and common sense no longer apply.
  - dolbz 15y ago
    Why must community and business be mutually exclusive? Hint: they're not, and SO is both.
    - qwe123_troll 15y ago
      Because to survive as a business SO needs to sell your sense of 'comunity' to a third-party resource. Not that there's anything wrong with that, just be aware that when you're participating on SO you're only a 'human resource', to be marketed and sold sometime later in the future. Hopefully SO is run by decent guys and the buyer will be ethical.
      - tadfisher 15y ago
        By "sell" you're implying that the sense of community is in some way diminished by selling advertising. I don't find this to be the case, unless it leads to a conflict of interest (i.e. SO deletes all Linux articles at the behest of Microsoft). Now if you were to use "capitalize on", "monetize", or one of the many verbs that don't imply a transfer of ownership, then I would agree with you.

batista 15y ago

> "Hey, look! They're making money with my knowledge! How they dare to do that?" > Welcome to real world. Have you READ the fucking article, or just came here to post your "cool" one-liner reply? Because in the article he mentions the REAL WORLD case of Experts-Exchange. And he mentions his hard earned REAL WORLD experience that such things don't end well as commercial entities, because when they are pushed for monetization they become closed and/or ad-circuses. He also suggests using a distributed model for such sites. You know, like, Wikipedia, which also exists in the REAL WORLD, but is not in it for making money with our knowledge, but for building a non profit community for knowledge sharing.

mattmanser 15y ago
Dude, the author and you are so far out of the loop on SO it's strange. How long have you been in the SO and HN communities? Joel and Jeff setup SO because EE sucked so bad, from the beginning they've said 'we're not going to end up like the site with the hyphen'. And now you're saying they're going to go against their entire raison d'etre? They have been upfront about everything, they made the posts all CC (http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/stack-overflow-creative-commons-data-dump/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/stack-overflow-creativ...) so the old experts-exchange and IMDB bait and switch can't happen to SO. Go listen to their old podcasts and read their original blogs.
- batista 15y ago
  Dude, the author and you are so far out of the loop on SO it's strange. How long have you been in the SO and HN communities? I'm on the SO since 2009 IIRC. (Btw, I'm over 16, non American, and my surname is not Lebowski, so I'm not a "dude"). Joel and Jeff setup SO because EE sucked so bad, from the beginning they've said 'we're not going to end up like the site with the hyphen'. And now you're saying they're going to go against their entire raison d'etre? Yeah, and Google once said "don't be evil". Corporate promises don't mean much, I'll take laws, signed contracts or systemic assurances over them anytime. When there's profit involved and especially investors, money has a way to become the 'raison d'etre'. Besides, Jeff has already quit Stack Overflow/Exchange: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/02/farewell-stack-exchange.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/02/farewell-stack-exch... (The downvote means what? I haven't made a reasoned argument? There have not been many cases of corporate bait-and-switch? It's inconceivable that people running SO in the future could attempt one, with investor money involved and Jeff retired? Or is it simply a case of: "I disagree with you, la la la la la"?)