yes! I would like to point out that my blog post was sufficiently poorly written that perhaps 30% of the people thought that the site name stackoverflow.com would change
@JoelSpolsky If the earnings/profits/dividends are the same? I'd rather have a bigger slice of the smaller pie. Money in bank doesn't necessarily mean more money coming in.
This is for you Jeff. We're asking and begging and pleading (and maybe even willing to pay) for some shirts!!!! We know you've got to have some hiding under your bed on top of your PING PONG TABLE!
Don't you think it's time to share with those that deserve it?
Perhaps to the newly elected...
there are, actually, ads on two of our sites (StackOverflow and ServerFault), and Careers 2.0 has job listings and resume search features which the employers have to pay for
@nEEbz: SO is definitely not ad free, and (plug!) careers.stackoverflow.com is also not free for employers who wish to post job listings or search our newly awesome candidate database.
@joel if you had gone with the initial stackexchange model of letting others create sites for $119/month, how many paying customers do you think you would have had in 2 years time?
@GregB Is this any different than the EU legislation that was passed last year? Google General Counsel figured that the browser settings on cookie control were good enough.
(1) We would love to get set up to sell y'all stack exchange t-shirts. It's actually kind of a high priority feature around here that we haven't had time to do. CafePress et al. make crappy shirts, so we want to do it ourselves, but it takes some work to set up a store and so forth.
@JoelSpolsky What was the primary motivation for switching to the invite-only model for Careers 2.0? Was the original money requirement not enough of a barrier to weed out the cruft?
@EndangeredMassa the original money requirement was... kind of controversial, and only a few thousand developers thought it was worth it. We wanted an order of magnitude more users, without lowering our standards. So after much discussion back and forth we hit upon the invite-only model... use invitations instead of price to maintain quality
@JoelSpolsky Dude outsource that to an art crew in Bushwick. You'll get some American Apparel (xl and xxl sizes) 100% american soft cotton Stack Exchange Tshirts.. With Street cred.
@JasonPunyon Most of your ads are for your own exchange networks and then there are sponsored tags. That's all. And revenue from your careers websites. I still don't understand how you guys don't need money with apparently such limited revenue streams.
I once answered a question that asked how Stack Overflow makes money, but that was before the time of VC.
Now, Stack Overflow has cash, and they have an ever-growing list of employees, but where's the business model?
The Experts-Exchange team took the time to answer its own Q&A about its si...
@joelspolsky i'm very surprised at two things - #1 that people get so freaked out about this, it's fairly standard, it's not like people go nuts every time fb or twitter take another hojillian in funding and #2 that you're not able to make more money off of ads
About half of the company telecommutes, but we have very limited ability to manage remote people, so we're not hiring additional telecommuters right now. We are happy to hire sales people, marketing people, programmers for New York. And we'd even hire a graphic designer.
@MichaelMyers speaking of the overlord underling position, has it been filled and will they consider a guy? Cos I would so rock at that position, I just doubt that I have the ... requirements ... to fill that position.
@Blankman - seriously - the trouble with the original stackexchange model is that there were three preconditions to success. You had to have (a) an idea (b) an audience (c) the willingness to do it as a commercial venture
@Blankman no question, that is a great business. It's sort of like Yammer is to Twitter. A great business, but if you're in the Twitter business, the Yammer business seems distracting
@Blankman plus -- there were already two decent open source alternatives... ultimately, software is a commodity (there! i said it!) and what's NOT a commodity is large communities of people who come to your site every day
@JoelSpolsky I've read somewhere on the internets, that your franchise would hit it big time if you could successfully branch out of computerized professionals ghetto into law and medical professionals. Any thoughts on that?
@JoelSpolsky the more time I spend on Stack Exchange, the more it seems like one of the biggest factors -- if not the biggest -- in SO's success was its seed population of Coding Horror/Joel on Software fans. Are you planning on reaching out to other existing expert communities for new SE sites?
@Palimondo we don't have an audience of laywers and doctors. Yet. There is not much overlap with programmers. However, as the programmers set up Stacks on topics like Cooking and Photography, they will attract lawyers who cook. And then the second generation of Stacks will contain lawyers and doctors.
My son's endocrinologist noticed when I was reading serverfault in the hospital last month, and wondered if there was a health-themed version. Guess I should point them @ the area51 sites in progress, then.
@LordTorgamus the Joel on Software mailing list was about 50,000 people. Stack Overflow now grows by 70,000 people a month. So the seed was Joel On Software / Coding Horror, but the number of Joel on Software people who are on Stack Overflow is probably miniscule now.
@JoelSpolsky Perhaps, but I suspect that they gave it a high-quality start, without which it'd be much harder to have attracted other users. It's part of my theory on why other SE sites continue to lag behind SO in population.
@JoelSpolsky What about fragmentation? My questions are recently getting bumped all over the place. SO -> /* Programmers */... I was puzzled if my other question belonged to English or Writers...
Proposed Q&A site for healthcare IT professionals and solution providers. Questions may be related to standards in healthcare IT, commercial and open source products, and development of healthcare IT applications.
Proposed Q&A site for people who run forums, IRC channels, give talks, etc. This is for the squishier questions. Hard questions about moderation software should still be on SO/SU.
You can see that we haven't reached Joel's goal yet on Fitness, it's programmers that workout or follow diets answering questions, not kinesiologists and dietitians
Any talk of giving more recognition to the long-time editors that keep the sites free from cruft? You've lowered the barrier to entry by allowing everyone to edit; but I still feel like rewarding the votes a good edit receives is missing from the incentives; even when there's empirical evidence that keeping a site free from 'broken windows' enhances its longevity.
@JoelSpolsky any chance you guys would be back to Dublin soon... maybe bringing a Dev Days event here... Unfortunately work got in the way of my attending the FogBugz tour.
@JoelSpolsky Nice. I think I understand the difference in approach: SE is about building focused communities - one per site. Quora does internal segmentation by Topics. What about fragmentation of reputation?
@IvoFlipse No, I know but half of the min 200 have to be existing SE users, which means a high chance close to 50% of your audience is coming from SO in a private beta based on network traffic.
@Lord Torgamus I've never used Experts Exchange either, but until recently they were a lot higher in the search results; not easily avoidable when searching before Stack Overflow.
Joel: What is it with TechCrunch and you guys? It seems like TC just does't like SE that much as I saw quite a few entries there trying to undermine SO/SE
@JoelSpolsky while I have an oppurtunity to chat to you, very quick q? I recently stumbled over "The Joel Test" and sent it round to a few friends. Was surprised how poorly some places still score, but have you ever considered updating it ?
@EoinCampbell can you suggest how to update it? Perhaps an email might be in order? Perhaps a blogpost and a tweet and a link here with a onebox? I wouldn't mind seeing a good quality update.
@drachenstern @JoelSpolsky there's actually quite a few blogposts around with people throwing in their two cents... some of the things that flagged with me were around "unit testing" and "one click deploy"
Based on this comment, I have started building a unicorn avatar maker. It's still quite ugly, and the results aren't different enough yet, but this is what it looks like so far:
Question list / Joel's profile (removed the images from here to make this thing a little shorter).
Is this just way t...
This is for you Jeff. We're asking and begging and pleading (and maybe even willing to pay) for some shirts!!!! We know you've got to have some hiding under your bed on top of your PING PONG TABLE!
Don't you think it's time to share with those that deserve it?
Perhaps to the newly elected...
I once answered a question that asked how Stack Overflow makes money, but that was before the time of VC.
Now, Stack Overflow has cash, and they have an ever-growing list of employees, but where's the business model?
The Experts-Exchange team took the time to answer its own Q&A about its si...
