1. The "insurance" aspect (which is good); and
2. Because Joel bothered to reply (within about an hour) to something on Meta.
If you listen to the SO podcasts Joel rarely visits Meta so I guess he was on the lookout for a reaction, which is understandable. But it's still interesting.
It's worth pointing out that those servers are for the entire set of sites of which only SO is anywhere remotely close to capacity but yes there are three Web servers for SO.
And yes the hardware/bandwidth costs are (still) nothing. Read:
ugh, 3 pages of how Stackoverflow and everything around it is doomed to fail. Also, seems like he's attacking Jeff & Joels decisions on a regular basis. Is this some personal thing of him?
Please just let them do their thing, they've been successful with everything they've done so far and I'm sure they have their reasons for raising VC. Kinda hate this gossip sometimes.
Mr. Shields (Cletus) is a very active member of the StackOverflow community who have contributed a lot to the site. I believe this is more like friendly criticism, not "personal vendetta".
1. I simply don't understand this 180;
2. I am concerned about how this will impact what is an otherwise successful formula by any metric except perhaps its ability to generate its owners wads of cash.
For the record, the main thing I've criticized to date is Stackoverflow Careers because it comes across as snake oil.
On the other side, I support their efforts at monetizing that included things others criticized such as adding Adobe logos (sponsored) to the flash and flex tags.
