There's this sort of idea that I can't wrap my head around, which is that if there's this fact A, and you don't like it, you can somehow make it not true by... explaining in detail why it is true. OK, so EE has its reasons for doing what developers didn't like... the end result is still that developers didn't like it. You explained that fact quite well, but I'm at a loss as to how that's supposed to translate into a negation of what you just explained.
I see this argument pattern bizarrely often online. It boggles my mind.
So the fact A is that developers didn't like EE. I don't dispute that. What I'm arguing is that sometimes it's worthwhile to take a nuanced view of something that goes deeper than the surface level.
In this case, I'm asking you to consider EE from a different perspective, and whether what they did was worthy of scorn. My hope is that you'll soften your hatred of EE, but I don't expect everyone to come to that conclusion. Not every argument is a total negation of the counter position, I suppose.
I don't care about their internal motivations. Why should I? It's not as if what you said is even all that different than what we thought anyhow.
Now, I realize that may sound like snark, but I actually mean it on a deeper level than that. Why should I care about their internal motivations? EE chose how they would interact with me. It was their choice. They get to live with the consequences. If they had wanted to be perceived differently, it's incumbent upon EE to decide to treat me differently. It's not my responsibility to try to "understand" them, any more than it is my responsibility to interact with any other company in exactly the way they want. That's freedom, for the both me and EE.
You're equally free to defend them, and I was free to read the defense out of curiosity, which is why I'm posting at all. But the end result is the same; I know EE by their actions, and the result is what it is.
I get what you're saying, but haven't you ever made a judgement on someone only to later learn more about the circumstances around them and then modify your judgement?
To me, EE is not deserving of the campaign against them. They're not patent trolls - they built a business that added value, and then they applied some spammy marketing to it. Patent trolls deserve to be taken down with a passion. EE, not so much. Thanks again for your comments.
Yes, that happens all the time. But in that case, there was already a judgment about someone and then I got to know them and then realized that what was said about them was either gossip, or the person changed.
The thing about EE is that it is not gossip. People hate EE and they don't hate it because someone told them to hate it--they already had come to that conclusion on their own. I always hated EE and when I talked to other people about it, I found out they also held the same opinion, many times a fierce hatred of it. There was no campaign to build the hate; the hate was already there, all discovered independently by frustrated coders looking for an answer.
Maybe the evil intentions of EE were not real. But there are moments when I am coding when I want to tear all of my hair out. That emotion is real and won't be forgotten.
Admittedly, they generated plenty of frustration for me, as well. SO has changed everything, but it's kinda funny to me that when we encounter content that isn't free, we have a visceral reaction against it. Yet when people demand our software be free, we'd laugh them to scorn. Thanks for your comments.
> Yet when people demand our software be free, we'd laugh them to scorn.
Speak for yourself. I think free software is pretty much a net good. It's a shame we're not at a point yet where it's the status quo; I'm glad it is for content.
You yourself admit that EE used grey-hat practices and spammy marketing.
If, after being named and shamed they apologized, and admitted that they were doing morally wrong stuff, and stopped doing that - then they wouldn't deserve a campaign.
They didn't, and apparently still don't - so they deserve whatever people think about them. Instead of making excuses, you need to apologize - it's that simple.
If your business model really, really, needs cheating your users - then the ONLY moral way out is to quit, no matter what other good things are there.
>It’s a little known fact that top contributors to EE got VIP treatment. They were flown to different locations around the world, wined & dined, and got lots of cool swag (computers, tablets, etc). When the experts came to visit us in San Luis Obispo, it was all-out fun for them. Experts on Experts Exchange have the potential to get some sweet perks.
Some of that money could've easily gone into improving the UX and adding features to the site which seemed to be stuck in 1999, or failing which, reducing the price of subscriptions. Throwing expensive swag around when there are better places to put it is a bad idea.
I have a company that assassinates babies. It's really profitable! The parents of the dead babies don't like it, but the working environment for our assassins is the best -- they get paid well and they can choose from the best weapons available and have unlimited drinks and snacks at work.
The serious point is, it does matter what you as a company do and employees are responsible for that. You made Google searches work worse, you made our lives difficult when we looked for information. You polluted the web.
Experts Exchange sells access to content - that's my whole point. That's literally all they do. Their crime was ranking highly in Google, while Google said what they were doing was OK. Comparing that to assassinating babies is kinda silly, don't you think?
"Their crime was ranking highly in Google, while Google said what they were doing was OK."
There's the letter of the law and there's the spirit of the law. EE may have been compliant with the letter of Google's law at the time, but if you'd asked Google and Google users specifically they would've told you it was sleazy/not ok.
Google eventually understood the sleaziness and changed their policy to address this specifically. End users also understood the sleaziness and went elsewhere.
White Van speaker guys sell speakers, that's literally all they do. Their crime is their super efficient marketing - they stop their van next to you while you're walking in the street. There's no laws against that!
Their offense (now a crime by Google Law) was showing Google one thing (full content) and users another (squeeze pages). There's a reason Google started kicking sites out of the index for this.
If their crime was only that they ranked highly because of the text in the questions and sold access to answers, I would be okay with that, but EE decided to let Google index the _answers_ too, for SEO purposes, and then hid the answers to non-paying members via various CSS tricks, hiding them below a large wall of boilerplate footer text, etc. The babies analogy is certainly silly though.
Sure, I understand that the company was just trying to make money and keep the jobs of 50+ people. But that doesn't change the fact that the company wasted my time and made my experience miserable.
> My hope is that you'll soften your hatred of EE ...
Okay, as a favor to you, I will hate EE 10% less for 24 hours. But I'll still filter their links out of my Web searches, and warn people away from them at every opportunity. The reason? They're unapologetic parasites.
I joined Stack Overflow about 4.5 years ago and I was one of the top 10 all time users on Stack Overflow for a couple years or so, so I have seen my fair share of SO/EE arguments on the web. What's interesting is that not a single time I'd seen EE defended by anyone but its current or former employees.
Also, the blog post mentions "I think their public, negative campaign against Experts Exchange was excessive, mean-spirited, and at the very least immature and silly. Admittedly, it worked – they’ve achieved their goal, and “death to EE” became the rallying cry."
I don't really get this. Aside some joke-like mentions in the podcast or blog entries, Stack Overflow did not really do anything to harm EE specifically. They were just a better QnA platform and much closer to what users wanted. No one rallied against EE just to kill EE; whatever was done was to build a better QnA system and that succeeded. Experts Exchange is just something users don't want and it never reacted to the presence of Stack Overflow and Stack Overflow eventually ate their lunch in its entirety. Stack Overflow's mission was to become the wikipedia of programming questions, which meant EE-like sites would eventually die should SO becomes successful, but EE was never a specific target of a tactic or anything beyond joke-like verbal attacks. It was, however, a good model of "how not to do things"; something you'd learn from.
You bring up a very important point in that the only defenders of EE seem to be current or former EE employees. Has anyone, anywhere seen someone defend EE who is not a current or former employee of EE?
I know that was what he said, but I believe that sentence was just a simple way to communicate their vision like using "XYZ done right" to describe a company. He did not particularly care about Experts Exchange IMO.
Alright, fine. If you believe calling Experts Exchange names by a tiny startup, that had just joined the QnA business, had anything to do with killing EE, you are horribly wrong. It's like me calling for Microsoft's death as an individual and when they die eventually, get blamed for their death as if my rant, not their incompetence, contributed to their death at all.
Wasted our fucking time: I want to know how to do X, if you want me to pay for that knowledge fine but don't do some shitty thing like cloaking the site so people would get tricked into paying while at the same time gaming Google to get these higher results.
Manipulated people into paying for the site: It's high up on Google so it must have the answer right? OK I guess I'm going to have to pay or else my ass gets fired.
But don't pretend like what EE did was "OK" because some Matt Cutts video said it was. Obviously it was not because it got hit and sank in rankings. SO wasn't what killed EE with it's "negative campaign," it was already well hated before SO came onto the scene.
If you're running a company with 50+ employees that is having success on Google, and Google explicitly tells you what you're doing is OK, you'd probably make a similar decision.
At the time of the Matt Cutts video, EE was serving the full content to users who clicked through - the answer was just buried at the bottom of the page. Crummy, sure. Definitely not going to win them many friends. Worth getting so angry over? Not in my mind.
Clearly you disagree, and that's fine. I think your mind is made up and I don't have hopes to change it.
> If you're running a company with 50+ employees that is having success on Google, and Google explicitly tells you what you're doing is OK, you'd probably make a similar decision.
Google doesn't click on the links it shows, your customers do. What google says is "OK" for them, is not always going to be "OK" for your potential customers.
Also, what does running a company with 50+ employees have to do with making a similar decision? You'd think with more employees you'd be more likely to find the guy that stands up and says "this is fucking retarded what are you thinking"
> At the time of the Matt Cutts video, EE was serving the full content to users who clicked through - the answer was just buried at the bottom of the page. Crummy, sure. Definitely not going to win them many friends. Worth getting so angry over? Not in my mind.
I don't know about you but when I have no idea how to fix a mission critical bug and need a fix ASAP and I search google but all I get is pages and pages of links to your site which "doesn't give me the answer" i get pretty pissed off, especially because you're giving google the answer in order to clutter up all those results pages and rank relevant.
And I say "doesn't give me the answer" because, just so you know, I never knew there was answers at the bottom of the page until jeff pointed it out.
Look, I get it questions and answers are just metrics on a screen to you, but questions and answers to the users are MUCH much more. You broke google, fucking with us when we least needed a fucking with. And to me, that is worth getting angry over.
The very question that is asked is a straw man argument. Nobody is saying that Experts Exchange did some great evil (ex: genocide). What they did was build a business model based on taking from many and giving to nobody. Then to preserve that unsustainable business model, they used various underhanded search engine manipulations.
To me, they were jerks. When Google came out with the ability to filter domains from your personal results, they were the first (and only) domain I added.
Even to this day, they will show you the answer if you scroll through 5 pages of gunk. They didn't do any "great evil". They're just slimy and I get a bad taste in my mouth anytime I think about them. But at least they added that hyphen to their name at some point because for a while I couldn't NOT see it as ExpertSexChange.com.
Personally I felt they made it difficult to find an answer. I get that they wanted to make money, but I felt like they could have done a better job on that end. But they were constantly filling up the first page of my search results. They were also the first (and one of few) domains I've blocked. When I did that, it made it easier to find an answer to my question. Do they deserve another look? Not really, they made a bad first impression and I've taken my business elsewhere. Those other businesses have suited my needs, so I've never needed to take a second look. I made up my mind, as did many other people, long before stackoverflow came along.
> What they did was build a business model based on taking from many and giving to nobody
I'm not sure where you get this. EE treats those answering questions really well, and nobody is forcing them to answer. Nobody forces EE's customers to pay for access to their content, either. Behind the curtain they actually have a lot of happy customers (and question answerers).
They didn't fit the "open source" model programmers like, but for the people who need advanced help with Cisco routers or for the experts winning trips around the world, they're actually not such a slimy company. Thanks for your comments.
I'm not sure where you get this. EE treats those answering questions really well
From Wikipedia:
At Experts-Exchange, users are awarded points for answering questions
Out of curiosity, what is the exchange rate between Experts Exchange points and reddit karma?
Wikipedia goes on...
Experts (those who have reached 10,000 points overall and maintain at least 3,000 points per month)[15] and subscribers get the benefit of using the site's search engine without limitations and no ads are shown.
What's the hourly rate on this work? Please explain how "EE treast those answering questions really well". Because it seems to me these people are doing work worth in the neighborhood of $100 per hour. You tell me how much they're actually making.
I'm not sure I understand your point. You seem to be thinking that people answering questions deserve to be paid - as if they're being forced into answering at all. Experts on EE are answering questions for the same reason users on SO are.
> Please explain how "EE treast those answering questions really well"
If you're a top contributor to EE, you get flown to really nice places and are treated like a VIP by EE. Not everyone reaches this level, but those who do get a really nice perk, in addition to the benefits of answering questions in general.
You seem to be thinking that people answering questions deserve to be paid
If I may first pay you a compliment, you are very adept at twisting words and building up straw man arguments.
What I actually said was:
What [Experts Exchange] did was build a business model based on taking from many and giving to nobody
Your response was then:
EE treats those answering questions really well
But we both know this isn't true. It pays the vast, vast, vast majority of question answerers in worthless or near worthless points. The average question answerer, including the ones that get flown places and "treated like a VIP" is probably actually getting less than minimum wage for their work. That's hardly being treated "really well".
So we come back to my original statement. Experts Exchange built their business on taking from many and giving to nobody. If you want me to add an exception of, "giving to nobody except giving scraps to the very top of people whose time they were taking to build their business on" I would be amenable to that.
You're being consciously or subconsciously obtuse.
With Experts Exchange:
1. People answer questions for free
2. People pay for the answers
3. Google and other search engines are gamed
The only thing that is the "just like Stack Overflow" is #1. The other two items are absolutely nothing like Stack Overflow. As I said, Experts Exchange takes from many and gives to nobody. Stack Exchange takes from many and gives to all. You really can't possibly not see the difference.
I don't understand what getting paid for answers is for? They volunteer to help answer questions, most do this because they get that warm fuzzy feeling inside from doing a good deed and helping someone out, the rest for the free access to the site.
No one at SO gets paid to post. so why should EE pay them to post?
Yeah, this is the stupidest argument ever. The only good thing about Experts Exchange was that it encouraged Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood to make Stack Overflow.
I'm fine with having internal enemies, but I think it goes beyond decency to name someone publicly you want to "take down" - especially if that company is actually providing value, albeit not in the way you want them to.
Jeff says in the very article you linked to from your blog:
"I have absolutely nothing against Experts-Exchange. Realize that I've been a fan of the smackdown learning model for a long time; it's like kayfabe in professional wrestling. There are no hard feelings; this 'rivalry' is mostly useful as a way to explain what it is we do. This internet is certainly big enough for the both of us -- big enough, in fact, for hundreds of Q&A websites."
There's no conspiracy here. If you're an asshole to everyone and they hate you, it's not because you have powerful enemies engaging in some kind of evil marketing agenda. It's just what happens when you're an asshole to everyone.
Being "dicks to users" is based on what, exactly? My point is that for EE to not be "dicks to users" in the eyes of the tech community would mean to stop charging for their content.
I linked a video of Google's Matt Cutts explaining that EE wasn't violating their guidelines. So their infraction was hiding content below the fold. Hardly an evil infraction, and not worthy of an attempt to sink them as a company.
EE added real value, and their longevity is evidence that some people are willing to pay for that value.
Well, stop charging for their content _or_ stop trying to get in google results.
The second one would destroy their business as much as the first though, yeah.
But yes, trying to get paywalled results high in google results is mistreating users (or, rather, mistreating the public at large; most of those people weren't their users (yet, they hope!)).
So is trying to trick people into thinking the results are paywalled when they are not. That's mistreating em too.
Yes, they had a business model that required them to a) get on google results so people would click and visit them, and then b) make those people pay (or _think_ they had to pay) to see what they clicked to see.
Yeah, they didn't arrive at this out of a desire to be evil or mistreat users, they were just people trying to figure out how to make a business like everyone else, sure. But what they ended up with, at one point, was a business that required mistreating the public. shrug.
"Mistreating" is pretty strong language, don't you think? In the worst case, someone thought they were going to get an answer, and they didn't...IMO that deserves a shrug, not a public campaign to take them down. I do appreciate your thoughtful comment.
Not sure about the impact of the so-called public campaign(which - to my perspective - just seemed to be a few comments) - I just stopped using EE when the SEO crap started. I didn't start seeing SO links until some time later - until then I trawled through forums and other less centralized resources for answers.
The problem I had with SE wasn't really the paywall (or fake-out paywall in case of below-the-fold). Well: okay, that was a problem in that once it started, I stopped using them. But I didn't blame them for that by itself - they have to make money. I just felt that the value EE gave me in terms of the quality of its answers didn't justify the money they wanted, so I moved on.
The problem was really the spamming. This is when I took an active dislike to EE - paywall content completely consumed the first page or two of search results to any technical question I searched for on Google. Or link farms that fed into paywalled EE content. That was when I started getting actively annoyed about it - but this was several months after I stopped using it.
I think "mistreating" is perfectly appropriate in this context - because during this window, it actually cost me valuable time to not use EE. Time spent paging through results, clicking on link farms before I realized they were link farms -- time that could have been spent actually working on the solution of my problem of the moment.
I'm not disputing that the CEO did what he thought was necessary. But there's no questoin that he picked wrong, and it's a little disingenuous to claim that the fact the company needed to earn money somehow made his choice more acceptable.
Well, sure, it may be that a competitor engaged in some highly negative marketting against them, and I can see how that would be annoying if you were them.
But are you really surprised that their strategy made the public mad? If someone clicks on a google result, that looks like it's going to give them an answer to their question -- only to find that they have to pay to get the answer (whether that's true or whether you've tricked them into thinking that) -- are you truly surprised they would consider that mistreatment? you think it was only a competitor that convinced people to consider that mistreatment?
There's a reason that Google requires that the content shown google -- which ends up in the google results summary/excerpts -- is the same content shown to the public. Because people get really mad and feel mistreated when it's not.
If the content was 'really' there just hidden to make someone think it was paywalled -- maybe that helps you technically get around Google's rules (that's between you and Google), but it obviously won't make people any less mad about it (to the extent it works anyway).
In the worst case, someone thought they were going to get an answer, and they didn't...IMO that deserves a shrug, not a public campaign to take them down.
Sure, and a single spam message is a minor nuisance worthy of hitting the delete key. Until you get a sea of 1,000 daily spam messages drowning out the 100 legitimate emails you get per day.
Slimy is slimy regardless of the scale the slime is distributed. Experts Exchange's business model was based on repeated and systematic abuses of people's time. That's worth more than a shrug.
So wait, now that I've read up on these, you're suggesting that it's not treating people poorly to send them spam... because most of them will never see your spam becuase they have effective spam filters?
Wait, why would you want to send something that you know nobody will ever see because of their highly effective spam filters?
Unfortunately Google doesn't let you manually filter out sites from your search results anymore. At one point EE was the only site on my filtered list...
Exclude a word
-query Add a dash (-) before a word or site to exclude all results that include that word. This is especially useful for synonyms like Jaguar the car brand and jaguar the animal.
jaguar speed -car or pandas -site:wikipedia.org
Tip: You can also exclude results based on other operators, like excluding all results from a specific site.
It functioned as a black hole of good advice, adding no useful value beyond acting as a gatekeeper, and made it more difficult to find actual help by both a) attracting answers that would have been publicly posted and b) obscuring search results making it more difficult to find other sources.
Let me put it another way. I can understand why a CEO might choose that, but as a user (especially as a user trying to find an answer, or a noob programmer trying to understand something better) all I would ever get was, "Hah! We've got answers .... and you've gotta pay."
My reaction was the same reaction we have when Google tries to foist G+ real-names on Youtube accounts, or when I see Quora's hidden results: "Oh, screw you!" It's not logical, but it's the feeling I (and I'm sure others) feel.
Quora is actually good, in that at least the first answer (usually very good) is usually visible, but as a user it's easy to see why I would want to use StackExchange rather than Experts' Exchange. I see all the answers, and am free to lurk. As a student, I would have been able to learn a lot about best-practices, or why X doesn't work with Y, where before I was stuck in ignorance due to not being able to justify the $ on a membership.
The main reason I turned to Wikipedia and Stack Overflow is not because they rank well on Google, but because they are free sources of information. Moreover, they don't constantly pester me to sign up, log in, or pay them anything. (I actually have an account at SO, but haven't posted anything: I don't feel like an expert on anything enough to write an answer that would actually earn points.)
> (I actually have an account at SO, but haven't posted anything: I don't feel like an expert on anything enough to write an answer that would actually earn points.)
The best way to learn something is to teach - pick a question that you can't answer and spend some time researching it. Then write it up as if you were explaining it to yourself before you started looking.
You'll come away with both points and more knowledge.
People were searching google for answers to their questions. EE hijacked the results with pages that hid the answers.
That's how they were dicks. They intentionally wasted our time. Far from "evil," but annoying enough to nourish resentment against EE.
Were the answers readily available elsewhere in most cases? If so, the main "wrong" done by EE was simply placing inaccessible results higher than otherwise accessible ones, which is pretty rubbish, but if instead, a bulk of the content was unavailable elsewhere, this doesn't seem that bad. I'm guessing it was more of the former though, lending to the general ire towards EE.
Generally you could find the answer elsewhere. They made it more difficult to find the answer's elsewhere, as they were generally in the top of any query. If it happened occasionally, it would be no big deal. But when it happened every single time, it gets frustrating. You have a deadline, and you have a problem that is already frustrating. Now you have to wade through EE results trying to find another site that has an answer.
Huh? You are making it sound that EE answer ranking highly in Google is EE's fault and not the Google search algorithm. I would argue that almost any useful programming question I search for has SO as the first link which is then "closed as not constructive". It is behavior even worse than EE - at least for EE, I knew that their pay-wall would block me.
EE users added this value, and its highly questionable that they would have done so if they had known that their expertise would be locked behind a paywall.
"not worthy of an attempt to sink them as a company"
It's competition. Someone makes something people like better and they win, you lose. If at the same time you helped them with intentionally poor UX, well there may be some negative sentiment about that which your competition will undoubtedly capitalize on. That's it though, EE chose their strategy, it failed and failed hard. I don't get what about that is hard to understand?
Does someone who pays EE for the answer to their question get what they were paying for? Yes. My point would be: how is EE charging for content any different than someone else charging for content? The great evil they seemed to commit was ranking highly in Google while following Google's guidelines, and then hiding the content below the fold.
They didn't just hide it below the fold. They made it look like it wasn't there at all, by showing blurred-out content first, along with text along the lines of "subscribe to see the answers".
Any reasonable person not aware of the trick would believe they had to pay for the answer.
I'd rather learn to do it myself, which is part of what makes Stack Overflow great. I can learn and teach there. EE raised barriers to consumption and participation.
Unfortunately it's really hard to get any reasoned discussion about Experts-Exchange on Hacker News. Ideologies are difficult to discuss. I'm reminded of this: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
It's part of the (on average) Hacker News identity to hate Experts-Exchange and any resource that exposes itself in search results but requires sign-up to access.
Anyone who tries to discuss something that is opposed to the HN identity is quickly downvoted, they learn from the feedback and damaged karma not to bother and you are left with only comments/commenters that say things they know will get positive feedback/karma.
edit: I'm actually surprised that I got downvoted just for mentioning this, it only serves to reinforce the reality of this ideological position.
'exposes itself' is a great euphemism for gaming the system in order to get a search engine ranking that it couldn't earn on its merits. I remember the first time I ran across EE, it was about fifteen seconds before the time I blocked EE in my google search results.
Sorry, I didn't intend to play semantic games here. I don't think anyone has disagreed that they gamed search results. I meant only to call out the difference between sites that explicitly don't end up in search results (because they don't want to) versus those that actively try to get indexed.
Hacker News requires a log in, but generally, HN links and discussions don't show up in search results, this is, if I understand correctly, intentional. So my statement was based on the idea that people on HN hate signing up for sites that require login, but which also end up in search results they find, which is why it's OK for HN to require a sign up for discussion, but not for Experts-Exchange.
It's not a complaint, it is an observation, I quite like most of the HN hivemind. It was meant to warn the OP who seemed to think his post, being in an agreeable tone, in general, would be well received.
And I don't understand what makes you think annoyance/hatred of EE has to do with HN identity. You seem to have drawn this conclusion based on the fact that most HN users dislike EE. I would posit that most developers and IT workers who used search engines prior to StackOverflow would dislike EE quite a bit. It is not surprising that the sentiment you see on HN would correlate with that.
You are definitely right that this sentiment is strong throughout the tech industry, so it's just by coincidence that it is strong on HN, however, it does define a strong position in voting behavior on HN. Even when there are reasonable arguments in support of non-open models (and I'm not saying this is one of them), downvotes fly and little discussion is had, it creates a feedback loop that reinforces an entrenched ideology and shuns opposing view points. I'm not making a value judgement about one or the other view, but it does affect how interactions on HN take place.
> reasonable arguments in support of non-open models (and I'm not saying this is one of them)
Then what the hell are you talking about? I am yet to see a reasonable argument in support of their business practices. Please link me to one if I missed it - because I don't think it exists.
The only thing I seem to see repeated is "some googley company did what we did but offered it for free and we have kids to feed so let us do shady things to keep our dated business model afloat and don't hate on us over it!"
You should change "Experts Exchange were dicks to users" to "Experts Exchange were dicks to users who want all their content for free".
A lot of people, including me, have derived extreme value from EE over the years. And anything useful in SO is "closed as not constructive" anyway - so SO basically has 0 utility for me. (I am not saying this is true for everyone)
To me, EE being gone is good riddance, I HATED THEM, HATE HATE HATE HATE.
Most people might wonder: "why?"
It is because ANYTHING I searched on Google resulted into 3 pages of their links, sometimes sorta hidden (ie: sites that republished their links for example), and it resulted in:
When it started, I wasted lots of time visiting their links, seeing the stupid paywall, and getting pissed off with the wasted time.
As I learned to not click on their links, then I clicked on other sites that republished their links.
As I learned to filter those out, I had to expend time looking carefully several pages of google results searching for what I really wanted.
So I hated them, because not only they provided nothing for me (I was not willing to pay for whatever crap they were selling, I never saw a answer on their site, since I never noticed the "below the fold" or whatever that means, thus I still don't have a clue on the quality of whatever was their answers, so to me it was just a scam), they also wasted my time, they made me lose my valuable time working around their shady SEO tricks.
When they were gone from google, and thus made me stop wasting my time, I was really happy.
And if a employee or ex-employee come complain that I want the demise of their employer, all I can say is: "Don't work for people that do evil stuff." (this also apply to anyone working for cigarrete manufacturer, US intel and DoD, US private army contractors, some certain divisions of game publishers, some banks, and so on...)
EE isn't the only company to have faced this conundrum (either you give away the content for free, in which case it shows up in search results and you get lots of search traffic, or you put it behind a paywall, in which case it doesn't show up in search results and you get no search traffic).
In fact, pretty much any company whose primary asset is content faces a version of this problem.
My take on it? This falls into the category of "3. Come up with a totally new business model":
I've often thought that it would be useful to have a search engine that indexes paid content and then allows users to filter it out.
So, suppose you're searching for the answer to a particularly difficult programming question.
You might start out with the filter on: "Only show me free results."
And then if your search turns up nothing, you might turn the filter off, and maybe you'd discover that for a couple of bucks, you can get access to the answer to your question.
So maybe EE, or some other enterprising company, could build a search engine that fits their monetization model, rather than relying on a bunch of search engines that don't.
The trouble with this is that everyone with the answer has an incentive to answer for free on an open site. The incentive is that others will do the same if they feel like they got value for their time.
How does a paid site compete with something like Stack Exchange? SE has most of the answers. People appreciate finding the answer they needed. Many of them will turn around and pay it forward by answering questions or improving other answers. It's the same reason Wikipedia killed paid encyclopedias.
Actually, anyone who actually wants to get compensated for their expertise or research has an incentive to answer on a paid site, rather than a free site.
I think we're now starting to realize the repercussions of this emphasis on free, free, free content online.
Look at newspapers. Nobody wants to pay for news anymore, and consequently, the journalism industry is in shambles. And that's a real shame, because in decades past, a robust metro newspaper used to be one of the best checks and balances against government corruption and slimey business practices.
The model you propose -- freely sharing information so that everyone benefits -- has its merits, but it's no way to make a living, and consequently the pool of contributors gets whittled down to those who can afford to contribute without any expectation of compensation. But what if the person who has the expertise to answer a tough question isn't in that pool?
If the person that has the expertise doesn't want to answer the question for free ... then the free market will deem access to that knowledge more valuable, and his consulting fees will increase. Everything is an ebb and flow. When the "value" of some knowledge goes down due to what some might call oversupply, the value of other knowledge will go up because it is not shared freely; those who need that knowledge or service will then be willing to pay a premium for it since they could not find it elsewhere.
You're right that some things that were great ways to make a living are starting to become less-so. The answer is to simply to not try to make a living at that thing that is undervalued by the market. If enough providers of that service leave the supply pool, then the value will increase and compel the supply to return.
The market doesn't have an obligation to support journalists ... if no one wants to pay them because they can get information on twitter, reddit, and facebook ... well, that's how it is :)
That’s far from the worst atrocity that EE committed. What sent me over the edge with Expert’s Exchange is the fact that to sign up for a “free trial”, you had to enter in credit card information. That kept me away from the site for a long time, until one day when I was desperate for an answer and it appeared that EE might have one. I bit the bullet and quickly signed up, not reading over the fine print. Next month, lo and behold, I see a charge on my credit card for a full membership rate at EE.
Shame on me for not assuming this would happen when I signed up, but shame on EE for implementing this scammy business practice in the first place. What percent of EE’s revenue model came from unwitting free trial memberships that rolled over into “VIP” memberships?
I was under the impression that pretty much any company that took CCs on signups assumed you would stay signed up until you explicitly cancelled...there are tons of examples of beloved companies doing this, so I don't agree that this was so bad. I suppose they could've made it clearer...
I just went through a list of companies that I personally use or have considered using that take CC information on signup. All but one assume that you'll be continuing unless you explicitly cancel. I don't think my impression is so far off the mark, but eh, I could be wrong.
When it's worded "free trial" and the details about rolling over into a membership are shelved away in the fine print, it certainly doesn't give off that impression to me.
Although, you're right, at the end of the day any company that is taking credit card information up front like that is probably doing this.
Maybe it is the case and it should be expected. But while it is a great tactic to increase short term cashflow to pay for employee's snacks, I fail to see how customers can like this.
How many months do you think debaserab2 suscribed to the service? My guess is either 1 or 0 if he managed to reverse the charges. Yet he hated EE for years after that.
EE failed because they had tons of little annoying practices like this that made it grow in the minds of their tech savvy customer as a company to hate and not a company to love.
This is a very common practice - even followed by Oreilly Safari and Linkedin for example. Anyone complaining about this is clearly biased without a reason.
I really didn't care much about the google spamming if by some magic they managed to get me right answers. The only problem with EE is that I couldn't get anything from their spam, only links to pay for the answer.
SO solved this problem by making it free. You could ask questions for free as well. I don't know if SO tries to game google, but their answers are pretty close to the top results most of the time. I don't mind, because they are usually relevant.
Depending on when you visited, you'd probably need to scroll to the bottom of the page to get the answer and/or visit the cached version of the page. Annoying, yes. Worthy of scorn? That's up for debate.
SO ate EE's lunch on the SEO front, to be sure. And I agree with Google that SO offers better experience for searchers, so I'm glad they're winning that battle.
You keep saying that they weren't really worthy of scorn, and yet they were fairly scorned industry wide BEFORE stackoverflow came into existed. So, yeah, obviously they did things that people disliked. I never saw a "kill EE" campaign. Yes, SO wanted to "not be EE," because everyone hated EE. I don't think a lot of people decided to hate EE because SO said to, they hated EE because of EE's practices. Did EE change their practices? Perhaps, but it was too soo, too late. And I never found out, because I blocked them as soon as I could.
From personal experience, I can tell you why I detest EE - their dark pattern practices. I did sign up and pay for a subscription, and it was not a ripoff. However - when I went to cancel it, I had to SEND A FAX (or use snail mail, IIRC) to stop payments. That's right, you could not cancel online. See ya later!
> Imagine you’re running EE in 2009 [...] You also have a new competitor who is doing everything for free. You have a few options, as I see it
This makes it sound like EE resorted in gray hat SEO at least in part as a response to SO. A quick Googling found they were doing this from at least 2006 [1]
I think the core point being made is that Experts Exchange was not evil. They were annoying.
They had a business model that was never great, but worked okay until someone came along with a better one. At which point they messily exploded because nobody (with the exception of a few employees and top contributors) actually liked them. They kept popping up in google results, but when they clicked on them it never actually solved your problem. Their web design was annoying, the cloaking was frustrating, and the actual content was often terrible. It often read like a transcript of a tier 1 tech support call that had been conducted in another language then translated into yours via google translate, and it was rife with errors or the classic "I have a problem with X...nevermind, I fixed it!", which is the sort of thing which fills everyone who finds it later because they're having the same problem with RAGE. Did our friendly sexchange experts deserve that rage? Not really, but it was their fault. EE was setup such that the average user saw tons of poor quality answers; SO was setup such that the average user saw good quality answers. Ultimately that comes right back to the door of the devs and designers.
I'd sum the blog post up as "Hey, Experts Exchange was annoying, mostly useless, and vaguely scummy, but it was staffed with good people doing the best they could, and it wasn't outright evil!" And he's right. Evil is a high bar; EE never even approached it.
What they were was incompetent. And SO called them out on it, and Andy is hurt by it. He has every right to be, but it doesn't change the fact that EE was is effectively gone, and deservedly so. And 99.99% of the people who ever tried to use EE will be pleased.
Experts Exchange was and is adversarial to its own users. Not Google, its own users. By charging for freely available content, they are making their own users suckers. That's enough to avoid using it, in my opinion.
What needs to be considered is what EE was good at. EE's speciality, as I recall, was not tutorials, but quick problem solving advice. And it was very Google friendly. It usually looked like it had a good answer whenever it showed up.
That being said, when a person is looking for advice on how to fix a problem, they are probably frustrated, stressed, or both.
So imagine going to Google for help to see a really promising link appear in the results (not in the advertising section), and the content is hidden behind a pay-wall. Almost like seeing an oasis in the desert only to realize it is a mirage.
I don't know about other users, but I'd rather not see a link. From my perspective, all EE did was make Google less effective.
Some might say that "there is no such thing as pad publicity." I would argue that isn't true at all. The above describes my first and only reaction to hearing about EE. And due to not being able to see the content, I lack any personal positive stories on the matter.
There's a particular XKCD comic that used to constantly reflect my experience while searching for the solutions to technical problems in one particular area of expertise (http://xkcd.com/979/).
Seeing EE answers gumming up the search results (especially if you didn't know the trick) was at least an order of magnitude more frustrating.
I'm glad EE treated its employees well, but the way a company treats its employees can be completely unrelated to the way a company treats its competitors, or its potential or actual employee base. And it seems pretty clear that EE treated its potential customer base so poorly that Stack Overflow was able to tap into latent frustration and anger and quickly corner the market on community technical Q&A. The hatred for EE grew up organically, and I doubt Joel's campaign did much more than giving direction and a voice to pre-existing resentment.
Oh man. The alt text. I want that so much now. When I think of how much more useful support forums would be if the first post in the thread were basically a wiki...
One thing I wish the article pointed out was that Stack Exchange isn't profitable whereas Experts Exchange is (this was true earlier this year; SE may be profitable now). In general, it's difficult for a bootstrapped company selling a service to compete with VC-funded free services, and choices have to be made.
Note that Stack Overflow itself was not VC funded for a good amount of time. They only raised VC funding when they wanted to push StackExchange towards other areas outside programming. They certainly were not VC funded from the beginning.
There is Experts Exchange, the company, and then there's experts-exchange.com. The majority of folks complaining have had a bad experience with the latter, while you are defending the former.
A reasonable person should be able to separate the two, and so it's nice to hear more about the people behind the website. But that doesn't make the user experience on the website any better than it is on StackOverflow, and it is unlikely to change the fact that most folks memory of experts-exchange.com before StackOverflow existed is one of disappointment and deception, which is why it was so effective for Jeff and Joel to rally users around the notion of being the anti-experts-exchange. (I think they themselves made a distinction between the site and the people behind it at least once, and talked about having a conversation with an experts exchange employee or two. And it's worth remembering that that was only one of the few ways they desscribed their vision: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/04/introducing-stackov...)
So if you want to humanize your friends, keep writing about them, and I'm sure you'll get readers. It sounds like an interesting story. But it seems mistaken to expect that alone to counteract people's impression of the site itself. If you want to hear people say nicer things about experts-exchange, either listen to the folks who are happily using it and ignore the hate, or genuinely listen to complaints, find a way to make more people happy.
When experts exchange first launched, it seemed like a clever concept to me, in the abstract; a way to get paid for your expertise (although you couldn't buy anything with it except answers to other questions). And they take a wee percentage (but they're not greedy).
However, in practice, I only ever asked one question (they gave a free $50 credit at launch, worth 5 questions or something). I got a great answer - I think better, and more insightful than I'd get on SO. But it was a horrific experience, and I never used it again after that.
I guess, in the bigger picture, they were trying to monetize people's goodwill in helping each other. Helping feels more valuable when done purely out of goodwill; money can devalue. Not sure how big that factors in their failure - but to the extent it created a competitor, it's a real factor. Your customers disliking you is serious business problem.
Although it's the way of the world, there's something hollow and unsatisfying about being motivated primarily by money. Most entrepreneurs - e.g. Elon Musk - have visions bigger than themselves and their riches. Many of the best developers, like many academics, believe everything should be free, or at cost.
I'm inclined to think the above is the root problem, and the SEO tactics etc are just a symptom. But hard to say.
Out of curiosity, how was asking a question and getting a great answer a horrible experience? Or more specific, what made you not want to ask more questions?
In general, I always felt a bit nervous about money being involved - additional importance, security issues, etc. A certain seriousness, a complication distracting from the actual technical issue.
But specifically, I couldn't log back into my account to mark the answer as correct. The help people gave me a new password a couple of times, but they didn't work. I eventually realized it was hopeless, and gave up. Later, I tried again to find the question and reward the person (this time paying out of my own pocket), but couldn't find it after intensive searching, many keywords etc. It seems that my question and the answers had been lost.
I feel that the initial problem was to do with money being involved - additional security around logging in, because mistakes with money are so serious. Maybe combined with teething troubles. It was very very strange and bizarre.
In contrast, I haven't had such problems with StackOverflow (or reddit or HN etc), so other purchases online.
Just a quick thought: the help I got on EE was different from SO, so maybe there's a niche for EE. Let me describe the help:
I'd been stuck, and pretty much given up. A friend wondered if there was someone I could ask - but it was virgin territory, no one had done it before, and so no one would know. I only tried EE because what the hell.
I didn't get a specific answer, but "X does that - why don't you see how X does it?" This was a clever, insightful, lateral point of view. I didn't think I'd be able to use X's technique - but amazingly, it turned out I could! The suggestion might seem obvious in hindsight, but it wasn't to me. It was just what I needed to hear - a great answer.
I'd describe this as "micro-consultation" or "micro-mentoring", which differs from SO's aim of specific concrete answers to specific concrete questions. I think the money-motivation of EE helped encourage someone to spend a few moments creative thought on my question.
It's the kind of insight you get from having many contributors to an open-source project - but who's going to bother, for the case where only one person benefits?
So... I do think this kind of service, sort of halfway between SO and full-on consultancy, is valuable and has a role - but micro, like Amazon's mechanical turk. I think Google Answers tried this (now defunct). A little bit like that logo design site SO used (http://99designs.com.au/logo-design/contests/logo-stackoverf...) - a sort of eBay for consultancy, but a micro version.
Because consultancy is very question-specific, they'd be almost no question reuse (unlike SO), which also fits with a money motive (i.e. people love karma/fame; but if not available, fortune is OK). So I'm suggesting a micro-consultancy facilitation site, where the asker pays the answerer and EE takes a wee percentage (a similar amount to crowd-sourcing sites). A different niche from SO.
The Fact is that Experts Exchange is a parasitic organism. It games Google search results, then, when people click their links, they're confronted with an infamous paywall instead of anything useful. If Expert Exchange had any self-respect at all, they would survive by way of advertising alongside freely available content, as their successful competitors do.
I've been filtering all Experts Exchange content from browsing results for years now, and as time goes by, the justification only gets stronger.
One thing I've always wanted is to be able set a browser switch to delete any returns from EE. There probably is a way that I've been too distracted to find. BTW, my only reason for such dislike is the 'Ooh ooh---we've got the answer' behind our paywall. Just don't like paywalls...
I see this argument pattern bizarrely often online. It boggles my mind.