If I were told "Here's several million dollars, an Answers platform, and a mandate to make a super-scalar return", I would immediately start trying to pull off Demand Media, starting each property with a core of content produced by cheap freelancers and then thickening them out with real UGC as they gained traction in the search engines. The million get spent on the freelancers and on having my crack team of engineers build a search prediction algorithm so that I know, e.g., what the top three questions about birdfeeders and the highest payout topics are.
The resulting company looks very, very different than what StackOverflow looks like... but it would make sense, I guess. (Major risk of getting annihilated by Google in the next 12 months but, hey, not my money.)
I generally yield to no one in my agreement against "land grab" economics. However, this space actually is a land grab. Maybe it isn't obvious to DHH because DHH doesn't really need to worry about the nuts and bolts of SEO all that much, but Demand Media can create a page for $15 and sell $40 of ads on it this year (it will still be there next year). That model scales to the effing moon, at least until Google gives them the smackdown.
This is the key to it. Technology development isn't the point of an investment in a company like this (though some new tech will be needed and created). You need to find editors, create partnerships, advertise (as dirty a word as that may be) and provide runway to iterate. A question site on graphic design might be different than one on cooking and even more different from one on the finer points of SQL. I do think the land grab comparison is fair. If you can get into the verticals quickly and establish a lead in content it is that much harder for the next guy.
I like 37S, but I don't get the compulsive need to criticize anyone that takes funding or sells their company as a sell out.
there is a difference between Demand Media and StackExchange...howto sites get linked to, Q&A sites do not. eHow is a PR8 site, while SO is a PR6 site. Original content will always outrank Q&A.
If you want I can talk your ears off about the Demand Media model, but one very smart thing they did was jump ahead of the curve by buying under-monetized sites aimed at middle American ladies which had existed for a decade, and then started building them out. StackOverflow, by comparison, has no decade old links because it has not even existed for two years yet. I don't think it is necessarily a question of link richness of the audience or linkability of the content there (as a matter of fact, I'd guess that StackOverflow probably accumulates links much faster than eHow -- like, order of magnitude faster, despite the fact that eHow has 40 times more monthly visitors).
Really? Although I found it to be in very poor taste it was on your own blog and I'd be surprised and disappointed if this was the case. Any moderators willing to confirm or deny?
it was submitted to HN too(made the front page)...got an email from pg for it...called me an asshole and said that he was embarrassed that such meanness was posted on HN
I think most news.yc users overestimate the value of voting. It's in your face, you see the numbers on every item, so it's easy to assume that's the most important thing. It isn't. It's just a guide, that indicates what the users are currently thinking. Sadly, it doesn't work to put too much stock in what they're thinking.
Pretty much every site on the internet where users gather and talk has eventually turned into a cesspool of angry arguments and spite, just before imploding altogether. Clay Shirky wrote the definitive essay on the subject:
So the evidence is pretty clear: leave the users to their own devices, and they'll eventually destroy the community. pg and the editors are well aware of this. So they curb bad behavior, behind the scenes. Many, many users and submissions get banned or killed. If it wasn't that way, this community definitely would not have survived for three-plus-years now.
And if you ask me, pg did absolutely the right thing banning that blog entry. It was exactly the sort of ugly, spiteful thing that sends a community spiraling into its death throes. I'm glad it's gone.
I suppose flag is a form of voting, but I think you underestimate the value of HN culture. Angry arguments and spite have rarely been tolerated here.
It appears PG didn't ban a blog entry, but rather a domain, and one which had previously been a source of useful content. If we apply this same standard we ought start banning entire domains left, right and centre: first cab off the rank should be techcrunch.com
I think the one thing that SO is missing is one of their claimed features, being a "community wiki". If they could somehow leverage that content in more of an article format then they could have that "article site" aspect. Right now they just look Q&A.
The resulting company looks very, very different than what StackOverflow looks like... but it would make sense, I guess. (Major risk of getting annihilated by Google in the next 12 months but, hey, not my money.)
I generally yield to no one in my agreement against "land grab" economics. However, this space actually is a land grab. Maybe it isn't obvious to DHH because DHH doesn't really need to worry about the nuts and bolts of SEO all that much, but Demand Media can create a page for $15 and sell $40 of ads on it this year (it will still be there next year). That model scales to the effing moon, at least until Google gives them the smackdown.