Sounds like they are so important they should have been compensated. I mean, if they were so critical to the success.

There are more forms of wealth than just cash. Some people find it rewarding to help others, and SE is set up to make it so that people could create the canonical answer to a particular question. This is a force multiplier so that helpful answers can reach a maximum audience.

This probably won't continue to feel satisfying if SE doesn't show respect for its volunteers. The force multiplier only exists because the moderators keep the site clean and well-organized. It sounds like SE both explicitly and implicitly showed gratitude for this effort, but now they are failing to do so.

what're you trying say, exactly? that people who get more satifaction from doing a job should be paid less?

if you want to start assigning a dollar value to subjective experiences like that, the argument goes both ways. you should pay more to people who experience more emotional distress from their jobs. but in that case a majority of companies would probably go bankrupt, since most people despise their jobs.

Some of them rise up to community managers and are then compensated. The person who recently got steamrolled was getting very close to that position.

I think some sympathy is due for the working-for-free workers on stack exchange, at least from us, Hacker News' unpaid content authors.

They contribute to the community that is owned by the company that then profits from the community.

In return they get points.

Points allow for showing how important they are to the community.

Points that have zero cash value.

Disgruntled volunteers are not going to be easy to replace.

Sounds like they gave value but got none to me..."visibility" ain't worth shit. How much SO got in the bank? What's the ratio of visibility to dollars here? I've never seen an SO badge anywhere and never mentioned in any resume.

What does this visibility mean? Can it be converted to cash somehow?

I suppose if your profile on StackOverflow is high enough you could put it on your cv.

SO also has a jobs site, which I suppose can be linked to your profile if you want it to.

A company I consulted at one time was trying to improve it's profile for job applicants so they wanted people to put up their github profiles and SO profiles in some advertisements or whatever they were doing - I think it was on linkedIn they were doing this. Anyway I think they stopped because nobody had a particularly high impressive number so why would you even want to do that (but they did it)

Lots of SO points means I spend a lot of time there answering questions (usually during work hours). Not sure I’d want to advertise that.

I would totally agree with that, however I have over the years developed the suspicion that people who make hiring decisions might not be operating at the same logical level that I am.

Given both that suspicion, and how they seem to behave about prominent github profiles and such, I think that being in the top 20th percentile or so on SO and a strong focus on the tags that correlate to the terms in a job announcement might be a big draw to some HR people/managers who just really don't want to mess up one more time! After the fifth complaint or so of programmers we hire don't know how to code or whatever - it might be soothing.

yes, if you do freelancing

Maybe create an ICO for these points?

The self-promotion is the main thing that makes Quora useful though. If you want to know what are all the startups that have attempted solving problem X, it's usually impossible to get a complete answer without using Quora. Just searching Google / Crunchbase / HN / ProductHunt etc. will miss the last third of startups, that you can only find mentioned in the relevant Quora thread.