[tptacek]

This harks back to our corporate goal to “make the Internet a better place to get expert answers to your questions.” A ghost town, without traffic, does not get people answers, but it does draw a few people away from other sites that might do so. We do not believe that the Internet benefits from putting up placeholder sites with negligible traffic that do not attract high quality communities. And we want the Stack Exchange brand to be synonymous with great community Q&A sites, even if we don’t necessarily cover every topic under the sun.

If Joel Spolsky somehow managed to actually touch Jason Calacanis, would some kind of catastrophic cosmic event occur? Or would they both simply annihilate each other?

[spolsky]

I consider Jason a friend (http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/podcast-56/), a very smart guy, and a great entrepreneur, although I have a different philosophy than he does on how to build a Q&A site.

[tptacek]

So then, do you think that Mahalo has a bum rap? Because the rep they have here is pretty close to "Google spammer".

[spolsky]

I do the best I can not to comment on competitors, although I can't always live up to my ideal.

There are a lot of companies built on the business model of making low-cost, low-quality pages for long-tail Google search results, either algorithmically or with low-paid humans. There's clearly an arbitrage opportunity there, providing some kind of semi-crappy web page on a topic so narrow that there isn't anything on the web yet, but low quality content doesn't interest me at all.

[gnaritas]

> low-cost, low-quality pages for long-tail Google search results

It's called spamming. Mahalo is spam, Jason is a spammer; friend or not that's simply what he does.

[markbao]

Yeah, it'd be like an electron colliding with a positron. The only thing that'd be left would be gamma rays.