[joelbluminator]

> Since my loyalty to SO is approximately zero

That's you though. It's not about loyalty, it's about Stackoverflow almost becoming a verb like Google. Many many people are used to using it, it's brand is very powerful. I don't see some competing tool stealing lots of mind share. Btw the thing about talking to maintainers directly is already done on small communities on discuss pages (ElixirForum for instance), on Discord, IRC and many other channels. None of it actually hurt SO.

[gm3dmo]

TomTom and BlackBerry had great brands, marketing and great software stacks. I still correct the google maps voice when it tells me to take the third exit on the roundabout. It’s “roundabound”. The people who ran those companies didn’t see anybody stealing their businesses either. Yet they are well and truly gone.

https://youtu.be/ATulnxruvhQ

[chipotle_coyote]

> I still correct the google maps voice when it tells me to take the third exit on the roundabout. It’s “roundabound”.

If it's saying "roundabout," I hope you're not correcting it to "roundabound," because "roundabout" is the correct word.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundabout

[travisjungroth]

Yeah what? Maybe it’s some local dialect.

[joelbluminator]

Not sure TomTom had as dominant a brand for navigation as Stackoverflow has for Q&A. Stackoverflow is pretty much alone in this space still which is pretty amazing when you think about it.

[catblast01]

Quora?

[joelbluminator]

Ah no I meant technical/developer Q&A of course

[bredren]

Brand is not a moat.

[joelbluminator]

How do you define a moat? For me it's anything that gives a company an advantage over it's competitors. It can be patents, tech, but also brands. Take Coca Cola for example. Now obviously it has a moat right? Where is this moat coming from then? If you think about it it's mostly the brand, not anything to do with taste. Same can be said about different beers or about Nike, Levi's, Apple (arguably) etc etc.

[throwaway894345]

Good question. It might be a difference in degree rather than a difference in kind. Consider the social media space: if you want to build a Twitter clone, you could do so in a pretty short amount of time with a pretty small team. You could buy ads to get everyone to know your product's name. Those ads will bring in enterprising early adopters, but no matter your ad spend or the quality of your platform (you could even include an edit button for pete's sake--and for free at that!), you're very, very unlikely to unseat Twitter. The reason is that Twitter's product isn't its platform or even its brand--the product is the social network i.e., the network of users and the interactions between them. That's moat.

> If you think about it it's mostly the brand, not anything to do with taste. Same can be said about different beers or about Nike, Levi's, Apple (arguably) etc etc.

Brand is king in fashion (and to a lesser extent, low margin consumer products like cola or cereal) because fashion is largely about signaling status. I don't think this effect extrapolates to SO.

[joelbluminator]

I think Twitter is mostly about momentum, everybody is there and people dont want to start over again. A competitor will have the critical problem of having zero users. I am not sure the connections between users matter that much. Not all brands is about status. How can cereal be about status for instance? A lot of the crap we buy and services we use is just habit and acquired behavior. Sometimes status signaling is part of it and sometimes it isnt. Is capncrunch about status lol?