[belter]

See my analogy below in this thread about the public park...

What is incomprehensible is developers confusing the value created by the site, with the means of production of said value.

While contributing to the site might provide you with some personal feelings of value, maybe even a rush of altruistic euphoria... :-) An illusory sense of digital sainthood...Your unpaid work directly enhances the value of a platform that profits from selling the collective output, including yours.

This means you’re effectively donating your expertise to a for-profit entity, with no equity or share in its success

[amrocha]

Sure, they made money off my work, I don’t mind that. That’s fine.

Your analogy about the public park is wrong btw. A better analogy is if someone ran a private park for years where musicians can come and collaborate with each other and expertly exchange ideas, and then after 20 years of running the park they sell it and move on with their life.

[nuancebydefault]

The value of unpaid work always goes somewhere.

Many sports clubs work with the help of many volunteers. If they were not available to help for free, the practitioners of the sports would need to pay more. That would mean, only the richer part of the candidates could do the sport. A side effect is as well, that the club itself gets bigger, more famous, and richer as a whole. All thanks to the help of volunteers. There is just no way around that.

In SO/Jeff's case this was beneficial for him in the form of a huge selling price. I would say luckily he was, as I read in the comments, a great contributor to the SO organisation.