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by andy_adams 4666 days ago
I'm sure this won't get me any love, but I worked at Experts-Exchange at one point, and it's not the horrible place SO and Jeff Atwood have painted it as.

Spammy marketing tactics? Sure. Is SO better? Absolutely. But in the process of building SO, Jeff and company have basically trashed EE's name, and after seeing EE from the inside I'm one of the rare few who don't think EE is evil incorporated.
3 comments
qu4z-2 4666 days ago
Eh, I hated EE long before I came across SO or heard of Jeff Atwood. My experience of it was basically just an annoying minigame in Google where you had to remember not to click certain results no matter how useful they sounded.
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ianstallings 4666 days ago
When it first arrived on the scene it was much like quora is now and I loved that. But then they started trying to trick people into signing up, etc. It just went from awesome to dagnabbit quickly. So when there was one place to find a bunch of other programmers that popped up, I jumped on it.
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andy_adams 4665 days ago
EE's business model was built in the early days of the internet, and before SO came around they had lots of paying customers. "Tricking people to sign up" was really just their attempt at monetizing content. It clearly did not pan out to be the best long-term strategy, but when you already have thousands of paying customers, it gets pretty difficult to "open up" to the general public vs. a company like SO which started open and monetized in other ways (Careers).
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InclinedPlane 4665 days ago
It's not necessary to be evil in your heart to nevertheless do things that are evil or have very negative consequences. EE was classic bait and switch. Moreover, they monetized cloud sourced answers without adding anything of value to the equation (compare this to stackexchange which put a lot of R&D into a system that facilitated better quality answers and also goes out of their way to keep their content open). Certainly that's not the worst crime anyone has ever committed but it's very scummy and has had a very real negative impact on a lot of people's lives. Thinking that the solution to your problem is available when it's not or finding out that it's behind a paywall (without even knowing if the "answer" actually works) is very disheartening.
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andy_adams 4665 days ago
Sorry, but this characterization is plain wrong. The experts on EE got VIP treatment when I was there, and they were getting good consulting work as a result of their answers.

EE also had teams working on improving the question/answer experience long before SO came around. I'd agree that SO is better now, but to say "no value added" is applying a blanket statement that isn't true.

EE's business model ended up losing out in the long term, but that's all that really happened. The characterizations and generalizations made about EE are pretty silly when you take a hard look at it.

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cstrat 4665 days ago
To be honest, I really enjoyed EE. I answered enough questions to earn VIP and even had shirts and things sent to me.

However I ended up letting my experience lapse, and I lost my VIP status and from then on I was bummed. If you aren't a VIP I couldn't imagine ever paying to see the answers.

If you were a VIP then the experience on EE was similar to SO.

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