[InclinedPlane]

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.

[andy_adams]

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.

[cstrat]

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.