[gmisra]

One of the most beautiful things about the internet is that it enables platforms for individuals to create value and then receive no share of that value.

We see much lamenting about lack of innovation in "business plans" around here, and yet we have an historic opportunity to examine the relationship between value creation and compensation. Why is the Etsy IPO plan so exceptional? Why do so menu community members of instagram, reddit, etc end-up feeling betrayed by the services they helped create?

[bduerst]

Or Stackoverflow? They are monetizing free support from thousands of developers, and it's arguably made the internet a better place.

[ddingus]

Yes, it has.

However, it's a bit more subtle than that. Yes, Stackoverflow is making some money, but everyone who contributes gets a few things out of it too:

1. They get the use value of the overall result. This is a non-trivial value. Linux operates under similar dynamics. A lot of "free" code was written, and it was written to improve on the use value in the body of code they found at the time.

Anyone finding Stackoverflow sees a lot of use value and they may well see improving on it in a similar way.

2. Reputation. I like to think of this as "feed the net and the net feeds you." Back in the USENET days, I was very highly active on SGI computers. Sometimes I wondered about the overall value of that. Then I got stuck on some painful Oracle installation issue. All I had to do was ask, and within an hour I got a nice script mailed to me along with a thanks for all the filesystem / disk questions I sorted out for people. (thanks Jerry)

Given the dollars in play at the time, that script was worth a ton!

3. Network, similar to reputation. My many interactions on the net has often resulted in knowing people who I could help or get help from or start projects with.

Clearly, this all must be balanced and weighed by everyone involved. People who do too much might seem over exploited or suffer opportunity costs of various kinds. And we all see what is worth what a little differently too.

But, it's not exactly free. There is value exchanged and accumulated. Making sure that happens is worth something. Maybe it's worth about what Stackoverflow is taking in.

USENET worked, until it didn't. And when it didn't, it all went down hard. Huge value lost. Maybe that won't happen this time, and frankly I think that's worth a profit to somebody because the use value is high enough to be painful should it go missing.

[jewel]

Also it's important to remember that all user content posted on Stackoverflow is licensed under CC-by-SA, so if Stackoverflow started going south, someone else can fork the data and continue hosting it.

The data dumps are hosted at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

[ddingus]

I didn't realize that. Awesome.

[pjc50]

Stackoverflow is a great MMORPG, and you don't even have to pay money to play it. It's also a great source of example questions to learn from in answering.

[chaostheory]

yes especially when you know that there could have been worse companies like experts exchange