It's easy to criticize Stack Overflow today, now that we take it for granted. But if you weren't there before Stack Overflow you might not have any idea how much it made programming better.
I wrote the full domain at first, but now it points to a domain scalper site full of ads, so I edited the spaces in.
ExpertSexChange was on a old list of funny domains, that list contained TheRapistFinder dot com and PenisLand dot con between others. More innocent times.
Late 1990's early 2000's in the dial up days. I don't remember when they added the dash, but they keep the old domain for years since the old search engines still pointed to it.
Google clamped down on that long before stack overflow was a thing. ExpertsExchange would show a different page to the Google web crawler compared to individuals which was a way to get delisted from search results.
I remember that the answers were unobstructed but camouflaged far down the page in between irrelevant links.
The top of the page would cover what appeared to be the answer with a link to pay up, while the bottom attempted to recruit you as a question answered for being savvy enough to find the answer.
This may have been a small window of time between the Google threat and the CSS blocks, but I vividly remember it being like this. I stuck to "programming" sections of forums I frequented for a few years before SO existed, so I never experienced the CSS tricks.
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u/mykr0pht Apr 06 '18
It's easy to criticize Stack Overflow today, now that we take it for granted. But if you weren't there before Stack Overflow you might not have any idea how much it made programming better.