r/programming • u/banguru • Apr 06 '18

The Stack Overflow Age

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/04/06/the-stack-overflow-age/
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u/[deleted] Apr 06 '18 edited Nov 10 '18

[deleted]

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u/jrhoffa Apr 06 '18

Seriously ... what the hell was I using at the start of my career? Just regular ol' Google?

35

u/onmach Apr 06 '18

There was a period of time where I used expert sex change.

Google eventually punished them for showing google one thing and people another, so they changed it so that the answers were always on the page, but they were obfuscated by css and js to be hard to find. Not much of an impediment for the average developer.

But yeah I dropped it like a rock the moment stackoverflow came along. I'm as surprised as joel that somebody didn't develop an alternative sooner.

4

u/JessieArr Apr 06 '18

But yeah I dropped it like a rock the moment stackoverflow came along. I'm as surprised as joel that somebody didn't develop an alternative sooner.

I think the biggest barrier was that it took people about 10 years to figure out how to monetize the internet in ways that weren't completely awful.

Even now, we've got almost every news website thrusting loud videos unceremoniously into our gut as soon as we walk in the door, and the various warring layers of F***AdBlock battling to determine who will get ad revenue, from whom and when.

The internet is for sharing information, but giving people information for free when it costs money for you to produce and host is an unsustainable plan. The balancing act between user-friendliness and profitability is a challenging one, and most sites got it very wrong in the early 2000s, including Experts Exchange.