<story><title>A Stack Overflow user&apos;s reply to Experts Exchange blogpost</title><url>http://blog.williamhilsum.com/2011/02/response-to-experts-exchange-blog-post.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>redler</author><text>With all the interest currently focused on Q&amp;#38;A sites, Experts Exchange actually presents an interesting turnaround opportunity. Despite the last few years of squandering goodwill with their deceptive solution to the findability/paywall paradox, they are still one of the longtime residents of the space, and they still have a massive -- albeit creaky -- corpus of questions and answers. They should hire a strong UX/UI team and do a clean-sheet redesign: new logo, new zen-like appearance without all the noisy clutter, logos, UI &quot;junk&quot;, fake blurred out answers with &quot;sign up now!&quot;, etc. They should set up a strong information design and analysis team to mine that huge corpus for opportunities to segment their product into paid and free components -- and then update the business model to a legitimate &quot;freemium&quot; approach.&lt;p&gt;I realize this is all easier said than done, but it does seem like there must be real value under the barnacles. Every time someone scrolls down past screen after screen of ads and blurred answers and has their &quot;I see what you did there&quot; moment, goodwill is squandered and the community impression of deception and spamminess builds.</text></comment>
<story><title>A Stack Overflow user&apos;s reply to Experts Exchange blogpost</title><url>http://blog.williamhilsum.com/2011/02/response-to-experts-exchange-blog-post.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cletus</author><text>There are lots of lessons here. Basically EE acted with hubris because they saw themselves as the only game in town. SO came along and quickly dethroned them in the programming arena (EE has a somewhat broader base than that).&lt;p&gt;Charging people for user-generated content is a shortsighted and doomed business model. What&apos;s more it&apos;s sleazy. I&apos;m reminded of the whole CDDB/Gracenote fiasco from years ago.&lt;p&gt;Chris Dixon wrote a great blog post about this [1].&lt;p&gt;EE in this context (or the &quot;evil hyphen site&quot; as Joel calls it) is acting as an extractor. They&apos;re simply putting up a barrier and charging a toll.&lt;p&gt;Compare this to companies like Dropbox and Evernote. These companies provide pretty amazing services (particularly Dropbox) for free. I&apos;ve seen many people say they pay for Dropbox not because they need the space but because they want to give them money for their amazing services. These companies are builders.&lt;p&gt;And let&apos;s not forget that EE earned a lot of bad will by once being free like SO and switching to this hideous pseud-paywall monstrosity. Treat your users like crap and they go elsewhere. Quelle surprise.&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;http://cdixon.org/2010/06/19/builders-and-extractors/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://cdixon.org/2010/06/19/builders-and-extractors/&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>