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Comment by Flimm | Hacker News Reader

I don't think you are giving Stack Overflow's leaders enough credit. There were many Q&A sites before it, but Stack Overflow was much better for the lurkers, and all of that content is licensed under Creative Commons, similar to Wikipedia.

Also, Jeff is not trying to take credit for the users' hard work, I'm a contributor and I don't feel that way, especially after reading this part:

> I am honored and humbled by the public utility that Stack Overflow has unlocked for a whole generation of programmers. But I didn't do that.

> You did, when you contributed a well researched question to Stack Overflow.

> You did, when you contributed a succinct and clear answer to Stack Overflow.

> You did, when you edited a question or answer on Stack Overflow to make it better.

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> and all of that content is licensed under Creative Commons

it's CA-BY-SA IIRC. In other words if you copied and pasted a snippet from SO you now need to open source your project (the SA part of CC-BY-SA). I'm surprised someone hasn't written some ransomware that scans SO for snippets and compares them to github and starts sending out the "pay up" notices.

If that makes a substantial part of the project. Of course, the meaning of that is likely to be decided by courts...but if your project literally consists of 50% recycled SO content, it might suffer from worse issues. #understatement

Last time I went through some sort of acquisition process, the purchaser had some third party look at the source code looking for stuff as you described to be corrected and this was at least five years ago.

Stack overflow was instrumental in my early programming career, because without it I would have had to read entire volumes of information to solve simple problems in some cases.

The issue that I have is the attempt to pretend to have guided the course more than was the case. SO was a Q&A with a tremendous UX, and the users used it to help each other. That’s it.

Even this nonsense of “gamification” is just ego-driven marketecture. Up and down voting has been a staple of the Internet for a long time. Voting up an answer is not gamifying it. The only thing even remotely game like about SO is that each question can have just one selected “corrct” answer... which is also basically the case on most Q&A sites, including yahoo answers.

Also, the extent to which Jeff and Joel attempted to curate this process is the exact extent to which the process tended to get in our way; deleting questions because they are “off-topic”, even though hundreds of people up vote them and want to know the answer, etc.

These are the decisions that ruined SO for manny developers.

> The only thing even remotely game like about SO is that each question can have just one selected “corrct” answer

Are you kidding me? Have you never seen the wall of badges?

"[All SO had was] tremendous UX" - that's no small feat. Remember expertsexchange et al? And the data-cloaking tricks? "Pay up or no answer for you"? shudder Those were dark times...dark times.

Perhaps SO is not the knight in shining armor, as it may have seemed then, but it certainly helped change the landscape for the better.

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