StackExchange reaches 16 million users, 131% growth | Hacker News Reader

StackExchange reaches 16 million users, 131% growth

blog.stackoverflow.com

59 pointsgecko11 comments

The StackExchange team did an exemplary job of pivoting the SE model[1] and I think they've seen the success they have today because of that action. Had they not pivoted, I think SE would have been associated with a lot of low traffic, and bad Q/A websites.

Initially with SE you had to pay to setup your own SE site. As mentioned in the post, they found that the sites were doing poorly without the critical mass of people to answer questions. Creating Area 51 helped them objectively measure topic interest, and allowed users to determine whether the site had legs or not, and thusly validate whether the site was worth creating. Had they not done this, I don't think we'd be reading about such success today.

[1]: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/05/migration-of-se-1-0-si...

They had the guts to say "this isn't working, we're going to throw it away and start over". That was crucial.

I really wish they hadn't balkanized into a billion sub-sites. I need to ask a question about compiling a 32-bit library on a 64-bit system, so it'll work with XAMPP's 32-bit Apache compile. Do I go to one of the web-dev ones? One of the sysadmin sites? Is there one for compilers?

There are of-course grey areas, but the key is the community. They don't optimize it for "where do I ask the question?". You could probably ask it in Yahoo answers or Mahalo then, that pretend to answer it all in one place. Or Quora.

The key is to create a community of people with common interest, where there is enough interest (Area 51) and have them connected. Getting answers is a side effect. They have nailed this part and you have to give it to them.

For what it is worth, questions that doesn't belong in a site are automatically, and generally quickly moved.

They handle this well with their migration process. It's still being tweaked, but it's not as if nobody has thought of or encountered the problem you mention. They're adaptive.

I believe it says they grew to 16 million VISITORS not users? Did I miss something?

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/15991/how-many-users...

This says that last August they had around 86K users, so by now they should have around 100K. The huge visitor to user ratio is a sign of their success, I think. (I'm assuming SO represents most of their traffic)

Edit: Wikipedia page says: "As of September 2010, Stack Overflow has about 243,000 registered users"

That SO answer was posted on Aug '09. So it wasn't last August.

Yep, my bad. So they went from ~86K in August 2009 to ~250K in September 2010. That's impressive! I didn't realize SO had that many members.

Maybe just people forgetting which OpenID login they used.

While I'm not fond of the numerous sub niche sites they open, StackOverflow is an excellent resource and has saved me a considerable amount of time when waiting for an answer on freenode.

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