I think it might have been a joke. If I’m not wrong experts exchange was the go to site before SO because the replacement. So giving SE as the answer as an alternative is kind of funny. Maybe I’m killing the joke but hey.

This was probably _the_ QA site for development/IT questions prior to SO. It used to be completely open and I really enjoyed helping out answering questions on the site. It felt like a focussed newsgroup that was super accessible.

But then they got scammy with hiding answers to users (but allowing googlebot to index) and paywalling... and that's why when Joel announced he was working on SO, I was super keen. Was one of the first few hundred users and it was exactly the anti-EE stance that appealed.

Fuck ExpertSexChange and the horse they rode in on.

EDIT: Jeff, rather... I followed both Joel and Jeff at the time, but think it was Jeff's posts that hooked me. https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/