In defense of Experts Exchange
andyada.ms
andyada.ms
I see this argument pattern bizarrely often online. It boggles my mind.
In this case, I'm asking you to consider EE from a different perspective, and whether what they did was worthy of scorn. My hope is that you'll soften your hatred of EE, but I don't expect everyone to come to that conclusion. Not every argument is a total negation of the counter position, I suppose.
Now, I realize that may sound like snark, but I actually mean it on a deeper level than that. Why should I care about their internal motivations? EE chose how they would interact with me. It was their choice. They get to live with the consequences. If they had wanted to be perceived differently, it's incumbent upon EE to decide to treat me differently. It's not my responsibility to try to "understand" them, any more than it is my responsibility to interact with any other company in exactly the way they want. That's freedom, for the both me and EE.
You're equally free to defend them, and I was free to read the defense out of curiosity, which is why I'm posting at all. But the end result is the same; I know EE by their actions, and the result is what it is.
To me, EE is not deserving of the campaign against them. They're not patent trolls - they built a business that added value, and then they applied some spammy marketing to it. Patent trolls deserve to be taken down with a passion. EE, not so much. Thanks again for your comments.
The thing about EE is that it is not gossip. People hate EE and they don't hate it because someone told them to hate it--they already had come to that conclusion on their own. I always hated EE and when I talked to other people about it, I found out they also held the same opinion, many times a fierce hatred of it. There was no campaign to build the hate; the hate was already there, all discovered independently by frustrated coders looking for an answer.
Maybe the evil intentions of EE were not real. But there are moments when I am coding when I want to tear all of my hair out. That emotion is real and won't be forgotten.
Speak for yourself. I think free software is pretty much a net good. It's a shame we're not at a point yet where it's the status quo; I'm glad it is for content.
They didn't, and apparently still don't - so they deserve whatever people think about them. Instead of making excuses, you need to apologize - it's that simple.
If your business model really, really, needs cheating your users - then the ONLY moral way out is to quit, no matter what other good things are there.
>It’s a little known fact that top contributors to EE got VIP treatment. They were flown to different locations around the world, wined & dined, and got lots of cool swag (computers, tablets, etc). When the experts came to visit us in San Luis Obispo, it was all-out fun for them. Experts on Experts Exchange have the potential to get some sweet perks.
Some of that money could've easily gone into improving the UX and adding features to the site which seemed to be stuck in 1999, or failing which, reducing the price of subscriptions. Throwing expensive swag around when there are better places to put it is a bad idea.
The serious point is, it does matter what you as a company do and employees are responsible for that. You made Google searches work worse, you made our lives difficult when we looked for information. You polluted the web.
There's the letter of the law and there's the spirit of the law. EE may have been compliant with the letter of Google's law at the time, but if you'd asked Google and Google users specifically they would've told you it was sleazy/not ok.
Google eventually understood the sleaziness and changed their policy to address this specifically. End users also understood the sleaziness and went elsewhere.
So, yes, what they did is worthy of scorn.
Okay, as a favor to you, I will hate EE 10% less for 24 hours. But I'll still filter their links out of my Web searches, and warn people away from them at every opportunity. The reason? They're unapologetic parasites.
Happy now?
Also, the blog post mentions "I think their public, negative campaign against Experts Exchange was excessive, mean-spirited, and at the very least immature and silly. Admittedly, it worked – they’ve achieved their goal, and “death to EE” became the rallying cry." I don't really get this. Aside some joke-like mentions in the podcast or blog entries, Stack Overflow did not really do anything to harm EE specifically. They were just a better QnA platform and much closer to what users wanted. No one rallied against EE just to kill EE; whatever was done was to build a better QnA system and that succeeded. Experts Exchange is just something users don't want and it never reacted to the presence of Stack Overflow and Stack Overflow eventually ate their lunch in its entirety. Stack Overflow's mission was to become the wikipedia of programming questions, which meant EE-like sites would eventually die should SO becomes successful, but EE was never a specific target of a tactic or anything beyond joke-like verbal attacks. It was, however, a good model of "how not to do things"; something you'd learn from.
Wasted our fucking time: I want to know how to do X, if you want me to pay for that knowledge fine but don't do some shitty thing like cloaking the site so people would get tricked into paying while at the same time gaming Google to get these higher results.
Manipulated people into paying for the site: It's high up on Google so it must have the answer right? OK I guess I'm going to have to pay or else my ass gets fired.
But don't pretend like what EE did was "OK" because some Matt Cutts video said it was. Obviously it was not because it got hit and sank in rankings. SO wasn't what killed EE with it's "negative campaign," it was already well hated before SO came onto the scene.
Good riddance.
At the time of the Matt Cutts video, EE was serving the full content to users who clicked through - the answer was just buried at the bottom of the page. Crummy, sure. Definitely not going to win them many friends. Worth getting so angry over? Not in my mind.
Clearly you disagree, and that's fine. I think your mind is made up and I don't have hopes to change it.
Google doesn't click on the links it shows, your customers do. What google says is "OK" for them, is not always going to be "OK" for your potential customers.
Try giving this recent submission a read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6399494
Also, what does running a company with 50+ employees have to do with making a similar decision? You'd think with more employees you'd be more likely to find the guy that stands up and says "this is fucking retarded what are you thinking"
> At the time of the Matt Cutts video, EE was serving the full content to users who clicked through - the answer was just buried at the bottom of the page. Crummy, sure. Definitely not going to win them many friends. Worth getting so angry over? Not in my mind.
I don't know about you but when I have no idea how to fix a mission critical bug and need a fix ASAP and I search google but all I get is pages and pages of links to your site which "doesn't give me the answer" i get pretty pissed off, especially because you're giving google the answer in order to clutter up all those results pages and rank relevant.
And I say "doesn't give me the answer" because, just so you know, I never knew there was answers at the bottom of the page until jeff pointed it out.
Look, I get it questions and answers are just metrics on a screen to you, but questions and answers to the users are MUCH much more. You broke google, fucking with us when we least needed a fucking with. And to me, that is worth getting angry over.
The very question that is asked is a straw man argument. Nobody is saying that Experts Exchange did some great evil (ex: genocide). What they did was build a business model based on taking from many and giving to nobody. Then to preserve that unsustainable business model, they used various underhanded search engine manipulations.
To me, they were jerks. When Google came out with the ability to filter domains from your personal results, they were the first (and only) domain I added.
Even to this day, they will show you the answer if you scroll through 5 pages of gunk. They didn't do any "great evil". They're just slimy and I get a bad taste in my mouth anytime I think about them. But at least they added that hyphen to their name at some point because for a while I couldn't NOT see it as ExpertSexChange.com.
I'm not sure where you get this. EE treats those answering questions really well, and nobody is forcing them to answer. Nobody forces EE's customers to pay for access to their content, either. Behind the curtain they actually have a lot of happy customers (and question answerers).
They didn't fit the "open source" model programmers like, but for the people who need advanced help with Cisco routers or for the experts winning trips around the world, they're actually not such a slimy company. Thanks for your comments.
From Wikipedia:
At Experts-Exchange, users are awarded points for answering questions
Out of curiosity, what is the exchange rate between Experts Exchange points and reddit karma?
Wikipedia goes on...
Experts (those who have reached 10,000 points overall and maintain at least 3,000 points per month)[15] and subscribers get the benefit of using the site's search engine without limitations and no ads are shown.
What's the hourly rate on this work? Please explain how "EE treast those answering questions really well". Because it seems to me these people are doing work worth in the neighborhood of $100 per hour. You tell me how much they're actually making.
> Please explain how "EE treast those answering questions really well"
If you're a top contributor to EE, you get flown to really nice places and are treated like a VIP by EE. Not everyone reaches this level, but those who do get a really nice perk, in addition to the benefits of answering questions in general.
If I may first pay you a compliment, you are very adept at twisting words and building up straw man arguments.
What I actually said was:
What [Experts Exchange] did was build a business model based on taking from many and giving to nobody
Your response was then:
EE treats those answering questions really well
But we both know this isn't true. It pays the vast, vast, vast majority of question answerers in worthless or near worthless points. The average question answerer, including the ones that get flown places and "treated like a VIP" is probably actually getting less than minimum wage for their work. That's hardly being treated "really well".
So we come back to my original statement. Experts Exchange built their business on taking from many and giving to nobody. If you want me to add an exception of, "giving to nobody except giving scraps to the very top of people whose time they were taking to build their business on" I would be amenable to that.
- EE isn't paying people money for the answers they provide
when
- those persons answering questions are doing so with no expectation of being paid in anything but points.
It's no different than Stack Overflow, but you seem to think otherwise. Just trying to figure out what you're getting at.
You're being consciously or subconsciously obtuse.
With Experts Exchange:
1. People answer questions for free
2. People pay for the answers
3. Google and other search engines are gamed
The only thing that is the "just like Stack Overflow" is #1. The other two items are absolutely nothing like Stack Overflow. As I said, Experts Exchange takes from many and gives to nobody. Stack Exchange takes from many and gives to all. You really can't possibly not see the difference.
How is the Stack Overflow business model any different?
No one at SO gets paid to post. so why should EE pay them to post?
Maybe because EE expects to be paid to share those answers and SO doesn't?
"I have absolutely nothing against Experts-Exchange. Realize that I've been a fan of the smackdown learning model for a long time; it's like kayfabe in professional wrestling. There are no hard feelings; this 'rivalry' is mostly useful as a way to explain what it is we do. This internet is certainly big enough for the both of us -- big enough, in fact, for hundreds of Q&A websites."
There's no conspiracy here. If you're an asshole to everyone and they hate you, it's not because you have powerful enemies engaging in some kind of evil marketing agenda. It's just what happens when you're an asshole to everyone.
If you want to steal users from your competitor, why not name names?
I linked a video of Google's Matt Cutts explaining that EE wasn't violating their guidelines. So their infraction was hiding content below the fold. Hardly an evil infraction, and not worthy of an attempt to sink them as a company.
EE added real value, and their longevity is evidence that some people are willing to pay for that value.
The second one would destroy their business as much as the first though, yeah.
But yes, trying to get paywalled results high in google results is mistreating users (or, rather, mistreating the public at large; most of those people weren't their users (yet, they hope!)).
So is trying to trick people into thinking the results are paywalled when they are not. That's mistreating em too.
Yes, they had a business model that required them to a) get on google results so people would click and visit them, and then b) make those people pay (or _think_ they had to pay) to see what they clicked to see.
Yeah, they didn't arrive at this out of a desire to be evil or mistreat users, they were just people trying to figure out how to make a business like everyone else, sure. But what they ended up with, at one point, was a business that required mistreating the public. shrug.
The problem I had with SE wasn't really the paywall (or fake-out paywall in case of below-the-fold). Well: okay, that was a problem in that once it started, I stopped using them. But I didn't blame them for that by itself - they have to make money. I just felt that the value EE gave me in terms of the quality of its answers didn't justify the money they wanted, so I moved on.
The problem was really the spamming. This is when I took an active dislike to EE - paywall content completely consumed the first page or two of search results to any technical question I searched for on Google. Or link farms that fed into paywalled EE content. That was when I started getting actively annoyed about it - but this was several months after I stopped using it.
I think "mistreating" is perfectly appropriate in this context - because during this window, it actually cost me valuable time to not use EE. Time spent paging through results, clicking on link farms before I realized they were link farms -- time that could have been spent actually working on the solution of my problem of the moment.
I'm not disputing that the CEO did what he thought was necessary. But there's no questoin that he picked wrong, and it's a little disingenuous to claim that the fact the company needed to earn money somehow made his choice more acceptable.
But are you really surprised that their strategy made the public mad? If someone clicks on a google result, that looks like it's going to give them an answer to their question -- only to find that they have to pay to get the answer (whether that's true or whether you've tricked them into thinking that) -- are you truly surprised they would consider that mistreatment? you think it was only a competitor that convinced people to consider that mistreatment?
There's a reason that Google requires that the content shown google -- which ends up in the google results summary/excerpts -- is the same content shown to the public. Because people get really mad and feel mistreated when it's not.
If the content was 'really' there just hidden to make someone think it was paywalled -- maybe that helps you technically get around Google's rules (that's between you and Google), but it obviously won't make people any less mad about it (to the extent it works anyway).
Sure, and a single spam message is a minor nuisance worthy of hitting the delete key. Until you get a sea of 1,000 daily spam messages drowning out the 100 legitimate emails you get per day.
Slimy is slimy regardless of the scale the slime is distributed. Experts Exchange's business model was based on repeated and systematic abuses of people's time. That's worth more than a shrug.
So wait, now that I've read up on these, you're suggesting that it's not treating people poorly to send them spam... because most of them will never see your spam becuase they have effective spam filters?
Wait, why would you want to send something that you know nobody will ever see because of their highly effective spam filters?
jaguar speed -car or pandas -site:wikipedia.org
Tip: You can also exclude results based on other operators, like excluding all results from a specific site.
FROM: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/136861?p=adv_ope...
See how hard that is?
-site:experts-exchange.com
I mean, it's a handy way of refining searches, but I don't want to have to type out my spam filter every time I search...
They had a net negative effect on the world.
My reaction was the same reaction we have when Google tries to foist G+ real-names on Youtube accounts, or when I see Quora's hidden results: "Oh, screw you!" It's not logical, but it's the feeling I (and I'm sure others) feel.
Quora is actually good, in that at least the first answer (usually very good) is usually visible, but as a user it's easy to see why I would want to use StackExchange rather than Experts' Exchange. I see all the answers, and am free to lurk. As a student, I would have been able to learn a lot about best-practices, or why X doesn't work with Y, where before I was stuck in ignorance due to not being able to justify the $ on a membership.
The main reason I turned to Wikipedia and Stack Overflow is not because they rank well on Google, but because they are free sources of information. Moreover, they don't constantly pester me to sign up, log in, or pay them anything. (I actually have an account at SO, but haven't posted anything: I don't feel like an expert on anything enough to write an answer that would actually earn points.)
The best way to learn something is to teach - pick a question that you can't answer and spend some time researching it. Then write it up as if you were explaining it to yourself before you started looking.
You'll come away with both points and more knowledge.
It's competition. Someone makes something people like better and they win, you lose. If at the same time you helped them with intentionally poor UX, well there may be some negative sentiment about that which your competition will undoubtedly capitalize on. That's it though, EE chose their strategy, it failed and failed hard. I don't get what about that is hard to understand?
Any reasonable person not aware of the trick would believe they had to pay for the answer.
Why not pay a computer shop or a programmer 3-4 times the amount for the same thing, only with EE, you can learn how to do it yourself.
I mean would you you rather have a electrician come out and change your light bulb for you, or would you rather learn to do it yourself.
It's part of the (on average) Hacker News identity to hate Experts-Exchange and any resource that exposes itself in search results but requires sign-up to access.
Anyone who tries to discuss something that is opposed to the HN identity is quickly downvoted, they learn from the feedback and damaged karma not to bother and you are left with only comments/commenters that say things they know will get positive feedback/karma.
edit: I'm actually surprised that I got downvoted just for mentioning this, it only serves to reinforce the reality of this ideological position.
'exposes itself' is a great euphemism for gaming the system in order to get a search engine ranking that it couldn't earn on its merits. I remember the first time I ran across EE, it was about fifteen seconds before the time I blocked EE in my google search results.
Hacker News requires a log in, but generally, HN links and discussions don't show up in search results, this is, if I understand correctly, intentional. So my statement was based on the idea that people on HN hate signing up for sites that require login, but which also end up in search results they find, which is why it's OK for HN to require a sign up for discussion, but not for Experts-Exchange.
Then what the hell are you talking about? I am yet to see a reasonable argument in support of their business practices. Please link me to one if I missed it - because I don't think it exists.
The only thing I seem to see repeated is "some googley company did what we did but offered it for free and we have kids to feed so let us do shady things to keep our dated business model afloat and don't hate on us over it!"
A lot of people, including me, have derived extreme value from EE over the years. And anything useful in SO is "closed as not constructive" anyway - so SO basically has 0 utility for me. (I am not saying this is true for everyone)
Most people might wonder: "why?"
It is because ANYTHING I searched on Google resulted into 3 pages of their links, sometimes sorta hidden (ie: sites that republished their links for example), and it resulted in:
When it started, I wasted lots of time visiting their links, seeing the stupid paywall, and getting pissed off with the wasted time.
As I learned to not click on their links, then I clicked on other sites that republished their links.
As I learned to filter those out, I had to expend time looking carefully several pages of google results searching for what I really wanted.
So I hated them, because not only they provided nothing for me (I was not willing to pay for whatever crap they were selling, I never saw a answer on their site, since I never noticed the "below the fold" or whatever that means, thus I still don't have a clue on the quality of whatever was their answers, so to me it was just a scam), they also wasted my time, they made me lose my valuable time working around their shady SEO tricks.
When they were gone from google, and thus made me stop wasting my time, I was really happy.
And if a employee or ex-employee come complain that I want the demise of their employer, all I can say is: "Don't work for people that do evil stuff." (this also apply to anyone working for cigarrete manufacturer, US intel and DoD, US private army contractors, some certain divisions of game publishers, some banks, and so on...)
Blanket statements like "don't work for [entire industry X]" generally make you come off as a little tin-foil-hattish, just FYI. :-)
Not hard to remove a site from search results, Wasting 5 seconds of doing that seems like alot of waste for you to write a 2 minute post on this..
In fact, pretty much any company whose primary asset is content faces a version of this problem.
My take on it? This falls into the category of "3. Come up with a totally new business model":
I've often thought that it would be useful to have a search engine that indexes paid content and then allows users to filter it out.
So, suppose you're searching for the answer to a particularly difficult programming question.
You might start out with the filter on: "Only show me free results."
And then if your search turns up nothing, you might turn the filter off, and maybe you'd discover that for a couple of bucks, you can get access to the answer to your question.
So maybe EE, or some other enterprising company, could build a search engine that fits their monetization model, rather than relying on a bunch of search engines that don't.
How does a paid site compete with something like Stack Exchange? SE has most of the answers. People appreciate finding the answer they needed. Many of them will turn around and pay it forward by answering questions or improving other answers. It's the same reason Wikipedia killed paid encyclopedias.
I think we're now starting to realize the repercussions of this emphasis on free, free, free content online.
Look at newspapers. Nobody wants to pay for news anymore, and consequently, the journalism industry is in shambles. And that's a real shame, because in decades past, a robust metro newspaper used to be one of the best checks and balances against government corruption and slimey business practices.
The model you propose -- freely sharing information so that everyone benefits -- has its merits, but it's no way to make a living, and consequently the pool of contributors gets whittled down to those who can afford to contribute without any expectation of compensation. But what if the person who has the expertise to answer a tough question isn't in that pool?
You're right that some things that were great ways to make a living are starting to become less-so. The answer is to simply to not try to make a living at that thing that is undervalued by the market. If enough providers of that service leave the supply pool, then the value will increase and compel the supply to return.
The market doesn't have an obligation to support journalists ... if no one wants to pay them because they can get information on twitter, reddit, and facebook ... well, that's how it is :)
Shame on me for not assuming this would happen when I signed up, but shame on EE for implementing this scammy business practice in the first place. What percent of EE’s revenue model came from unwitting free trial memberships that rolled over into “VIP” memberships?
Gods, how I wish I had enough karma to downvote on HN...
Although, you're right, at the end of the day any company that is taking credit card information up front like that is probably doing this.
How many months do you think debaserab2 suscribed to the service? My guess is either 1 or 0 if he managed to reverse the charges. Yet he hated EE for years after that.
EE failed because they had tons of little annoying practices like this that made it grow in the minds of their tech savvy customer as a company to hate and not a company to love.
SO solved this problem by making it free. You could ask questions for free as well. I don't know if SO tries to game google, but their answers are pretty close to the top results most of the time. I don't mind, because they are usually relevant.
SO ate EE's lunch on the SEO front, to be sure. And I agree with Google that SO offers better experience for searchers, so I'm glad they're winning that battle.
Deliberately designed to be annoying? Yes.
Worthy of scorn? I think so.
This makes it sound like EE resorted in gray hat SEO at least in part as a response to SO. A quick Googling found they were doing this from at least 2006 [1]
[1] http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=11974
They had a business model that was never great, but worked okay until someone came along with a better one. At which point they messily exploded because nobody (with the exception of a few employees and top contributors) actually liked them. They kept popping up in google results, but when they clicked on them it never actually solved your problem. Their web design was annoying, the cloaking was frustrating, and the actual content was often terrible. It often read like a transcript of a tier 1 tech support call that had been conducted in another language then translated into yours via google translate, and it was rife with errors or the classic "I have a problem with X...nevermind, I fixed it!", which is the sort of thing which fills everyone who finds it later because they're having the same problem with RAGE. Did our friendly sexchange experts deserve that rage? Not really, but it was their fault. EE was setup such that the average user saw tons of poor quality answers; SO was setup such that the average user saw good quality answers. Ultimately that comes right back to the door of the devs and designers.
I'd sum the blog post up as "Hey, Experts Exchange was annoying, mostly useless, and vaguely scummy, but it was staffed with good people doing the best they could, and it wasn't outright evil!" And he's right. Evil is a high bar; EE never even approached it.
What they were was incompetent. And SO called them out on it, and Andy is hurt by it. He has every right to be, but it doesn't change the fact that EE was is effectively gone, and deservedly so. And 99.99% of the people who ever tried to use EE will be pleased.
That being said, when a person is looking for advice on how to fix a problem, they are probably frustrated, stressed, or both.
So imagine going to Google for help to see a really promising link appear in the results (not in the advertising section), and the content is hidden behind a pay-wall. Almost like seeing an oasis in the desert only to realize it is a mirage.
I don't know about other users, but I'd rather not see a link. From my perspective, all EE did was make Google less effective.
Some might say that "there is no such thing as pad publicity." I would argue that isn't true at all. The above describes my first and only reaction to hearing about EE. And due to not being able to see the content, I lack any personal positive stories on the matter.
Seeing EE answers gumming up the search results (especially if you didn't know the trick) was at least an order of magnitude more frustrating.
I'm glad EE treated its employees well, but the way a company treats its employees can be completely unrelated to the way a company treats its competitors, or its potential or actual employee base. And it seems pretty clear that EE treated its potential customer base so poorly that Stack Overflow was able to tap into latent frustration and anger and quickly corner the market on community technical Q&A. The hatred for EE grew up organically, and I doubt Joel's campaign did much more than giving direction and a voice to pre-existing resentment.
A reasonable person should be able to separate the two, and so it's nice to hear more about the people behind the website. But that doesn't make the user experience on the website any better than it is on StackOverflow, and it is unlikely to change the fact that most folks memory of experts-exchange.com before StackOverflow existed is one of disappointment and deception, which is why it was so effective for Jeff and Joel to rally users around the notion of being the anti-experts-exchange. (I think they themselves made a distinction between the site and the people behind it at least once, and talked about having a conversation with an experts exchange employee or two. And it's worth remembering that that was only one of the few ways they desscribed their vision: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/04/introducing-stackov...)
So if you want to humanize your friends, keep writing about them, and I'm sure you'll get readers. It sounds like an interesting story. But it seems mistaken to expect that alone to counteract people's impression of the site itself. If you want to hear people say nicer things about experts-exchange, either listen to the folks who are happily using it and ignore the hate, or genuinely listen to complaints, find a way to make more people happy.
However, in practice, I only ever asked one question (they gave a free $50 credit at launch, worth 5 questions or something). I got a great answer - I think better, and more insightful than I'd get on SO. But it was a horrific experience, and I never used it again after that.
I guess, in the bigger picture, they were trying to monetize people's goodwill in helping each other. Helping feels more valuable when done purely out of goodwill; money can devalue. Not sure how big that factors in their failure - but to the extent it created a competitor, it's a real factor. Your customers disliking you is serious business problem.
Although it's the way of the world, there's something hollow and unsatisfying about being motivated primarily by money. Most entrepreneurs - e.g. Elon Musk - have visions bigger than themselves and their riches. Many of the best developers, like many academics, believe everything should be free, or at cost.
I'm inclined to think the above is the root problem, and the SEO tactics etc are just a symptom. But hard to say.
But specifically, I couldn't log back into my account to mark the answer as correct. The help people gave me a new password a couple of times, but they didn't work. I eventually realized it was hopeless, and gave up. Later, I tried again to find the question and reward the person (this time paying out of my own pocket), but couldn't find it after intensive searching, many keywords etc. It seems that my question and the answers had been lost.
I feel that the initial problem was to do with money being involved - additional security around logging in, because mistakes with money are so serious. Maybe combined with teething troubles. It was very very strange and bizarre.
In contrast, I haven't had such problems with StackOverflow (or reddit or HN etc), so other purchases online.
I still feel bad about this, after 10 years. :(
I'd been stuck, and pretty much given up. A friend wondered if there was someone I could ask - but it was virgin territory, no one had done it before, and so no one would know. I only tried EE because what the hell. I didn't get a specific answer, but "X does that - why don't you see how X does it?" This was a clever, insightful, lateral point of view. I didn't think I'd be able to use X's technique - but amazingly, it turned out I could! The suggestion might seem obvious in hindsight, but it wasn't to me. It was just what I needed to hear - a great answer.
I'd describe this as "micro-consultation" or "micro-mentoring", which differs from SO's aim of specific concrete answers to specific concrete questions. I think the money-motivation of EE helped encourage someone to spend a few moments creative thought on my question. It's the kind of insight you get from having many contributors to an open-source project - but who's going to bother, for the case where only one person benefits?
So... I do think this kind of service, sort of halfway between SO and full-on consultancy, is valuable and has a role - but micro, like Amazon's mechanical turk. I think Google Answers tried this (now defunct). A little bit like that logo design site SO used (http://99designs.com.au/logo-design/contests/logo-stackoverf...) - a sort of eBay for consultancy, but a micro version.
Because consultancy is very question-specific, they'd be almost no question reuse (unlike SO), which also fits with a money motive (i.e. people love karma/fame; but if not available, fortune is OK). So I'm suggesting a micro-consultancy facilitation site, where the asker pays the answerer and EE takes a wee percentage (a similar amount to crowd-sourcing sites). A different niche from SO.
Maybe I should try EE again next time I'm stuck!
I've been filtering all Experts Exchange content from browsing results for years now, and as time goes by, the justification only gets stronger.
This is definitely not true anymore (the handful of jobs part).
Shameless plug: I work in SLO for Mindbody and we're hiring. https://www.mindbodyonline.com/company/careers