Quora seemed like the Silicon Valley solution to this problem with too much focus on monetization ahead of establishing a truly great experience. Looking at Crunchbase they had $226M funding compared to Stack Overflow's $68M. I know it's more complicated than those numbers, but I feel like that funding is squandered on Quora.
I think that pretty much sums up how I feel about Silicon Valley and what it's come to stand for. Earlier, it was about building something cool that people used (and make a good living doing it). Then some of those cool things ended up making so much money, that now it's not about making creating, it's about making money.
The same thing happened with the mobile app stores. First it was about people making cool stuff that was useful, and then a few stories came out about how insanely lucrative some apps ended up being, and everyone wanted to make the next app and get rich.
Since this seems to be a natural emergent phenomenon with how our culture and technology interact, I guess I'm just hoping that somewhere along the lifecycle of the phenomenon it settles into a more sane paradigm where everyone isn't constantly on step X of what is essentially a get rich quick scheme.
Reddit also has the gilding system for making extra cash for when ads aren't enough.