jason1178

Once VC money gets involved there has to be a path to monetization somewhere. I don't want to argue the virtue level of the founders because there's no point in it. EE started off as a community and still is a community. The paywall is what it is because EE will not take any more VC money.

SO has swag for top rep earners so it's a distinction without a difference. The original article talked about getting paid for answering and I thought you were reacting to that with your post.

Experts Exchange NEVER paid cash for answers. People answered questions to earn t-shirts or free memberships but never money.

It's an idea that has been discussed for as long as I've been involved with EE and prior but never implemented. It's too complicated given taxes and the international user base to be at all feasible.

Joel,

Not all of us misunderstand where SO is going or your motivations. I've posted as much here:

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/92683/what-experts-e...

The facts are that despite what everyone thinks/hopes, EE isn't going anywhere anytime soon. SO rules the roost for programming but EE covers more than just programming topics and is still doing pretty well and, as a user of both sites, I'm happy both exist.

Also:

"The attitude of many EE contributors"

[citation needed]

"As soon as EE introduced the concept of money they forced everybody to think of their work on EE as just that -- work."

[citation needed]

It's okay Joel. I know you feel the need to demonize EE because it worked in the beginning. Keep up the great work and see you around the web.

JCL

The design changes are nice, but we're also waiting to see how Experts Exchange reconfigures itself to deal with the new Panda rules.

The update was beneficial to Google, not necessarily to its users. A lot of Google properties (Demand Media, anyone?) that are clearly content farms climbed up the rankings while good sites like Stack, DaniWeb, and yes...Experts Exchange got nailed. In DaniWeb's case, she got nailed twice by two different updates.

The problem here is Google is selling the ads and also determining the traffic to the ads. It's too much in one place and ripe for abuse and the abuse seems to be happening

Experts Exchange is not scamming anyone: you, google, whomever. All they did was play Google's game by Google's rules with first-click free and did it better than anyone else for a long time. Now that Google has changed the rules, EE will change too. There's a new site in beta testing and given the Panda restrictions it will almost have to be a freemium model in order to compete.

The only reason Stack remains free is because of the large cash infusions they received from VCs. As soon as they burn through it without coming up with a viable replacement that still allows free access, they will begin charging or they will disappear. One one site makes money from ads and it rhymes with Moogle.