Sorry about that. We actually don't have a canned response for people who cancel their membership if they specifically state they prefer Stack Overflow. That was a new customer service representative being a little overzealous.

We wish Stack Overflow nothing but the best of luck going forward. We think the Internet is big enough for many players in the Q&A space and you guys are doing a great job in yours. Keep up the great work.

To address some of the other stuff above:

1. We don't hate you, nor are we spending a lot of time "talking trash" (one blog post, sheesh people). Certainly, the comparative levels of hate from your user base towards ours far exceeds what, if anything, "trashy" has been directed from us to you. Also, a quick trawl of the history of Stack Overflow blogs reveals a fair amount of anti-Experts-Exchange posts, but let's not turn this into a "but Moooooooom, he called me a bad name first" thing.

2. Experts-Exchange has never been "wildly profitable". Enough money is made to keep the lights on, the servers running, the bandwidth flowing, and the employees paid. No one is lighting cigars with hundred dollar bills and taking baths in caviar. We're still making money, still hiring, and still here and plan to be so for quite some time.

Thanks, and enjoy your discussion.

Jason C. Levine aka WhackAMod /
Experts-Exchange Site Administrator

As Experts-Exchange's resident historian, I'd like to put our story in context, introduce some of the human beings referenced, and put things in an accurate sequence:

Experts Exchange was developed in 1996 by Clint Staley, a California Polytechnic State University ^[1], computer science professor in San Luis Obispo ^[2], California, along with his former student, Matt Wormley (who went on to author the editable type tools used in Adobe Photoshop) as a departmental pet project. They envisioned a better system than Usenet ^[3] by inventing Q&A mechanics like points, rewards based on difficulty, accepted solutions, ranks, etc. that would help educate both asker and answerer. These basic concepts are still in use by most Q&A services today.

Experts-Exchange originally launched as a free service (and remained so for eight years), but it took 2-3 years for the site to reach critical mass. California Polytechnic State University computer science students participated as the first Experts-Exchange's original experts, developing programming skills while answering questions. Dan Gardner was brought on as the business mind and several folks were hired. I was hired as employee number five. Austin Miller (the future owner referred to in Jeff Atwood's post ^[4] and a former Apple VP) was brought in to mange operations in 1998-99.

Those were exciting times. We obtained 5.5 million dollars of VC funding from JP Morgan and built a small and talented staff in San Luis Obispo. The VC money came with a catch. Most start-ups at that time were unprepared without the VC lessons we take for granted today, and (of course) we gave JP Morgan a 51% interest in the company. Within months, they opened an enormous office in San Mateo ^[5], California, and filled it with sixty additional employees along with brand name executives from Electronic Arts, NASA, etc. James Gosling ^[6] served on our board. We inked deals to provide internal Q&A installations to companies like Oracle and Sun Microsystems. External instances were sold to clients like Alta Vista. Experts-Exchange's member base and traffic were growing exponentially. We kicked serious ass and slept on cash pillows. The sky was the limit.

But less than a year later the honeymoon ended. The founding office in San Luis Obispo became increasingly irate with the lack of output from our San Francisco Bay Area peeps. We also disagreed with the company's direction. After a few months of conflict and whistle blowing, we arrived to work one morning and were greeted by a security guard who escorted us into the office to collect our belongings. We were then instructed to meet at a local hotel conference room to discuss next steps in front of a long table headed by our new executives. They flew down and laid us off in an effort to save face to our investors. Our labor of love had ended. Or so it seemed...

Eight months later, the exorbitant burn rate for the San Mateo offices/salaries exceeded what was in the bank. The dot-com era was coming to a close in early 2001. Cash was running out. There were no second round VC suitors. The San Mateo team rushed a shoddily built Java version of the site which experienced days/weeks of downtime. The expert community was in revolt. The company plunged into chaos. It looked like the beginning of the end of Experts-Exchange.

Then ironically, JP Morgan then decided to hire some of the original team as contractors (myself included) to keep the site afloat so they could either sell or liquidate Experts-Exchange's assets. We were unemployed, gaining weight, and still living off severance packages, so we shamelessly took the work and drove to San Mateo with a U-Haul to collect computer equipment, assuming the office was already empty. As we walked in at 8:00 a.m., we watched the CEO walk out. It turned out the executives never told the staff what was happening. They simply left. We were then tasked to lay off sixty people - the same folks who'd laid us off only months before. You can't make this stuff up.

By late 2001 Randy Redberg (Experts-Exchange's current owner) and Austin Miller purchased the site. By late 2002 we rewrote the code base. Uptime was steadily improving. Most of our competitors became part of the dot-com dead pool. But co-location costs, staff costs, and ad revenue alone couldn't keep the lights on. After a lot of experimentation (think of New York Times' pay permutations, only years before) nothing really worked (like New York Times), so Randy went with the controversial decision to go with paid subscription. We really had no choice. We could either offer paid subscriptions or close the shop.

Some of our community didn't want to shift to a revenue model (imagine if Stack Exchange went from free to paid, the sentiment expressed in Jeff Atwood's post) and we experienced a lot of turnover with both members and community volunteers. But after the dust settled, the thousands of members, experts, and volunteers that hung around laid the foundation for what we have today. In fact - after the dot-com bomb, with no corporate entity to speak of, our community volunteers and experts self-organized, built their own offsite tools (with no API) and essentially kept Experts-Exchange alive. After that Randy led the company to profitability after nine years in 2004. Since then, we've had the resources to maintain an ongoing service that's stable for our community and staff.

Experts-Exchange is still a labor of love. We have a great story. We're proud of where we come from. We're proud of how we got here. Now we're going to talk about it. A lot. Paid does not equal evil. A business model does not mean we're bad folks.

We're happy to continue this conversation wherever/whenever.

If this is recent and legit (no offense), then it's a bit shocking to see how EE just fundamentally do not know their competition.

While Experts Exchange offers expertise on any aspect of technology, Stack Overflow has a much narrower field of attention, focused only on issues related to programming.

Technically correct, but the Stack Exchange network has so many other technology sites that I have a hard time keeping up with them all.

Stack Overflow is collaboratively edited, which means that others can edit your work on their site. Though Experts Exchange is a moderated forum, your work will never be edited by other users of our site.

This one is 100% true, and I've seen a handful of complaints about it on Meta. I think the vast majority of SO users prefer collaborative editing, but it's even in the FAQ ^[1] that it's not for everybody, so they do have a valid point here.

Stack Overflow and Experts Exchange use different systems to select an answer. On Stack Overflow, the community votes for the best answer; on Experts Exchange, the person who asked the question is prompted to choose the most complete solution. While both methods have their plusses and minuses, we think your best chance of getting the right answer is having the asker tell you “yeah, this worked for me.”

Stack Overflow has had this from the beginning.

The way our accounts are created ensures that our users are kept up to date on the status of their questions. Experts Exchange users are informed of possible solutions to their problems by email, so they don’t have to keep checking the site for updates.

This option is in your profile on the prefs tab.

It sounds like they've gotten a few questions related to this and set up a standard reply to people asking about it.

I don't begrudge their points (Bill pointed out why most of them are irrelevant). They're right about the collaborative editing, but we consider this a strength of our system. MSN Encarta probably said the same thing about Wikipedia. "You can't trust any old yahoo on the Internet for your research. Our system is better!" -- and depending on the context, they could be correct.

In the end, I think the Internet is the true judge of the merits of each system:

Postscript: Note that even though Panda ^[1] hit our site according to Alexa ^[2], our Google Analytics statistics show very little drop in stackoverflow.com traffic (not the case for serverfault.com). Also, you can see from this chart that our traffic rank barely budged (even with Alexa's perceived fall in Daily Reach).

[Disclaimer: I'm one of Jason's fellow admins; feel free to edit the signature if it's appropriate to do so.]

@Randolf Richardson: Jeff Atwood has been calling SO the "anti-Experts-Exchange" for as long as SO has been around.

@Bill The Lizard: EE probably knows as much about SO as SO knows about EE. A customer service rep who has been on the job for about a week does NOT know much about SO. If you want to rip her about it, that's fine -- but there are a lot of assumptions made and repeated about EE that show the same kind of ignorance. We're just not going to engage in what Mr Spolsky referred to recently as "Well, Actually".

@Michael Pryor: The Alexa charts notwithstanding, I think a lot of what they show is that there are a lot of people who are willing to accept something that doesn't cost them anything == hardly a surprising revelation. One of the significant differences between EE and SO is that EE is, as Jason noted, an ongoing profitable business; everyone pays, either by answering a couple of questions a month or by doing what he and I do (voluntarily) or with a credit card -- but everyone pays. SO has chosen to forego the issue of generating revenue and instead gone the VC route; EE did that in the last century, and only time will tell if it works out any better for SO.

I don't pretend to think EE is "better" because it pays its bills on revenue it generates from the people who actually use the site. I do think it's a lot more honest than saying SO is "free"; someone wrote a check that is being used to pay for rent, salaries, equipment costs, donuts and bandwidth. I think the fact that EE has been doing what it does for 15 years during which time the site (not the company) has been managed by volunteers who rely on a minimal set of guidelines speaks for itself in terms of the strength of its foundation. And, like you, I'm not convinced Alexa's numbers are any more valid for SO than they are for EE -- but I'm not an SEO expert by any stretch.

I agree except the data is open source. If EE dies, the data is gone, especially if the past happens again.

My friend and colleague Mr Barbir referred to a period of time when the community built its own tools to manage the site.

One of those tools allowed us to download the entire Q&A database as it existed at the time -- before Mr Redberg and Mr Miller purchased the site. We were fully prepared to reverse-engineer it, host it, and continue to manage it. EE won't go anywhere; the community won't let it. One hopes that SO doesn't have to find out the hard way if its membership is as loyal.

Jeff -- congratulations on finding COBOLdinosaur's site ^[1]. He left the site when he decided he could not live up to the demands of the systems he insisted EE create (specifically, what EE calls the Zone Advisor program). Whether his allegations of greediness, obfuscation and/or deliberate falsification, and unknown parentage on the part of Mr Miller are accurate or not isn't really relevant; simply put, Cd& couldn't cope with what was a brave new world.

However, despite his account of the history ^[2] he was not one of two people "asked to form" the EAB; there were six members, three of whom are still regularly active (Mr Waldron isn't one of them). Mr Miller wanted a sounding board; instead he got a gaggle of idea people. He can be faulted for being more of a marketing person than a techie, for making promises he couldn't keep, and for not understanding the amount of time and resources it would take to fix the problems Mr Barbir described.

To their credit, Mr Redberg and Mr Barbir have taken a poorly conceived and badly executed idea and turned it into an reliable and meaningful system for managing our "labor of love" that involves the membership at virtually every level. However, that EE doesn't have to worry about how it's going to pay its bills shouldn't be a reason to envy -- and therefore vilify -- it so much.

Eric Peterson (aka Netminder / EE Site Administrator)

Some fascinating bits of Experts-Exchange history I stumbled upon today:

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Web_Development/Miscellaneous/Q_21227030.html

The codebase for the site started out in the late Summer of 2000. The whole site was converted from a mix of static page, perl, and a patchwork of pieces. Everything was converted to JAVA and Oracle databases, by a bunch of contractors hired by the former owners who managed to blow 5 million dollars in venture capital on the project.

In November 2000 a group of us beta tested it... we told them flat out it did not work. It was full of problems and was no where read to go in. However they were just about out of money so they put it in anyway.

---

In November, 2001 Austin Miller and Randy Redberg bought the site out of bankruptcy. They hired Ken Bell, who set about getting experts back on the site by spending time out on the alternate sites discussing it with us. Austin promised to fix the site, and give the experts input into what was going on.

In January 2002 Austin asked Dennis Waldron and I to form and Experts' Advisory Board; which we did. Jansuper and Brian were brought in as site engineers to fix the site. That is one of the really amazing parts of this. The two of them completely re-built the codebase. What we have today is that codebase extended and enhance; and they did it on the fly. Plus they were willing to work for a fraction of the going rates because they believed in the site; just like those of us who stuck it out and kept this site from dying.

By Novenmber 2003, we were ready to switch to the new format of generating everything from the database and return HTML pages (primitive then compared to the way it is done today). That was necessary so that Google could fully index the site. That was the big boost that the site need in less than a month we went a 10000th rating on Alexa to the top 1000 and we have been there ever since; and in our market(tech help/support) we are the number one.

http://www.expertsrt.net/main/forum/action,printpage/topic,1033.0/

I am fairly active on EE.... I recently spent some time looking through some old dialog in some of COBOLDinosaurs later postings and "conversations" with the mods..which eventually led me here out of curiosity....My question is simple, whilst I am taking no sides at all, I wonder exactly what the issue is with people firing up at EE?

---

Everyone who has left did so for various personal reasons. I left quite simply because the owner of the site is a lying greedy son of a bitch.

When he bought the site out of bankruptcy [ed: Nov 2001] he asked me to form an Experts Advisory Board to help him get the site back up. In exchange for that he made promises and commitments about the treatment of experts which he did not keep. He made promises about the quality of the free version of the site that he did not keep. He screwed Ken Bell, the guy who put together the Google connection that gave us the traffic we needed. He lied to the Board, the experts, the community, and the paid members.

When the Board refused to endorse unlimited points for paid premium, he terminated the relationship, but did not let the Community know until two months later, tht they no longer had any representation.

The reason I stopped being an "Expert" on Experts-Exchange is because of the pay wall. I hated it when my own answers could not be viewed by other persons; these were answers I gave to the community for free. I hated it when I walked into a wall after not answering questions for a mere two months.

But most of all I hated the company subscriptions that overloaded the site with clueless developers asking questions without any research, and expecting an answer because they paid for it. There are a lot of such ill-researched, ill-written questions on Stack Overflow as well, but I can at least edit or close those questions.

I still have my "expert" T-shirt somewhere, but at work it has been replaced by my Stack Overflow mug and pen. It would be even better if you could get a T-shirt with the nickname and reputation though, even if paid for.

I would advise Adam Rackis to check older receipts, as the 10$ is a monthly payment and an idle account for several years will cost a lot more.

The fact that Experts-Exchange changed from a free site into a paid site can be seen as "business" and would be fair when the experts would have been informed on forehand and would get a share of the revenues. The change however was a small step-by-step, and it was after several years, when trying to add a friend as a member, that I found out how the site had changed into a PAY PAY PAY site.

The experts are rewarded with worthless "expert-points" and are” hypnotized” by scoring as much as possible and now can add status by collecting as many followers as possible.

I've been an expert for six years and a moderator (modulo and GranMod) for four years and was suspended as Experts-Exchange didn't support me when trying to improve the quality of another experts "F1-Help" comments. The “quality Q&A” talk is only advertising talk and when you check the questions you’ll find out that a lot of questions are trash.

Now I see Experts-Exchange from the outside and have found out that they are over protective to their Q&A’s. Links to other Q&A sites in solutions aren’t allowed and critical comments towards them are removed. They even succeeded in getting my Yahoo account disabled as I’m too critical.

So be warned before using (or worse anticipating in) Experts-Exchange. Like CobolDinosaur and many other “old” experts I’ve experienced Experts-Exchange’s true nature.

My experience with Experts-Exchange came when they decided that we should have an account at work in case we ended up getting stuck with stuff. The long and the short of it is that I ended up using it about four times with three of those four times ending up with me answering my own question as none of their 'experts' could.

That was a long long time ago.