I agree with you. However, this is not like something that has "failed" in the sense that this sort of mindset was always prevalent from the Beta of SO. This is just Jeff Atwood's philosophy plain and simple. I don't think it is, as you say, put in place to increase revenue, I think it was sort of "control freak" mindset that Jeff Atwood displayed (love it or hate it). I don't know how much Joel agreed with him on this sort of stuff in the beginning but the inane amount of micromanagement, brow beating questioners, etc was always there. You can go back to the old podcasts and blog posts for that. In the beginning, for a long time, there was push back, I felt like even in the SO blog comments there would be 25% disagreement with this idea, but I think the collective has "gotten out of control" (if you think it is bad thing). I remember long discussions on the podcast about whether some such question was relevant enough to stay on the site.
I always thought Programmers SE was just evidence of this silliness; I saw and still see no reason for it to exist outside of SO. But that's the way it goes.
Comments
I agree with you. However, this is not like something that has "failed" in the sense that this sort of mindset was always prevalent from the Beta of SO. This is just Jeff Atwood's philosophy plain and simple. I don't think it is, as you say, put in place to increase revenue, I think it was sort of "control freak" mindset that Jeff Atwood displayed (love it or hate it). I don't know how much Joel agreed with him on this sort of stuff in the beginning but the inane amount of micromanagement, brow beating questioners, etc was always there. You can go back to the old podcasts and blog posts for that. In the beginning, for a long time, there was push back, I felt like even in the SO blog comments there would be 25% disagreement with this idea, but I think the collective has "gotten out of control" (if you think it is bad thing). I remember long discussions on the podcast about whether some such question was relevant enough to stay on the site.
I always thought Programmers SE was just evidence of this silliness; I saw and still see no reason for it to exist outside of SO. But that's the way it goes.