Wow, what a comp for doing free consulting work ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

danhab99@programming.dev to Programmer Humor@programming.dev – 270 points –
21

Would you prefer SO to be paid?

That would never be an option for Stackoverflow

Well guy complains about compensation for his "work". I assume he's ready to shell out a few dollars for when he'll need it :-)

His "work" as you put it, is the only thing of value on the site. SO without users to provide answers are worth zero dollars, so I'm not sure why you put work in quotation mark.

Because if he's able to help anyone on SO, he very likely profited many, many times from free access to knowledge there before he got to this point. Given activity of average user he probably gained orders of magnitude more than he given.

I find rambling about money and compensation in such context distasteful.

SO provided platform which, while not perfect is used by millions of people. They aren't overloaded with ads and dark patterns as many of the clones. If it's worthless, why people are using it instead self hosted blogs for example?

the owners of SO make far more than the benefit provided to any single dev. if that were not true, they wouldn't be in business.

if that were not true, they wouldn't be in business.

Why? They are not loosing anything while developers are gaining time using their website.

They had 66 million dollars revenue in 2021. They have about 20 million registered users (and much more unregistered, and that's revenue not income, but let's forget that). Do you really, honestly feel, that SO doesn't save you $3 worth of time per year?

I use stackoverflow for minutes at a time and it almost never has answers to the questions I need answers to. if it has an answer, it's usually "you can't do that". reference docs are 100% of the time more helpful. so no, I don't think so.

Why do you go there then? If you don't, they won't get their $3 out of you and universe is in balance again :-)

frustration, usually, hoping against hope that the answer is relevant.

You guys are funny. If you don't want to see ads, use adblock. Now SO is a free platform for people that want to contribute.

???

Looks like stack overflow privileges

On stackoverflow, even asking questions is a privilege.

You won't get banned for being toxic, but you will if your question isn't a "proper" one.

“comp” seems to refer to compensation.

It makes so much more sense. I thought when hotels say comped they meant make something complimentary/free but compensation makes more sense.

At least you're not rewarded with more ads.

Is this from stack overflow? I never use it.

With the way SO treats their mods, I'm very much looking forwards to an alternative pick up