How Stack Exchange became the world’s largest Q&A website

Here, Huxiu introduces two more sentences about Stack Exchange. Stack Exchange is a platform for a series of question and answer websites. It has a total of 133 sub-sites, covering question and answer topics in different fields including mathematics, gardening, physics, cryptography, astronomy, data science, photography, economics, etc. The most famous one is Stack Overflow, which is familiar to programmers.

Joel Spolsky believes that the difference between them and Quora is that Quora is a social comprehensive Q&A website, while Stack Exchange focuses more on fact-based Q&A. In terms of profit model, Stack Exchange mainly relies on recruitment services and advertising, accounting for two-thirds and one-third respectively.

Stack Exchange is very strict in controlling the community atmosphere. The following article also shows this: how Stack Overflow expanded and grew all the way to Stack Exchange, while still firmly controlling the cohesion of the community.

Today, Stack Exchange is very happy to announce good news to everyone. We have just raised $40 million, mostly thanks to Andreessen Horowitz.

You may be curious about how we will use the money. First of all, of course, we need to gild all the outdated Aeron seats in our office. Then we will upgrade our aging game arcade. At the same time, we have already sent celebration cakes to our star users. .

However, these are still not listed here. First of all, let's take everyone to review some of the things that Stack Exchange has experienced since its creation.

In 2008, Jeff Atwood and I were still struggling to solve the problems developers encountered. At that time, it was very painful to find the answer to a programming problem. Because the answers we want are often hidden behind walls made of money - paid websites, or in a bunch of smelly discussion columns that have been dormant for hundreds of years.

So we devoted ourselves wholeheartedly with obsessive-compulsive disorder and full enthusiasm to create Stack Overflow for programmers as you see it now - a better question and answer website.

The significance and value of Stack Overflow’s existence today is to make programmers’ work easier. On the site we allow members to vote on answers so that we can give you the best answers with the highest scores first. We don't welcome opinionated and self-righteous questioning here, because it can easily lead to an out-of-control verbal war, which is not helpful to other users who want answers immediately. At the same time, we must also be careful to prevent the text content on Stack Overflow from developing in a commercial direction, because if the commercial content is too heavy, users will lose their trust in us.

What you may find even more incredible is that we do not allow any animated ads to appear here, although this is a standard practice on many other websites. But that's not the case for us. We don't want to distract the programmers' focused eyes from reading the answers to your animated advertisement doing Jiangnan style. In other words, if we distract programmers because of Uncle Psy's jumping left and right like a monkey, we cannot guarantee that we can provide 100% service to these programmers, and we can only provide 98% level at most. service... But you have to know that we are all paranoid. If we can only achieve 98%, we might as well close Stack Overflow and run to Las Vegas to open a taxi.

Anyway, we finally did it! This is entirely due to you. A frightening number of developers like you have stepped forward to become the torchbearers of knowledge transfer and provided everyone with a lot of help. Because of your contributions, Stack Overflow has quickly become the largest and most trusted community site for programming knowledge in the world.

Soon, Jeff and I discovered that if we want to provide services to programmers, just some Q&A services related to coding are far from enough. So we then established Server Fault and Super User. When it was found that this still could not meet your needs, Stack Exchange finally began to be released, and the entire community expanded different websites based on different topics to serve everyone. So when you want to help the girl next door set up a server, or install a PC, or a database, or install Ubuntu, or come up with new ideas for iPhone, you can first come to our website to find those things that can completely help you solve the problem. The master of the question or the answer they provide, and then go to the girl's house next door to show off their skills.

But everyone should be very clear about what this group of programmers is about. They are all good people who keep their integrity and work hard, so it is easy to get married and have children in groups accidentally. So things like parenting and taking pictures of children are often things that programmers know nothing about, so our users began to create corresponding Stack Exchange websites for these topics that are not related to programming, such as parenting topics and photography topics. Because the programmers we serve often want a place where they can learn more about nannies and ordering milk powder! These excellent websites like Stack Overflow, which can meet the special needs of programmers such as learning how to raise babies and taking artistic photos of children, were created.

Because we serve this group of programmers so well, some smart non-ape groups start to stare at us: "Stop it! I need that extra feature!" And of course we will Tell them patiently, brother! You need to know that everything that is suitable for programmers should also be suitable for everyone else. As long as you are willing to think according to programmers' thinking, everything will be fine. And if you try it, you need to know that programmers' way of thinking is The best way to think in the world. Therefore, we will open the door to everyone who wants to join the Stack Exchange family. And the websites they create all serve a community they identify with, such as "bicycle repair" and other themed websites you can think of.

So since the creation of Stack Exchange, the users we have joined have created ***133 various communities. Of course, Stack Overflow is still the biggest big brother. This reminds me of the following picture from medieval times. This shows a cluster of smaller village houses clustered around the bustling metropolis of Jerusalem, the benchmark city.