When you need to do research for hours (or even days), you are of course willing to spend a few bucks to get your solution quickly, and get on with your project.
- So you would describe your technical problem, as usual.
- You would then set your monetary reward for the accepted answer.
- You could increase your monetary reward if answers are lacking or coming in too slowly (the list of unanswered questions could be sorted by "reward").
- To make your start easy, you could import your StackOverflow "karma" (points) into your new profile.
I do not care to learn some obscure, poorly documented API by trial and error. If I could write a failing test or three in a playground then post it in an appropriate chat window and have two or three people claim it at once, with the winner earning 50% of the prize, I would utilize this with some frequency.
The problem with an SO-style solution is that I don't get confirmation that anyone is working on it. So if my project is under a stiff deadline then I have to keep trying myself.
That said, yes, someone please build this. There is a market for people like me that have wasted days on ffmpeg just to get X to do a Y without a Z.
Days? I know I must have wasted weeks, in total.
And not to mention how this can pull you down emotionally/mentally, when you just don't find the solution to your problem. Having someone pull you out of a deep hole is worth money.
I currently have "3.6m people reached" on my Stack Overflow page. I have no idea if this is low or high, but if it was converted to YouTube views or Spotify plays it would pay me about $150,000-$300,000.
Instinctively I feel like there probably could and should be some kind of way to reward people for contributing to (something like) Stack Overflow.
And some employers may not want GH activity made public for concern about leaking working hours or time zone, such as in defense.
I am quite confident that a working professional could give me an excellent answer in about 2 minutes, and I have to say subjectively the question is pretty interesting (not a "how do I <x>" or "do my homework" question). It is unusually hard to Google, Wikipedia doesn't have the right information, and there's only one major enthusiast forum that might have users that know the thing. I'd be willing to pay a token amount, maybe $20, to get the answer. Not that I think $20 is worth getting out of bed for, but given you were already using a Sunday afternoon to answer a few questions, not a bad minutely wage.
I think my main concern is that such a site is likely to become essentially micro-projects, more "do this for me" than "answer my question". And I think people who are paying would be even angrier than usual if their question gets moderated away for doing this.
The boundary is probably not always easy to define. And so I would ask myself - would there even really be a need for such a boundary? Why not simply increase the reward, if your question/problem is bigger than most?
How much value can really be added though in the question-answer format that you can't already get for free on StackOverflow?
The answer probably lands somewhere on a sliding scale between "quick answer to an easy coding or api question" at 0 and "team of programmers speccing out and working on a project with delivery by a deadline" at 100.
StackOverflow currently sits at 0 to 10. Gig sites like fiverr at 50, and legacy consulting at 80-90. Maybe the value here is at 25 or 30 on that scale?
Or a tier higher - for SO points. Whenever a question is not answered, throwing a few hundred/thousand points at a bounty gives you so much attention, I don't think you'd be able to get a better answer for money.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/04/06/the-stack-overflow...
I don't know their business played out, but lots of dotcoms seemed to focus more on appearance of growth, and IPO cashouts, and the earlier obvious globally-connected-world utopia ideas didn't always do so well.
Experts Exchange's biggest legacy might've been to gain acceptance of "-" in domain names.
Basically just like joining the project's IRC channel and hoping that someone has time - but with a guaranteed best effort and quick response.
How is this different? It's usually not a single question where I am able to find an answer, or the community is actually quick and correct enough with an answer - it's more like "hey we used $tech for $thing and we have a feeling we did something wrong because $weirdproblem" and just scree nsharing actual closed source code would be a better explanation than trying to find a minimal repro case.
In a past company we actually tried to find someone like this for a few specific OpenStack things but had no luck. But it wasn't enough to book a consultant for an extended period of time.
Also I don’t think this is a Tell HN…
When sharing knowledge was to actually inform someone out of pure altruism.
When gaming was about gaming and not money/sponsors.
When social communities (forums) actually gathered people out of pure desire to share common interests.
Those days are long gone, but we get to tell the stories.
Or realizes a few hours later that for a complex enough problem it was not a sufficient answer?
Is there an arbitrage service? Because StackOverflow mods already go crazy with power. Add money to the mix ...
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/08/09/the-econ-101-manag...
It is worth the read
The power to determine who gets and does not get the money is going to be a very difficult moderation challenge.
And on top of it; the money pool is likely to be very small imo, because there’s already stack overflow which is free.
Sorry for not being able to back this with the original sources.
This was for something that should have been straight forward for PHP developer.
But for something you want to implement that needs research? Yikes. All the worst behaviors of SO, but with a race to the bottom. Most minimum answer all the time, ignoring your edge cases, telling you that all of your boundaries are ridiculous and their way is the only way.
Is Microsoft answers community have paid experts? I dunno, but they’re always polite in that same way. And they don’t answer the question you asked, but politely. It can take several attempts to get them to recognize the issue. Only then you might get a reasonable answer. Why is that if not the economic pressure to answer as many questions as possible as quickly as possible?
Look at paid help from a different direction—customer service or technical support for anything. You know they’re paid agents with training, paid by the company they work for. They always have a bias.
If you pay for SO like questions, where is the bias? Can you figure it out? How can a user contextualize answers?
It seems like conditions for low quality answers.
But behavioral economics says:
> Sometimes asking someone to do something for nothing is more powerful than paying them. [1]
Also, StackOverflow incurs zero monetary cost. There is a stark difference in people's behavior towards zero cost, even if the price difference is only 1 cent. [2][3]
[1]: https://danariely.com/why-bankers-would-rather-work-for-000-...
Seems to be working so far. I had a business process question around credit card processing that did not have a straightforward answer and a guy came out of the woodwork with useful things to consider, what impacts the decision one way or another and what he's seen in the past.
You think there is a market.
Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood discussed this on their podcast back in the early days about making Stack Overflow. They believed that having monetary rewards would create perverse incentives and the psychology of involving money would discourage people from participating - people would balk at $n/answer/vote/whatever thinking it's not worth their time, but would happily spend their free time answering questions for free.
Please, no.
Let's stick with a site that is mostly populated by people internally motivated to provide good answers, rather than a site that is mostly populated by people externally motivated by money. The answers will, on average, be poorer, guaranteed.
But more importantly, there's the Jon-Skeet-already-has-a-job problem.
And the handling-payments-is-a-PITA problem.
Ultimately if someone has the money to make an expert answer worth their while, they can hire a consultant.
And if an expert wants to make their living answering questions, they can open a consulting firm.
Good luck.
But I can't help but think anyone who launched such a service would end up spending most of their time adjudicating disagreements about whether there should be a payout when a poorly stated question gets a low-effort unhelpful answer.
