Possible negative effects of VC funding for Stack Overflow?

Question

Assuming Joel and Jeff succeed in obtaining VC funding for Stack Overflow, what negative effects would you anticipate on the way Stack Overflow currently works?

And how harmful would they be?

And how could the users mitigate these effects?

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to see this happen, but this is the first thing I would do if I were the VC and wanted to generate more revenue from Stack Overflow:

• Introduce "sponsored answers"
• The sponsored answer would appear at the top of the answer list for any question (above the accepted answer and highest-voted answer.)
• It would almost invariably say "Product X will solve your problem; Use product X"
• It would of course be paid for by the vendor of product X.
• Users could vote on the sponsored answer (as that would be useful feedback for the vendor) but it would not change the position of that answer on the page.

Can you think of any other examples?

Answer 1

We're not going to accept funding that would in any way interfere with what made Stack Overflow successful. Period.

Stack Overflow succeeded because it was NOT plastered with flashing ads, paid membership, and corrupt "sponsored" answers. Nobody is going to mess with that.

In fact, we already make half our revenue from something that is completely invisible if you don't look for it: Stack Overflow Careers.

Most of the goal of raising VC would be to create, partner with, and/or buy StackOverflow-like communities for other fields. I don't expect very much would change in the way StackOverflow itself is run.

We deliberately put the Stack Overflow community-generated content under Creative Commons and make data dumps of it available regularly as insurance... if Stack Overflow ever slips into the hands of an evil person who does evil things, the content of the site is freely available and someone else can set up a non-evil site. We did this because IMDB and CDDB both started out with "community generated content" which was appropriated by commercial companies trying to make a buck, and we wanted to insure that this could never happen to Stack Overflow.

Answer 2

From my knowledge of working with a few VC companies in the past, I don't think that there would be much pressure in changing what is already working*, but a lot of pressure to simply maximise profit from existing money making areas.

I would think that this would be achieved by removing the reduced advertising on certain reputation and possibly more adverts.

After this, I think there would be a lot more activity turned to Stack Exchange and basically monetising the idea of Stack Overflow, or it will turn the other way and expand like crazy into other areas - make money from sponsorship/advertising and not let other people use Stack Exchange based sites.

* I am guessing that this site is turning a profit based on the previous post where they donated cash to various Open Source projects.

Answer 3

Ok, so if there were Sponsored Answers, I would be creating a Greasemonkey script to do something like the following:

• Upon page load, sponsored answers would immediately get a downvote from me. (I got the rep...)
• The sponsored answer would then be hidden from my view.

Further more, I bet there would be bands of users that would all flag a sponsored answer as spam in order to delete it, given that they don't make it immune to that as well.

Answer 4

As you say, it would have to be about monetisation/ROI for the VCs, off the top of my head, so some examples that could appear might be:

1. Cash bounties for questions (instead of just rep bounties)
   • Don't really see that this one would be too harmful assuming they aren't given too much priority over normal questions
2. Tip jar style micro payments on top of voting (where the house takes a % of course)
   • Could actually be a good thing for the community...
3. More ads/"sponsorships" of questions/tags
   • Possibly acceptable to the community, but it starts skating a fine line
4. More subversive ads (like those annoying linkification of keyword type ads)
   • I think this would be enough to start turning away the regulars (certainly for myself anyway).
   • ...although it would be interesting to see if they only did it for low/no rep users which from what I understand is the majority of page views (i.e. people coming from google), whether it would have an effect on the community given that it would largely go unnoticed (not that it would make it acceptable in any way, but it might be sneaky enough to slip beneath the radar)...
5. Paid subscriptions
   • Given Joel/Jeff's opinions of that sex-change site, I think this is very unlikely.

As to what the users could do to mitigate these effects:

1. Speak your mind here on meta (so far the SO team has shown that they definitely care about what their community thinks - hell the fact that they treat it as a community & not as group of potential customers is a good start).
2. Go elsewhere (aka vote with your wallet/ad-viewing-eyeballs). All content is CC licenced so there's nothing stopping someone from building an OSS-SO, taking all the content as a seed and trying their luck using a different model.