This is a truly awesome place for getting help, but like most popular sites on the web, eventually they fall down with the weight of traffic and trolls. Just imagine what would happen if the favourite saviour of all things code, introduced payments for solutions to fund the servers from all the traffic? Imagine the chaos, the riots, the lack of functioning code, and lastly, the lack of irate people solving kids homework.

I can see this coming (you read it here first), not just a subscription, but a donate button. On Bleepingcomputer, you get help with bricked devices, and they get paid for it.

Other crazy notions would be micro-payments. A few cents popped into the pocket of some random person who fixed your code? They might have become an enabler for you to earn your own wages. This altruistic concept works if optional of course, and the people who give a f**k, can help another person out.

I recently met a high-level contributor for Stack, and they are struggling – really struggling. Imagine a crazy alternate universe that all the people they’d helped had given him .10c? They’d would be less worried, and fully engaged in helping on Stack – But alas not, and Stack loses.

This degrades the value of stack as the talent pool frustrates at a lack of acknowledgement, and a clear reward for sacrificing their time. Something is going to give, and it won’t be the Stack. Over time this will just turn into a pit of discontent without radical overhaul towards a community centric reward structure.

Personal experience

They don’t usually hand out the answers on a plate, which is sort of ok, but can give you a headache tracking down the actual issues. I’ve literally built complete sites from using google/stackoverflow, so it’s not all bad.

Use cases

When you can’t solve an issue in your code, server, or want to give something back by being a contributor.

Cons

It can be toxic if you don’t give explicit details of your issue.