I will totally fulfill that HN clichee of people in disbelief that any tech company has employees... But: TIL they have 250 of them. It's a fully automated site, huh.
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35 whole people with no fractional people isn't that large o a number. If you use a period for the thousands mark, what do you use for the decimal part a semi-colon?
Every site with user-generated content has an army of employees of various sorts, trying to make sure it doesn't descend into a morass. The natural un-moderated state of any community site is complete and total garbage.
Well "trash" is a matter of opinion, but profitability isn't. If a community is left unmoderated, it gets so toxic and extreme that advertisers won't go near it with a 10 foot pole.
Except on StackOverflow all of those are unpaid voluntary community moderators. There are less than ten people being paid by SO in community facing positions as far as I know. Also, they recently fired two of their most long-standing community managers.
But StackOverflow (the company) is more than just public Q&A, and in fact public Q&A is not primarily how they make their money. Job ads and SO for teams seem to be the main revenue sources.
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