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> if you wanted to start your own stackoverflow competitor for whatever reason, you would have a very hard time getting any traction. this is also true of current general purpose engines, but you still do stand a chance to be referenced well and hit high enough to still get traffic

Hmm... You started to backpedal but then persisted. In the today world, your SO competitor would have that (slim) chance to rank if you started getting links from sites like HN or from people on Twitter who matter and know about tech. This would give you some PageRank and then you'd start possibly ranking in Google (in theory. In reality, no you probably wouldn't rank for anything since you're competing with 1,000,000 spam sites including whole verbatim clones of every page on SO that Google can't even get under control)

If any directory would be worth using, it would be run by humans who would HAVE to look at each submission. They could also look at who's linking to it, and evaluate "Is this a backlink from like, a gibberish page on `prawns-01-blork.info` or from like, Joel Spolsky's Twitter account?" Yes, it would take a lot of work, but like, it would be creating a truly useful product that people might pay for. And we have examples of other professions where "just rubber stamp everyone who pays" is frowned upon, like building inspectors and journalists. It's a hard problem, but it's far from hopeless.




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