"Do not let children onto the Internet - they make it dumber", - that's what I've heard a hundred times from grown-ups who actively flood at forums. I'd say, both such children and grown-ups are just lazy. Fortunately, the future is made by hard-working people.
Chris Dixon, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, recently announced via Medium.com that the fund invested $40 million into a network of knowledge exchange web-sites Stack Exchange along with the company's earlier investors.
The company was launched in 2008 as a site where programmers could help solve each other's problems.
Since then, the Stack Exchange network has grown enormously and now all communities are visited by over 86 million unique visitors a month. A good thing is that people come here with a certain goal - to ask a question or answer it. There's no side talk like on a discussion forum - just helpful information. Good answers are voted up and shown up first so that they can be easily found.
Now Stack Exchange is a network of 133 communities that are created and run by experts and enthusiasts passionate about a focused topic. And the topics are widely ranged: from engineering and science to gardening, Buddhism and martial arts.
In 2014 over 300 million unique visitors contributed over 3.1 million questions and 4.5 million answers.
It has broken into Quantcast's list of the top 50 most popular U.S. websites. There are also localized sites in German, French, Portuguese and Japanese. The company currently employs over 200 people "who are trying to make the internet a better place".
Stack Exchange's business model is based on job placement. Employers create company pages and then run targeted ad campaigns for open job opportunities.
"Find developers on the site they trust the most", - says Stack Exchange.
Chris Dixon says at Medium.com: "As new generations of people grow up on the internet, old habits - searching through textbooks or how-to books, or asking friends, will fade away. People will come to expect that any objective question can be instantly answered with a Google search".
