Super User
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Type of site
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Question and answer |
|---|---|
| Owner | Stack Exchange Inc. |
| Created by | Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky |
| Website | stackexchange |
| Alexa rank |
 144 (April 1, 2017)[update]
|
| Commercial | Yes |
| Registration | Yes |
| Launched | September 2009 (relaunched in January 2011) |
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Content license
|
User contributions under CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Stack Exchange is a network of question-and-answer websites on topics in varied fields, each site covering a specific topic, where questions, answers, and users are subject to a reputation award process. The sites are modelled after Stack Overflow, a Q&A site for computer programming questions that was the original site in this network. The reputation system allows the sites to be self-moderating. As of April 2017, the three most popular sites in the network are: Stack Overflow, Super User and Ask Ubuntu. User contributions are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.
In 2008, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky created Stack Overflow, a question-and-answer Web site for computer programming questions, which they described as an alternative to the programmer forum Experts-Exchange. In 2009, they started additional sites based on the Stack Overflow model: Server Fault for questions related to system administration and Super User for questions from computer "power users".
In September 2009, Spolsky's company, Fog Creek Software, released a beta version of the Stack Exchange 1.0 platform as a way for third parties to create their own communities based on the software behind Stack Overflow, with monthly fees. This white label service was not successful, with few customers and slowly growing communities.
In May 2010, Stack Overflow (as its own new company) raised US$6 million in venture capital from Union Square Ventures and other investors, and it switched its focus to developing new sites for answering questions on specific subjects, Stack Exchange 2.0. Users vote on new site topics in a staging area called "Area 51", where algorithms determine which suggested site topics have critical mass and should be created. In November 2010, Stack Exchange site topics in "beta testing" included physics, mathematics, and writing. Stack Exchange publicly launched in January 2011 with 33 Web sites; it had 27 employees and 1.5 million users at the time, and it included advertising. At that time, it was compared to Quora, founded in 2009, which similarly specializes in expert answers. Other competing sites include and Yahoo! Answers.
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