What's annoyingly fraudulent is posting this as if it were something new.

The article was written in August 2013, and used information from early that year. For one thing, Experts Exchange has used neither that system since before the article came out (meaning it's bad research to begin with).

But if you all want to drink the Kool-Aid, be my guests.

Nope. I've been an EE member since 1999 and have never given them a cent. Some parts of the site are only accessible to Premium Services customers, but it's not all that difficult to earn them -- so no money out the door.

Emphasis on the word "old". Experts Exchange doesn't do that, and hasn't for quite a while now.

DISCLAIMER: I'm one of Experts Exchange's volunteer administrators.

Google penalized sites that redirected from SERPs or buried content below a lot of "sign up here" stuff very heavily; you can even make the case that it could have been called the "EE Penalty" instead of Panda, if only because Google's web search team (i.e. Matt Cutts) collaborated heavily with the Stack ownership in developing the algorithm changes and consequences.

That's not to excuse EE's management's behavior -- quite the contrary. From the perspective of longtime users, EE's string of decisions, the consequences of those decisions, and its reactions to those consequences starting not quite a decade ago nearly destroyed what had been a vibrant community.

If there's anything good to have come of it, it's that EE has finally moved -- about six or seven months ago -- to a business model that allows the non-member to see what members see: the entire question and solutions. Joining for free does have a few minor advantages; paying (either with a credit card or by answering questions) has more.

But it took a long time for EE to learn those lessons and begin to implement those fixes. Whether Quora will learn them is a whole 'nother story; like so many other sites, it built its systems and market-share without much thought given to how it was going to monetize.

EE made that mistake too, in 1997. Quora has a lot of money backing it up, so it can maintain its facade for a long time... but I wouldn't be placing any bets on it being around 15 years from now if it actually had to depend on income.

It's a lot easier when Matt Cutts is listening to you tell him what to do about the competitor you're trying to overcome.

DISCLAIMER: I'm Experts Exchange's senior volunteer administrator. That means, for the most part, that I've outlasted everyone else.

At the time EE imposed the cloaking / hard and fast paywall / masking / whatever you call it, we told them it was a bad idea. We understand why they did it -- it was to counteract the effects of a prior less-than-advisable decision -- but that didn't make it a good idea.

Long term, obviously, it resulted in 1) major penalties from Google and 2) a lot of competition EE didn't need to provoke.

New management has removed the paywall and redirects from external search results and links about two months ago; we expect that it will still be a few months longer before the penalties will be overcome.

DISCLAIMER: I'm Experts Exchange's senior volunteer administrator.

That's just one of the things EE was busted for. For logged in members, they would see the pages from a Google SERP one would expect to see; for non-members (or those who weren't logged in), they would see a page that said "sign up". It's not unprecedented -- the New York Times does the same thing -- but the way EE did it (over strong objections from the user community) was singularly creepy. That EE's competitors had Matt Cutts on speed dial just hastened the imposition of the Panda et seq. penalties.

The good news -- at least, for those of us who aren't natural born haters -- is that a change in management has resulted in the paywall coming down, and the penalties imposed are slowly but surely being overcome.

That is the precise inverse of what LinkedIn is doing.

Never used LinkedIn before, no account - see exactly what Google SERP shows.

Never used EE before, no account - you get a page asking you to "sign up" instead of the Google SERP page.

With respect, that's not true: http://www.ee-stuff.com/images/LoggedOutView.png

You DO get a message asking you to join just above the question, but nothing else.

They still exist?

Why wouldn't EE exist? Despite the best efforts of some well-known bloggers whose site wouldn't exist if it had to depend solely on actual income, EE exists because it has a business model that DOES work.