Not to discount the skills of Joel and Jeff, but one thing to keep in mind is it's much easier to build a social site for a bunch of hackers, than for example, a bunch of retirees.
The same thing goes for Hacker News. StackOverflow and HN are great, but when you look at their traffic figures, (1600 a day to start for HN, and 30k a day today) keep in mind that websites for computer programmers will just in general perform the best among any sort of website, in terms of market penetration.
What they don't perform very well in is having visitors who don't run adblock. Because of this quirk, you need to have a million-dollar revenue source like Spolsky has on his blog - a job board for programmers.
The same thing goes for Hacker News. StackOverflow and HN are great, but when you look at their traffic figures, (1600 a day to start for HN, and 30k a day today) keep in mind that websites for computer programmers will just in general perform the best among any sort of website, in terms of market penetration.
What they don't perform very well in is having visitors who don't run adblock. Because of this quirk, you need to have a million-dollar revenue source like Spolsky has on his blog - a job board for programmers.