Well I did believe that when I started the project. I don't know if quitting was altruism. Selling is hard enough for a programmer like me, but for this project I really recoiled from it. My heart just wasn't in it. Perhaps if communications were opt-in for the developers and we controlled the communications channel it would be okay. This piece might be worth keeping: The site scored each developer on various skills, so users could see that a person was better than 87% of their peers worldwide and better than 93% of people within 100 miles, etc. You could still use the whole population to compile those stats, even if only some people had opted in to communications. (Of course the score was based only on public data, so it was not perfect, but still it seemed like a pretty strong signal when I looked at it for people I know.)