I'm telling you what I want. I never said it currently exists. > Gamification encourages many people to participate, Yes, then it also encourages them to be d

I'm telling you what I want. I never said it currently exists. > Gamification encourages many people to participate, Yes, then it also encourages them to be dicks to new users and post nothing but rude and condescending copy-and-paste snippets and vote to close or delete literally anything you post. > allowing the (vocal) community to drive the direction of the site encourages a certain type of participation (because a site which heads in a direction the community doesn't support dies). Yes, but if the community is full of dicks, that only steers the community to cater to dicks. Non-dicks don't get involved in the process because they all left the site the first time they tried to participate and some dick discouraged them. > What can we do to be better here? Who is "we" and where is "here"? One thing you can do, if you're representing an organization, make that clear before posting. > Not to say you have the answers but these are difficult questions and I think SO gets it more right than the rest. Possibly, but that's a pretty low bar. --- You're right that I don't really have any better suggestions, but StackOverflow makes a lot of assumptions I vehemently disagree with: * That people who have the most imaginary internet pointzzz are the best qualified people to moderate content (especially when those pointzzz are assigned by an easily-gamed computer.) Similarly, that these people are also best-qualified to represent the "silent majority" of read-only users who use the site when considering site changes * That the best way to determine which questions get answers has anything at all to do with the person who posted it * That features of a site should be "gated" by imaginary internet pointzzz, especially extremely basic features like writing a comment on your own question. --- EDIT: also you ask "where else can you go to get a difficult question answered?" Well, since StackOverflow has a track record of exactly 0% at that for me, as far as I'm concerned: anywhere else.