Stackoverflow was a major improvement over forums and mailing lists when it first came out: centralized, clean and easy to use, and the content was up to date.

Stackoverflow was a major improvement over forums and mailing lists when it first came out: centralized, clean and easy to use, and the content was up to date. Additionally, the early users generally already pretty savvy, or at least motivated to learn and make quality contributions. Now a decade on, much of the content is stale, accumulating reputation has become a goal in and of itself, and the culture has become weirdly cult-like. There no longer seems to be the same shared purpose or sense of community and respect. In many ways, the site still is designed for the early days. Take stale answers and questions for example. I can't even count the number of times I've clicked on a stack overflow link in the search results only to find that the accept answer is some horrendously unnecessary jquery snippet. This problem needs to be addressed if the site is to continue being a valuable resource As Jon identifies though, the bigger problem is culture. I quite like his proposed covenant and wish more users would take it to heart. It's also interesting to think how design could promote the covenant. Some quick ideas: - Provide a question template: "this is what I am trying to do and why", "this is what I have tried", "this is what is not working". - Better way to ask for clarification on a question or answer. Comments are too overloaded in their current implementation. - Require users explain why they are voting to close an issue (more than the general categories already provided) - Provide a section for "I have a problem but don't even know what question to ask" - Provide more UI reminders that users are human. - Tag questions by new users with "new asker". - Automatically remind new users of good etiquette, such as: 'Don't forget to accept the correct answer' - Add explanations to downvotes (again, something besides comments) - Show new users examples of good/bad questions and answers and explain why before throwing them in the deep end The obstacle is that solving these problems will require changing the site in a way that would break the existing reputation system and piss off many prolific users. The bigger question I have: so Stackoverflow is bad, but what is the better alternative?