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It's for several reasons (and why I personally find reddit (of all places!) a much more welcoming and useful community): 1. Points. They're very visible, givin

It's for several reasons (and why I personally find reddit (of all places!) a much more welcoming and useful community): 1. Points. They're very visible, giving you power. If you want power, you mine for points, and once you earn them, well you worked for your power, you use your power. You are expected by the powers-that-be to close questions for being bad, or for being duplicates, or whatever. In contrast, reddit doesn't focus on points. You focus on the name/flair. So the focus is hanging around and answering questions - in other words, it's more of a community than a way to show off your knowledge. 2. The communities are kept separate. For example, /r/Rust has a different community culture than, say, /r/golang. So they have different mods with different policies. 3. The lack of community moderation means that I don't have to be scared that 5 guys out of 5000 decide that my question "wasn't good enough" or "subjective", closing it. And yes, there are hard-code reddit communities. /r/askhistorians put's history.stackexchange.com to shame in rigor. To write an answer there, you're writing a term paper based of primary sources. So how do they do it? They have a team of moderators. Really, stackoverflow could be broken up into rust.stackoverflow.com and go.stackoverflow.com and python.stackoverflow.com, where each community elects[1] their knowledgeable moderators who know their community and respects them. 3. Unlike reddit, they're not trying to solve my problem. They're trying to be a large database of answers[2]. A wikipedia of programming or something (which is why duplicates are not just pointed out, but actively closed, and why "open ended discussion questions" are closed). The problem is that I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in getting my question answered. Now if you don't want to answer my question, that's fine. But it's up to the asker. [1]. Another point - community elections means that there's politics involved. reddit allows one to easily fork a community, so if a significant group of users don't get along with /r/linux, they can fork and make /r/linuxos or something.

porker 8y ago
Points are damaging, especially the way they've done them on StackOverflow. It's fine for anyone who got in on it in the early days, or cares about collecting them. But to make a better community the points need to decay (exponential decay preferably) so there isn't such a power imbalance. This would incentivize everyone to gain points by being helpful, rather than enjoying being an 'authority'.
- greenhouse_gas 8y ago
  The problem with points is that they become the way to gauge your reputation. In contrast, in fora like HN or reddit (where points are, well, pointless) the username is the way to gauge your reputation. So I don't care how many points you have in HN, but people will notice if you comment a lot and have deep knowledge.

porker 8y ago

Points are damaging, especially the way they've done them on StackOverflow. It's fine for anyone who got in on it in the early days, or cares about collecting them. But to make a better community the points need to decay (exponential decay preferably) so there isn't such a power imbalance. This would incentivize everyone to gain points by being helpful, rather than enjoying being an 'authority'.

greenhouse_gas 8y ago
The problem with points is that they become the way to gauge your reputation. In contrast, in fora like HN or reddit (where points are, well, pointless) the username is the way to gauge your reputation. So I don't care how many points you have in HN, but people will notice if you comment a lot and have deep knowledge.