Stack overflow was instrumental in my early programming career, because without it I would have had to read entire volumes of information to solve simple proble

Stack overflow was instrumental in my early programming career, because without it I would have had to read entire volumes of information to solve simple problems in some cases. The issue that I have is the attempt to pretend to have guided the course more than was the case. SO was a Q&A with a tremendous UX, and the users used it to help each other. That’s it. Even this nonsense of “gamification” is just ego-driven marketecture. Up and down voting has been a staple of the Internet for a long time. Voting up an answer is not gamifying it. The only thing even remotely game like about SO is that each question can have just one selected “corrct” answer... which is also basically the case on most Q&A sites, including yahoo answers. Also, the extent to which Jeff and Joel attempted to curate this process is the exact extent to which the process tended to get in our way; deleting questions because they are “off-topic”, even though hundreds of people up vote them and want to know the answer, etc. These are the decisions that ruined SO for manny developers.