Stack Overflow did a competent job at a community Q&A site, and marketed it well. I think the downside of it was that it was developed in the age of 'gamificati

Stack Overflow did a competent job at a community Q&A site, and marketed it well. I think the downside of it was that it was developed in the age of 'gamification', so it has a ton of badges and incentives for participating, but it incentivizes the wrong things. It's still miles better than expertsexchange.com (the hyphen site), but is very biased towards first answers for doing kids homework. The majority of questions I've asked there are when I seriously can't get to the bottom of a bug, and generally the answers aren't helpful like "you need to restructure your application". Its value is really in simple, dumb answers, which as the author points out, is very useful when you have to jump between languages and don't quite remember the right idiom for pushing something onto an "array" in PHP vs using a stack elsewhere. Like a lot of other web2.0 sites from the era, the incentive with reputation and badges is very effective at creating a community of people who want those points, but also offers a perverse incentive of racing to answer the easiest questions quickly. Unless that question has been determined by the community to be low quality (in the case of the infinite loop homework question referenced in the article). Like a lot of community sites where engagement gives you more privileges, there ends up being a meta-community of people with power dictating the tone and direction of the site, even if that is orthogonal to the actual goal of the site. The other issue is that for a software dev Q&A site, it can be very hard to find / suss out current info. If I'm looking for an issue migrating to Hibernate 5, and the most popular answers are something using the XML configs and migrating to hibernate 3 from 2012, that's not really helpful, and I don't think the tagging/search combo from 2008 can filter for that. I will say this, it seems to have avoided the tech forum pitfall of: "I'm getting this error, can anyone help? Edit: nm, figured it out."