4 ms·
I don't know that SO ever wanted to be much of a community in the traditional sense. We had communities before SO: huge forums and similar construct. They wer
by fishtoaster 4y ago
I don't know that SO ever wanted to be much of a community in the traditional sense. We had communities before SO: huge forums and similar construct. They were pleasant(ish) for people participating in them, but they were awful for random people off the internet trying to find the answer to a specific question like "how to X in language Y." You'd wind up paging through 50-60 back-and-forth posts in some long-forgotten thread before finding out if anyone had answered the question. You find yourself with the classic DenverCoder9 problem[0]. Forums were great for community, but bad as a repository of answers. SO was an explicit reaction to that, and explicitly rejected attempts to make it a "community" in the classical sense (aggressive duplicate-closing, no opinion questions, minimal user personalization, no off-topic discussion, etc).
[0] https://xkcd.com/979/ https://xkcd.com/979/
- autokad 4y agothe best way to fail is to not be what your customers want. SO's hostile attitude towards people who ask questions is comical considering the site only existed if people had done so.
- snthrow 4y agoThe site needs questions and answers. And most of the people who answer want different things than most of the people who ask. It's a fundamental tension. Both groups need to be kept somewhat happy.
- autokad 4y agothe questions are more important than the answers. there is nothing to give an answer to if there are no questions. If you have a backlog full of questions, its just a matter of figuring out how to get answers to them. there is nothing you can do if you have no questions.
- Gud 4y agoThis was not my experience at all. I would use google, and would come across a forum topic regarding the subject. Nowadays it's 10% reddit, 10% blog post, 5% old forum post, 75% garbage