Yes, many SE sites are pretty great, but they probably wouldn't if they were as large as Stack Overflow itself. The failure modes of SO are well known. Still, g

Yes, many SE sites are pretty great, but they probably wouldn't if they were as large as Stack Overflow itself. The failure modes of SO are well known. Still, given how invaluable a resource it has become to the large majority of programmers, it's certainly doing many things right.