Stack Exchange Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky used to run a podcast where they described exactly the techniques they had discovered. - Communities are segmented

Stack Exchange Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky used to run a podcast where they described exactly the techniques they had discovered. - Communities are segmented according to specialty so as to concentrate expert-level talent. Compare the kinds of questions listed on an SE site to what's asked on any other Q&A site out there. The math questions are asked by actual mathematicians, the photography questions are asked by actual photographers, etc. (You'll also notice that---beyond the gaming site---most of the silos are dedicated to a profession.) - Many of the professional sites are dedicated exclusively to people in that profession. The Theoretical Computer Science silo explicitly requires PhD-level material. The Quantitative Finance site opens the FAQ with "if you aren't earning a living at this, it's probably off topic". - Most SE sites explicitly prohibit subjective questions. Something like, "What's better, Ruby or Python?" will be closed immediately. - Any post can be edited by another user, just as with Wikipedia. So grammar and spelling tend to be pretty decent. - Moderators are given broad powers to close questions, delete posts, suspend users, and even delete accounts. - There is a separate Meta site for questions about the site. That segregates questions about the silo's topic from questions about the silo. Reddit has some siloing as well, but they don't prohibit memes, which is why the content looks the way it does. They also don't have user editing or strong moderation. It shows.