Stack Overflow harnessed the good attributes of tech people (I’m not saying that only tech people have these attributes, but I do think they’re very common in t

Stack Overflow harnessed the good attributes of tech people (I’m not saying that only tech people have these attributes, but I do think they’re very common in tech people): the joy of learning and the joy of sharing/helping others learn. However that also brings with it some bad attributes of tech people (again, not exclusive to tech people, but very common): intolerance to people who don’t try to help themselves first, don’t “RTFM”, don’t try to search first, and (probably most importantly) post duplicate questions. Unfortunately for Stack Overflow (and other tech sites), those “bad” things are also critical to what makes a community site be successful. Sites like Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, etc. are very successful and full of people posting things that are off topic, low effort, and duplicated. On Stack Overflow, only the first “your dog is so cute” comment would be allowed, and then all the rest deleted. And in the process, alienating everyone who had something deleted—those negative feelings add up eventually. And maybe that’s the fundamental flaw of it. They’re trying to be both a social site and a version of Wikipedia where each page is the single source of truth for that particular topic. They might recover from their problems if they reduced the social aspects and leaned more into the reference material aspect of the site. But maybe their funding model won’t allow that.