> For me, SO is a proof that communities need a BDFL with a vision for how they should run That was Jeff Atwood. Who said a lot of very interesting things abou

> For me, SO is a proof that communities need a BDFL with a vision for how they should run That was Jeff Atwood. Who said a lot of very interesting things about how the site was explicitly intended to differ from traditional forums where "perfectly good" questions are constantly asked. > Answers were shot down because they weren’t phrased in the form of an MLA essay. This is absurd and I can't think of anything remotely like this happening in practice. The opposite is true: popular questions attract dozens of redundant, low-quality answers that re-state things that were said many years ago, list two different options from two other different previous answers, list a subset of options from some previous answers, describe some personal experience that ultimately led to applying someone else's answer with a trivial modification for personal circumstances unrelated to the actual subject of the question, etc. etc.