This comes up now and again on HN. Essentially, StackOverflow is a great site. It's premise was a free, frictionless, focused Q&A site and it was made possible

This comes up now and again on HN. Essentially, StackOverflow is a great site. It's premise was a free, frictionless, focused Q&A site and it was made possible by the wide audiences of Atwood and Spolsky. Atwood focused more on something that went between obscene OCD and just dogma. I think what wasn't realized after the beginning of SO was that SO became a success despite Atwood's ideology, not because of it. I think Joel realized it, just based on the podcasts, but since Atwood was doing most of the work, "whatever." The big problem came in with the ideology becoming enmeshed with the culture and the high council of Meta being sort of a sycophantic keeper of the faith. Basically, any question or answer or anything that might, some day, remotely look like a "discussion" (gasp) on SO is rigidly stamped out by the religious police. You could say this is hyperbole, but just use it for awhile. Heck, google any technical question and probably SO will be the first hit but that question will be marked "Closed, not conforming to the ideology of Atwood" or something like that to the point of being comical. It's even more farcical when you consider the abject snobbery SO has toward the "other Q&A sites." That has been there from the beginning, and to be sure many of the criticism of those sites are well deserved. But, SO has deeper problems, in some ways, particularly with the zealotry, but it is masked by the fact that there are so many technical people still on SO or, even if many have left, they have gathered such a large corpus that they will remain the big kid on the block. But at least they are trying to address it, if only at a surface level.