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I too have a lot of complex feelings about Stack Overflow. I appreciate it as a resource, but I also worry about what it incentivizes and why and how it incentivizes them. Your example is great: why is it that complicated questions with complicated answers you cannot just link to existing, well written how to article. Some of my best resources have come from such links that could only be appended as comments to the question, so they don't benefit from as much Rep gain as an answer, nor can they be marked as the "accepted" answer, when often they are the best answer... It's a particular concern given they are exploring a "Documentation" site designed for such long form answers and presumably there will be more answers on the main page of the form "see this example of this Documentation page" and it will be interesting to see if some of the Rep systems and moderation policies adjust with that. On the flipside the Documentation site as proposed still encourages people to (re)create content that could exist elsewhere for Rep points and maybe to the detriment of useful community sites or existing documentation sites. Some of that will be wait and see as they move forward into the project, of course. Finally, in a slightly different direction, as a somewhat unsuccessful game designer in a past life, I spent a lot of time thinking about point systems and incentive systems, and it's hard not to evaluate Stack Overflow's Rep through some of those filters. From those respects, Stack Overflow Rep is not bad, but sometimes concerning, largely in part from a reactionary position on myself that the "gamification" of the world is largely a bad thing, incentivizing in people sometimes the worst OCD tendencies and disincentivizing thoughtfulness or creativity. Stack Overflow Rep is definitely OCD incentivizing. I had interviewers ask me about my Stack Overflow Rep, and for one thing its not hard to find, and for second thing many of my points are actually elsewhere in the Exchange network, which can be fun to explain. But it's also easy for me to worry what in fact they are really asking about if they are interested in such an arbitrary metric, as well known and "extensive" as it may be... (Particularly in a world of employers that forbid social media participation entirely, which would include things like Stack Overflow.) |