[dnomad]

SO sucks for the most part. I've certainly given up on it. It's certainly not that I think I could do a better job. Managing such a large community is more than likely a losing game. It's only going to get worse, I suspect, because of the growing inequality between the old-timers (who don't actually seem that interested in answering questions but in excessive moderation) and the newbies. The only hope of SO is devolution: spin out the communities that can be saved and give them more autonomy. But this will never happen. This means the site is going to die. There are powerful negative forces aligned against it. Eventually, even the old timers who've amassed these enormous reps, are going to start wondering why they devote so much time and energy to making Joel rich. Wikipedia, at least, is a non-profit foundation.

The interesting thing will be what comes after SO. I'm always struck by the Ubuntu community which does a much better job providing fast, relevant answers and support to the community than SO ever did. (The Stack Exchange, https://askubuntu.com/, is dead. All the exciting stuff happens elsewhere.) There's also something much more organic; you've got blogs, wikis, Q&A, chat, and various reddit forums all working together to serve the community. This seems to me be the future and should scale better than SO at the end of the day.