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Look at Reddit vs HN, do you think the difference is down technology ?

On multi-sided market websites (marketplaces, forums, ugc sites, etc) community management is generally a far bigger differentiator than technology. Quora isn't better than Yahoo Answers because of it's technology, but because of it's community.

My guess is that SO wants to steer away from subjective questions which can lead to downward spiralling in quality (i.e. language/tool-chain wars) which can then have a knock-on effect on what type of behaviour users think is acceptable across the rest of the site (i.e broken window syndrome).