[ChrisMarshallNY]

Agreed. It was a very important part of my personal journey, but, like so many of these things (What is a “payphone,” Alex), it seems to have become an anachronism.

Yesterday, I was looking at an answer, and I got a popup, saying that a user needed help. I dutifully went and checked the query. I thought “That’s a cool idea!”. I enjoy being of help, and sincerely wanted to be a resource. I have gotten a lot from SO, and wanted to give back.

It was an HTML question. Not a bad one, but I don’t think I’ve ever asked or answered an HTML question on SO. I guess I have the “HTML” tag checked, but I see no other reason for it to ask my help.

Yeah, I think it’s done.

[neom]

Hey Chris! Thanks for the reply. :)

As I never used SO except to understand it for doing business for developers, I know many found the community aspect/self building/sense of worth aspect important, same with Quora. Do you have a idea of how this will change things for developers? Is that a real thing I was seeing? (maybe even an opportunity!)

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Well, people in general, tend to have self-image issues, and it seems to be more prevalent, in the developer community, than in other vocations.

One of the reasons that SO became so successful, was the "gamification" of answering questions. Eventually, they started giving the questions, themselves, more attention, but, by then, the damage was done.

Asking questions became a "negative flag." If you look at most of the SO members with very high karma, you will see that their total count of questions asked, is a 1-digit value, with that digit frequently being "0."

So the (inevitable) result, was that people competed to answer as many questions as possible, in order to build high karma scores. In its heyday, you would get answers within seconds of posting a question.

The other (inevitable) result, was that people who asked questions, were considered "lesser people," and that attitude came across, loud and clear, in many of the interactions that more senior folks had with questioners. They were treated as "supplicants." Some senior folks were good at hiding that attitude, some, not so much.

Speaking only for myself, I suspect that I have more experience and expertise, actually delivering product, than many of the more senior members, and it is pretty galling, to be treated with so much disrespect.

And, of course, another inevitable thing, was that the site became a spamhaven. There was a lot of "shill-spamming," where someone asks a question, and many of the "answers" point to some commercial product. If you attempted to seriously answer the question, your answer was often downvoted, causing you damage. I think they got nuked fairly quickly, but it was quite a problem, for a while (It's still a huge problem in LinkedIn groups. I never participate in those, anymore).

I have found that, whenever I design anything; whether an app, or a community, I need to take human nature into account.