[InclinedPlane]

That's good but SE is a federation of sites, so it's an unfair comparison.

From the start I've always thought that the biggest danger to SO/SE wasn't failure, you guys are smart enough to see and recover from outright failure. Instead it's reaching a level of success far below what you're capable of.

It seems to me that SO/SE spent a lot of work innovating in the early days but once they found their comfort zone they've stopped innovating. They are good sites for their intended purpose but how much of the original vision has been abandoned? I remember back when you and Jeff were talking about taking over the way all online discussion happened. Nothing like that is even remotely possible with the way StackExchange is today.

To be bluntly honest I think you guys are just lucky that most of the ambitious and competent folks in the industry don't view discussion as "sexy" so you don't have as much ompetition as you would otherwise (quora is practically a joke). But realistically it's just a matter of time until SE will be out innovated.

[teh_klev]

"I remember back when you and Jeff were talking about taking over the way all online discussion happened." - not quite right. The problem in hand was that good Q&A was buried in discussion forum type apps.

The whole point of SO from the beginning was to build a Q&A site for programmers that didn't suffer from the shortcomings of using apps such as phpBB etc, where threads get hijacked and pages upon pages of extraneous discussion and arguments take place making it difficult to find and answer to a specific problem.

[lelandbatey]

I'm not totally sure about that, if for the sole reason that SO/SE has such a huge volume of answered questions already. Unless they make those answers harder to access, I think there will always be a contingent of people who'll need them.

However, I do hope that we get an even better discussion platform than the ones we have now. I really look forward to even cooler products in the future.

[termain]

"I remember back when you and Jeff were talking about taking over the way all online discussion happened."

Aren't they now -- or at least Jeff Atwood -- working on Discourse?

[voltagex_]

Yep, discourse.org. It's a little too heavy weight for my uses and I think they really need to get the client and server requirements down a bit so that it can take over where PHPBB was once used.

See http://discuss.emberjs.com/ and http://bbs.boingboing.net/ for real world implementations. It's very, very cool to see forums being dragged out of the 1990s.

[InclinedPlane]

Jeff left StackExchange, he's just working on his own now.