[marcfowler]

I don't know whether it's because of the type of questions I've ever asked on there, but I've found it to be excellent, and I always get my questions answered perfectly.

The attitude on there seems to be slightly terse, but, it is designed and really focussed on Q&A, not discussion. So I don't know that I really agree with the criticism of it.

[zamalek]

> I've found it to be excellent, and I always get my questions answered perfectly.

That's debatable. I used to be a fairly regular contributor. Fairly often I'd get beaten to the answer by the guy "who types in the minimal amount to be correct." The asker would then immediately tick the answer instead of waiting for my answer which has a great deal more information (important caveats, alternative approaches, pros/cons). Incomplete information is a smaller concern, though.

The greater concern is the knowledgeable person who "who types in the minimal amount to be correct, leaving out crucial information resulting in actually incorrect information." The type of information you can easily discredit with a simple CLI application, or the type of information that blows up in the fact of 100 requests/sec. It has a green tick mark next to it.

That green tick mark is never going away - the asker has long since left the website. The answerer is never coming back because he has his karma points and will ignore any and all comments you make pleading for him to correct it (remember: you can't make meaning-altering edits to answers.

That's the crux of it. S/O has some great insightful information but also has some downright dangerous garbage, dangerous amounts of which has a green tick next to it. The gamification fixed the human troll-like tendencies (for a while) but brought out another dangerous trait: the ability to do almost anything (lie, half truths, rush jobs) in order to get imaginary internet points.

[marcfowler]

Actually I agree with you - good point - I can see why being on the other end (i.e. as the answerer) can be really frustrating, especially as you said, your answer can be 'more' correct with greater detail etc.

As I said, my experience could very well be based on that I've only asked something like 5 questions on there, all very specific, which is really the kind of question perfectly suited for a site like that.

[DanBC]

There are badges for answers that score highly but which do not get accepted.

[zamalek]

Which is fine were I to care less about correctness: rewarding the person who answered correctly does nothing about the green tick on the incorrect or incomplete answer. The gamification was a device to improve the quality of the content on the website, which worked really well until human nature found the path of least resistance.

The badge is an acknowledgement of a problem/bug in the design of the game, not a fix.

[lfowles]

If it's any consolation, as a regular reader, I rarely look for the answer with the green checkmark. I read through the top X answers until I find one that answers the question in terms I can understand. Perhaps a better fix is to mark the question as Answered, rather than mark a Specific Answer.

[ucho]

All of this sounds like "The decline of Wikipedia". Number of edits and active users keeps falling. Many people tried to find the reason, but maybe it is just natural? It is no longer peak popularity for either page. Also there is always some churn on science/tech related "forums" - same questions/problems are posted over and over - not many people can stand it over long periods of time.

[rspeer]

It's certainly the same phenomenon as Wikipedia -- certain users become influential, and some of them use their influence to solidify the way they do things and make the site more like what they want. This often is at odds with what a new user wants because they can't remember being a new user.

SO's many levels of reputation that give you additional abilities, I think, made the whole process happen faster. It got the site ramped up and turned into a reliable resource faster, and it also let people create their fiefdoms of influence where they wall out new users faster.

[catnaroek]

"Focused on Q&A" is a good thing. "Focused on questions whose answers trivially follow from what the documentation says" isn't. Stack Overflow ought to complement the documentation, not replace it.