Wow, time flies (for both the age of SO and how long since Jeff was involved).
So I'm onboard with the concept of SO as Wikipedia. Fine. Weirdly I see no mention of some of the bigger problems (as I see them). And what's weird about these problems is they were completely foreseeable by anyone who paid the tiniest bit of attention to Wikipedia.
1. TMS (Toxic Moderator Syndrome). You have askers, answerers and moderators. All have their purpose but they are not equal.
- People who ask questions mainly derive value from SO by getting answers to their problems and this is how it should be (and the karma system reflects this).
- People who answer questions. This is where most of the value is derived from.
- Moderators. While cleaning up the site has value it should be recognized that this is a utility function. The karma system reflects this but any system like this seems to attract a certain kind of personality who embodies the principle that "those who can, do; those who can't, moderate".
Look at any highly ranked answer (or question) and you'll see a litany of questionable edits (which eventually rob the answerer of any karma when that question or answer gets 30+ edits and goes "community"). I don't have a problem with this kind of pedantry.
What I do have a problem with is closing of using questions because of a culture that has decided completely on its own what qualifies as acceptable content for the site. Anyone who has used SO more than a few times will have come across useful questions that don't have mathematically provable correct answers and are closed as off-topic.
It's like the SO mods feared flamewars that never happened and in the process created an equally bad (if not worse) situation.
2. Accepted answers that are wrong (or were right but are now wrong). Why can't these be edited?
3. What to do with all that VC money. This never made sense to me but this was in the era where some (VCs mainly it seems) thought that Q&A sites like Quora were going to be the next unicorns (I never did and still don't).
This has led to side businesses like SO recruiting, which I never thought was going to go anywhere because if you say contributions to the site were a useful signal in hiring (which I'll accept as valid), last I looked at this (a few years ago) only some ~25,000 with non-trivial amounts of karma. That's not a sufficient market and pales in comparison to, say, Github repos as a signal.
4. How to handle stale information. I still see no solution to this.
I really do wonder what went into Jeff bailing 2 years in (assuming he wasn't pushed out). Joel still seems to be plugging away, which is a bit weird given he's done much better out of, say, Trello.
There's honestly nothing magic about SO. It's just fairly simple software with a clean UI that came about at a time where the alternative was the giant trash heap that was and is EE. Don't get me wrong, it's definitely useful.