The scalability problem is indeed at the core of Stack Overflows woes.
When it was small, it was easier to handle the questions of the day, guide new users, handle the "fun" questions (and answers) in a way that wasn't off-putting, and generally be a smaller community.
As SO grew, it lost control of the culture that had been established there before (much like Usenet (different thread)) and became a place for people to do hit and run questions - drop their question, come back later, get the answer and move on.
The majority of the users of the site had moved from "community of people sharing information - asking and answering" to "new users without any cultural attachment asking a question and not remaining."
The core group culture became more defensive of their ideals... and lots of friction between management wanting more engagement and new users just wanting people to answer their question ("if you don't like the question, just move on" being a frequent refrain).
From A Group is its own worst enemy:
> 2.) The second thing you have to accept: Members are different than users. A pattern will arise in which there is some group of users that cares more than average about the integrity and success of the group as a whole. And that becomes your core group, Art Kleiner's phrase for "the group within the group that matters most."
> The core group on Communitree was undifferentiated from the group of random users that came in. They were separate in their own minds, because they knew what they wanted to do, but they couldn't defend themselves against the other users. But in all successful online communities that I've looked at, a core group arises that cares about and gardens effectively. Gardens the environment, to keep it growing, to keep it healthy.
> Now, the software does not always allow the core group to express itself, which is why I say you have to accept this. Because if the software doesn't allow the core group to express itself, it will invent new ways of doing so.
As the software didn't allow sufficient and proper moderation and curation tooling, the way that the the core group expressed itself was the more negative and ultimately toxic approaches. Snark and rudeness are the moderation tools of last resort.
A Group continues with:
> 3.) The third thing you need to accept: The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations. This pulls against the libertarian view that's quite common on the network, and it absolutely pulls against the one person/one vote notion. But you can see examples of how bad an idea voting is when citizenship is the same as ability to log in.
The current goals of upper management being advertising and engagement are not in alignment with the goals of the original founders (as idealistic as they were) and what remains of the core culture.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/
> It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.
Note that good is italicized in the above quote and is present in the original.
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Getting people to be able to find existing questions and clean up the SNR of the content out there on SO would improve it... but that would likely make a lot of lines go down rather than up (deleting 10,000 duplicates of one question would show up).
Trying to get Stack Overflow back to a scalable model doesn't further the engagement and upper management goals directly.
Instead, they're focused on more engagement... with not unexpected responses.
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/425532
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/425531
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/425530