StackOverflow unwinding?

With communities in general (not explicitly referencing SO here), I've always felt that moderators are their own worst enemies.

They dictate the terms of use through enforcement. It's not fun to use something until you find that you aren't allowed to.

The best tools do not limit their usage patterns, and communities adapt and evolve to make these tools solve their problems.

These aren't always the same problems that the creators of the system or moderators intended to be solved.

So moderators kill the potential utility of a tool.

One of those potentials (now referring back to SO) is the unification of people with a shared interest in a programming language or knowledge domain.

Without community, why should a user invest in it?

So I assert (overly simplistically) that moderators kill communities.

It's funny that a huge chunk of the questions that I find extremely interesting and worth reading have been 'closed for .'

I've heard the same rants in any of the usenet groups I used to partecipate. :)

It seemed inevitable that 95% (some very high %) of StackOverflow was destined to be little more than an archive, leaving a very stagnant system as the speed of activity & build out slowed to a crawl.

Large, highly active development technology doesn't change every day. PHP has been around for 15 plus years, Python for 20 years. And those are two of most popular.

How many questions can ultimately be asked about PHP or Python, before you wipe out the radical majority of possible and important questions? Obviously languages like that evolve, but not very quickly once they hit a certain point in their life cycle.

As you saturate the big segments, you're going to naturally bleed off user excitement and interest. Stack will continue on, getting tons of traffic because their answers will remain extraordinarily valuable, but the ratio for the amount of new content in relation to existing content will continue to accelerate toward Stack being mostly an answers archive. That guarantees the stagnation of their community (perhaps leaving small pockets of excitement around new, lesser adopted tools).

Haven't communities like Wikipedia followed curves like this? Once you max out all the English topics (for example), then it's an update approach with a smaller number of new topics coming in. Net result ultimately being a lot less overall new content being added in relation to the existing base (demanding a peak in overall community activity). Wikipedia isn't nearly as exciting as it once was, several years ago, when the rate of build-out and topic addition was staggering. The wild west eventually becomes a boring suburb.

Instead of closing those questions, they could move them to the "Programmers" site. http://programmers.stackexchange.com/faq?mnu=1

All subjective questions are expected to be constructive. How do we define that? Constructive subjective questions:

  -inspire answers that explain “why” and “how”.
  -tend to have long, not short, answers.
  -have a constructive, fair, and impartial tone.
  -invite sharing experiences over opinions.*