With that introduction, I strongly recommend reading A Group... in particular the fourth item of the Fourth Things to Design For.
> 4.) And, finally, you have to find a way to spare the group from scale. Scale alone kills conversations, because conversations require dense two-way conversations. In conversational contexts, Metcalfe's law is a drag. The fact that the amount of two-way connections you have to support goes up with the square of the users means that the density of conversation falls off very fast as the system scales even a little bit. You have to have some way to let users hang onto the less is more pattern, in order to keep associated with one another.
The design of Stack Overflow is one that tries to hinder the ability to discuss. This is intentional. Consider how hard it is to search discussions. Try finding a comment here or a particular post on Reddit, or something someone said on Usenet or a mailing list archive. They work ok in small sizes, but they fail miserably when the scale goes up.
If polling / opinion gathering / discussions were allowed, Stack Overflow would be no more useful than forums of old. It would be impossible to find anything of value later because there would be too much noise. All of the chatter makes finding the questions and answers that people are searching for harder. Having questions that don't follow the "One question, one complete answer" make it more acceptable to ask more of those questions making it even harder to find the question with the answer.
There are other sites that are better designed for polling and discussions. Stack Overflow because of that. Hacker News, Reddit, Quora, Slant.co. Stack Overflow doesn't need to be all things to all people.
Stack overflow doesn't need to be all things for all people. Its trying to do one thing and do it right. Fighting against that design brings friction in usability. Fighting against the intent behind that design brings friction in the community.
Stack overflow is susceptible to someone providing a better Q&A site. But building a better Q&A site that provides for discussions? I haven't seen that design scale much beyond the department Confluence install.
Continuing to the next paragraph from A Group...
> This is an inverse value to scale question. Think about your Rolodex. A thousand contacts, maybe 150 people you can call friends, 30 people you can call close friends, two or three people you'd donate a kidney to. The value is inverse to the size of the group. And you have to find some way to protect the group within the context of those effects.
With that introduction, I strongly recommend reading A Group... in particular the fourth item of the Fourth Things to Design For.
> 4.) And, finally, you have to find a way to spare the group from scale. Scale alone kills conversations, because conversations require dense two-way conversations. In conversational contexts, Metcalfe's law is a drag. The fact that the amount of two-way connections you have to support goes up with the square of the users means that the density of conversation falls off very fast as the system scales even a little bit. You have to have some way to let users hang onto the less is more pattern, in order to keep associated with one another.
The design of Stack Overflow is one that tries to hinder the ability to discuss. This is intentional. Consider how hard it is to search discussions. Try finding a comment here or a particular post on Reddit, or something someone said on Usenet or a mailing list archive. They work ok in small sizes, but they fail miserably when the scale goes up.
If polling / opinion gathering / discussions were allowed, Stack Overflow would be no more useful than forums of old. It would be impossible to find anything of value later because there would be too much noise. All of the chatter makes finding the questions and answers that people are searching for harder. Having questions that don't follow the "One question, one complete answer" make it more acceptable to ask more of those questions making it even harder to find the question with the answer.
There are other sites that are better designed for polling and discussions. Stack Overflow because of that. Hacker News, Reddit, Quora, Slant.co. Stack Overflow doesn't need to be all things to all people.
Stack overflow doesn't need to be all things for all people. Its trying to do one thing and do it right. Fighting against that design brings friction in usability. Fighting against the intent behind that design brings friction in the community.
Stack overflow is susceptible to someone providing a better Q&A site. But building a better Q&A site that provides for discussions? I haven't seen that design scale much beyond the department Confluence install.
Continuing to the next paragraph from A Group...
> This is an inverse value to scale question. Think about your Rolodex. A thousand contacts, maybe 150 people you can call friends, 30 people you can call close friends, two or three people you'd donate a kidney to. The value is inverse to the size of the group. And you have to find some way to protect the group within the context of those effects.