It's not the discussion Stack Overflow seeks to squelch; it's the noise. Unfortunately, discussion is one of the things that attracts noisy posts, so it's not exactly something that's actively encouraged.
It's not the discussion Stack Overflow seeks to squelch; it's the noise. Unfortunately, discussion is one of the things that attracts noisy posts, so it's not exactly something that's actively encouraged.
The people who tend to rise in a site that's organized that way are people who devote the most time to volunteering for the site. And volunteering for the site means spending a lot of time reeeeaallllyy focused on a glowing screen. Meaning people who naturally rise to the top in such a community are people who've chosen to devote large portions of their free time to content, not people.
I find voting systems tend to squelch most of the idiots on technically focused forums.
Stack Overflow was designed so that the next person with the same question could find the answer more easily. The next person could avoid having to go through Sun's Java forums, and CodeRanch, and /r/Java, and /r/JavaHelp and the comments of someone's blog post, and ... Too many places with too much tangental knowledge that wasn't well indexed. Despite the idiots and trolls having posts removed,
With Stack Overflow, one knows that if they ask a question there (admittedly, that fits within the focus and quality guidelines) they will get an answer - not someone commenting on another comment that is indistinguishable from an answer (comments vs answers). And if they search Stack Overflow, and find the question that has an answer - it is an answer. That is the key value proposition of Stack Overflow in that the next person who has the same question as you do can find it easily.