Other sites have optimized for other things. Slant.co does a great job (in my opinion) of the "pros and cons" for different things. Quora has a more anecdotal spin to its thing. You can ask a question, get lots of viewpoints, but may not get any real answers for the underlying problem. Trying to make one site that does everything... I'm not sure it exists.

That last comment is more elaborately written in https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-... . Read it all, but it concludes with:

> We feel that the world is awash in questions, but not answers. Answers are the real unit of work in any Q&A; system. Therefore, the only logical thing to do is to maximize the happiness and enjoyment of answerers. If this means aggressively downvoting or closing unworthy and uninteresting questions, so be it. Without a community of people willing to answer questions, it really doesn’t matter if there are questions at all, does it?

This was written in the early days of Stack Overflow. I believe the philosophy there was "its easy to get questions." I'm not sure I agree with that... or at least, it is certainly not easy to get well asked questions and separating the well asked form poorly asked questions is an immense undertaking. I don't think the system that SO has has scaled well. That you have trouble finding answers that may exist show that there is too much noise in the system and unless you know exactly what you are looking for it becomes difficult. Try removing too much of the noise and people start complaining about losing internet points.

Aside from the Atwoodians and Spolskyians... there are the Zuckerbergites.

> No, Zuckerberg didn't have anything to do with Stack Overflow. The philsophy of :+1: however, is one that can be seen on Stack Overflow. The web is a social place, and Stack Overflow is too. People you interact with, you up vote. It makes them feel good and you feel good knowing they feel good. No one likes to get a dislike or unfriend on Facebook - and no one likes to get down voted or have their questions closed on Stack Overflow.

And the LinkedIn

> The world is a hard enough place to get a good job. Especially when there are scores of other people trying to that single entry level coding position that opened up and you just got out of college. So, how do you set yourself apart from all the others? You put Stack Overflow on your resume. You provided 200 answers on Stack Overflow! Opps, that one just got deleted.

And the freELance

> Did you know there is a site out there where you can pay money for people to do some work? I haven't gotten job as a programmer yet, but I took a bid on eLance for writing a facebook clone for $200 for some beer money. I know some JavaScript and php... At worst, I don't get it done but have some great material for when I get out of college (or maybe I'll drop out and become self taught on the weekends while answering phones)

All of these are competing for how the community on the site is run. Without direction you get rules and squabbles. The results of this show up in reviews (first post - everyone gets an up vote no matter how poorly written) and close / delete "wars" where people try to remove something seen as cruft and other people try undoing that... and it ends up undeleted and locked (and contributing to the noise that makes it harder for you to get an answer with a google search).

The site that you get when you don't try to have the great answers that arise from good questions, well... https://answers.yahoo.com/dir/index?sid=396545663&link=list

As to the narcissists? Its more of a "the people answering are trying to answer the question once." Its not to hear themselves, but so that programming problems are resolved by searching rather than by asking. Similar to the driving goal of Wikipedia - all knowledge easily available.

If answers were paid... that goes down an interesting path for philosophy and motivation. A difficult path for a web site (money is hard to handle) and motivation (you're only putting $0.05 on this question, we'll, I'll give you $0.05 of my time. "This can't be processed by a regular expression." - poor answers to poorly paid questions)