It was the lead in to the "when you think about how you'd design it, you'd end up with Reddit or Discourse". I have seen dozens of them attempt to be "we're going to be Stack Overflow, but for those other questions" - get an enthusiastic start, and then peter out as lack of activity and disproportionate moderation requirements started to become evident.

For the network effect, try Reddit and consider why /r/AskProgramming doesn't have the mix of people that you're after. Or consider using AskHN here... but note also that this site (which has similarly smart people) isn't the right spot for such questions on a regular basis... why do we want to make Stack Overflow into something that both the software and the established community resist? ... and consider that it was designed that way to make it difficult and awkward to support those types of questions.

The collection of smart people answering questions on StackOverflow are doing so because it is StackOverflow and they can answer a question and then continue on. Eric Lippert and John Skeet don't want to be getting in discussions or they'd be more active in other places. If you ask "what is the best X" on Stack Overflow you'd still not be getting their answers.

As an aside to the "what is the best" - for a while I was recommending https://slant.co/ as a rather well done site (with even less comments) designed for that style of question. https://web.archive.org/web/20221104202743/https://www.slant...

I keep saying that Stack Overflow was designed a certain way. It was. Jeff was strongly influenced by Clay Shirky who wrote A Group is its Own Worst Enemy ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27706413 ). Clay was on the original board of directors for Stack Overflow. The "poorly designed" comments are in response to:

> 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.

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https://stackoverflow.fogbugz.com/default.asp?W25450

Atwood: Maybe. But the cool thing about this is this is not just me, because that would be boring. It is actually me and Clay Shirky. You know, Clay Shirky is one of my heroes.

Spolsky: Oh...

Atwood: Yeah I know, it's awesome. So we get to talk about like building communities online and I get to talk about StackOverflow, you know, and all the lessons we've learned and, get to present with Clay. Obviously he's an expert so. That's one of the people that I have emailed actually, because I thought that would be good, because he is from New-York city as well. So we could A) show him the site and B) talk about the thing we are going to do together in March, because he needs to see the site to have some context. I mean I did meet him and talk to him about this earlier a few months ago, I think I mentioned it on the podcasts. But that was before we had sort of even going to beta, so there's really not a lot to show him. But I would love to show him in person. So we'll see if I'll hear back from him, I do not know.

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Just as Star Wars is a manifestation of Campbell's Hero's Journey (lots of Lucas Campbell links), Stack Overflow is an implementation of "A Group...". There are things that worked well, there are things that worked poorly.

The sites that compete with Stack Overflow for the other questions already exist. That they don't attract the experts or that they don't allow such questions is a statement about what would happen on Stack Overflow if you were try to make it so those questions were allowed.

Remember that https://news.ycombinator.com/ask exists and has those less well formed discussions that clearly doesn't match Stack Overflow's Q&A format.