I see a lot of complaints, about questions closed as redundant etc, and about moderation, but what keeps someone from putting a better version up? In particular unlike quora, the reputation of the person answering doesn't seem as important. most people would accept anyone's answer as long as it works.
My impression is that the network effect comes from where people choose to go to ask questions. You go where you know your question has a good chance of getting answered. As such sites grow as "bases of knowledgeable people", they become a Schelling-point pulling people-with-questions toward them.
That's the first-order effect. The second-order effect is that people who are familiar with one of the StackExchange sites, if they have a question about something that doesn't fit there, might default to looking at the sibling list of sites to find a good place to ask their question, even if that sibling site is smaller than some out-of-network Q&A forum on the same topic. The smaller sites in the network don't quite gain cachet from being associated with their larger siblings, but they sort of gain "an expectation of having your question answered" inherited from their bigger siblings—whether it's true or not.
That is true but SE gained a critical mass of answers by encouraging one set of behaviours through its points and badges system, then pulled a bait-and-switch and told those subject matter experts that they were no longer welcome. Wrong demographic, see.
SE is dying. The quality of the questions is falling because being welcoming to new users is deemed more important now than the newcomers absorbing the culture. Questions go unanswered. The real technical Q&A is on Github now. But this is what Spolsky and Atwood wanted all along, good luck to them with their new community of newbies and SJWs.
Search issues and PRs - that’s where the real knowledge is now.
When I Google a question, an SE link is still the most common thing
Yep because SE gained critical mass, and in its earlier incarnation was often linked to from outside. But in its present form recent question are unanswered and old answers are obsolete. Because all the people who actually did the work were told by SE that they had served their purpose and were no longer welcome.
I’ve been wondering the same thing myself lately, the only advantage I can think of this accumulated information on the site (in the form of Q&As). I’d imagine a majority of SE traffic is people reading old questions, though if anyone knows this assumption to be wrong please correct me. I also wonder if scraping the Q&As and posting elsewhere would be some sort of legal violation? It would be fairly trivial to host the current body of knowledge up to this point on a static site and then start fresh.
> I also wonder if scraping the Q&As and posting elsewhere would be some sort of legal violation?
The (unilateral) relicensing was another recent issue, but generally not. All user contributions are licensed CC-BY-SA 3.0 so I don't see legal reasons stopping you. Google won't send you any traffic, though, because it will be duplicate content and the original has a gajillion links pointing to it.
I link to websites when I copy someone else's code, for attribution. How do these "build pipes" expecting me to do it instead if the code is from stack exchange ?
Maybe I don't understand your question, but there's a huge network effect of people browsing the site and answering questions. Anybody can put up a Q&A site, but to gain traction the site needs answers.
It does raise the question of what happens when StackExchange shuts down. There's a lot of knowledge stored there, hopefully it's not lost.
I see a lot of complaints, about questions closed as redundant etc, and about moderation, but what keeps someone from putting a better version up? In particular unlike quora, the reputation of the person answering doesn't seem as important. most people would accept anyone's answer as long as it works.
so what's the important network effect here?