> I think that attempting to apply a meritocratic measure (karma, a technical solution to a social problem) will always fail.
Give one exemple of a QandA site that has a better system than stackoverflow at that scale(i insist on the latter).There is none,because nobody has done better.
> Communities don't scale, so allow them to perform their own version of cell-division to remain highly relevant to their members.
Communities scale when they have strict rules that help promote civil discussions and interesting content.
That's the wrong question. Plus you've precluded any ability for me to answer with an example as "at that scale" requires something equal or bigger within the limited Q&A space.
The reason it's the wrong question is that Q&A is merely one form of communication that can exist within a community.
Conversations (forums) are another.
News/Link/Image sharing (the reddits, HNs, Diggs, Slashdot, etc) are another.
Even e-commerce has communities (through reviews and recommendations - Amazon reviews are an example).
Communities are merely groups of people that have a shared interest and agree to use some form of communication to collaborate around that interest.
I would argue that Reddit is a great example of a community that allows the type of division I describe (through subreddits).
Reddit shows that by doing so that they are able to keep the quality very high with a low and highly varied moderation policy at every applicable level of scope.
Communities don't scale. But providing tools that allow them to naturally divide into smaller communities increases the total size of that group of communities whilst retaining a high quality and low moderation effort within each area.
> That's the wrong question. Plus you've precluded any ability for me to answer with an example as "at that scale" requires something equal or bigger within the limited Q&A space.
You're basically saying SO system is broken, I say it is not because nobody has done better at that scale. Doesnt mean it is perfect,just mean it's the best thing we've come up with yet.You cant prove me wrong on that.
And SO is a QandA , it's not an image/link/sharing recommendation system, you talk about all these sites and pretend like they play in the same category as SO,that would make them comparable to SO.They are not.
> you talk about all these sites and pretend like they play in the same category as SO,that would make them comparable to SO.They are not.
They are.
They are all a form of content management system for a community or group.
And I'm not saying SO is broken, I'm saying communities don't scale. You can certainly tweak a community to get it farther down the road than other comparable communities (tags do this well for SO), but to imagine you've dodged the reality that communities don't scale is wrong.
Instead we should look at how things scale in societies, and they do so by splitting themselves into manageable sized groups... cliques, microcosms of the whole, each potentially a part of a larger clique and host to ever smaller cliques but all with the same capabilities.
You cannot scale a single community, but you can perform a sleight of hand (e.g. subreddits) to allow a natural sub-division of the whole into many smaller communities that collectively have scaled the parent microcosm (the parent itself is a subset of a society or the larger global population).
Disclaimer: I build community software, and I realised I've gone and used the company name in my writing.
By that argument, it's impossible for the most popular website in any area which has significant network effects to be flawed, which is just ridiculous.
Maybe nobody has, but that doesn't make it a wrong observation.
As one of the answers on the OP puts it, "I spend an excessive amount of time as of late trying to find a question that interests me enough to do the research to answer it." Karma SO-style doesn't solve that. I think buro9 has some really interesting ideas that might.
>Give one exemple of a QandA site that has a better system than stackoverflow at that scale(i insist on the latter).There is none,because nobody has done better.
Ok, its not at the same scale, because it has a narrower focus, but PerlMonks is better for Perl questions and encourages the sort of discussion that SO hates. (It probably does have as many Perl specific questions as SO though).
The styling is kind of outdated now, but the content is better. Unfortunately it is Perl specific, and I am mainly using Python these days. You would look up how to do something and come away with more knowledge of the language and reason why things are done, rather than getting just enough material to copy paste until your code works.
Give one exemple of a QandA site that has a better system than stackoverflow at that scale(i insist on the latter).There is none,because nobody has done better.
> Communities don't scale, so allow them to perform their own version of cell-division to remain highly relevant to their members.
Communities scale when they have strict rules that help promote civil discussions and interesting content.