Ask HN: Why didn't Stack Exchange dethrone BBoard?

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It seems like there are a lot of BBoard run communities. Why couldn't Stack Exchange dethrone BBoard as the community board of choice?

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I don't think that was really their goal. They wanted to make a better question and answer platform. If I wanted to talk about video games in general, I wouldn't go to a Q&A site about video games to talk about them, I would go to a BBoard type of a community. They both have their audiences and both fit needs of different communities.

Joel talks a little about Bboards in his interview on Mixergy and talks about their vision with developing Stack overflow and stack exchange in the first place. http://mixergy.com/stack-exchange-joel-spolsky-interview/

That seems reasonable. I'll look at the interview later; thanks.

It's just that BBoard's design and interface seem so dated, so cluttered. SE is just more slick, such that, a community could really spawn around it. :( oh, well.

Jeff Atwood has stated in podcasts that one of the goals of Stack Exchange was to kill phpbb and its ilk.

e.g. http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/03/podcast-85/

Luckily, phpbb is free.

Good point. :)

I guess SE could have provided a good way to have a ready-made, slick interfaced 2.0 with hosting and everything put together. I dunno.

Another question: would a migration tool to move away from phpbb to SE have helped?

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