I find SO perfect for the simple problems you have when you're new to a language/framework/whatever but when you get into the real nitty gritty problems its like nobodys home.
I did finally get enough rep on Server Fault that I can upvote things, which may help there. But I don't want to go through a concerted effort on each and every SE site I care about in order to participate. Maybe that's what SE wants (I know they want strong communities, I listened to the SE podcast since the very beginning) but it feels like a limiting factor to me.
Once you get over 200 rep anywhere in the network, you'll automatically get a +100 rep bonus on other sites you join so you don't have to "grind it out" for the basic privileges.
The low rep hurdles (anything < 100) are basically "know how everything works" bars (the number of people who mistake "answer" for "forum-style reply" and "community close votes" as "moderators" backs up the need for such hurdles), the high ones (down vote, edit, close, etc.) are the "strong community" ones.
My gut feeling is that SE's post structure, handling of reputation and permissions is overly complex... feature creep in a way.
I am glad to hear that your rep can affect other sites rep. I feel like the fractured approach doesn't work very well and it is good to see some improvements in account handling from the beginning like: - Easier account creation and management(openid feels very arcane and this has smoothed out a lot since the beginning I think) - Logging you back on when you visit (I guess they changed how they did session cookies or something, I get these 'welcome back' messages now) - Cross-site notifications and relationships
Maybe if they had gone with centralized SE accounts at the beginning with per-site reputations it would have been simpler. The current method might be because of how SE evolved from the 'original trilogy'.
But realistically, what else should one expect? The cost/benefit ratio just isn't worth it for the person writing the answer. It won't garner you enough points to be worth the time creating an answer that most readers won't even have the skills or knowledge to assess one way or the other. Far better to throw in your 2p by answering an everyday question with a workaday opinion that's shared by thousands of others. Don't frighten the horses, and wait for the waves of groupthink to buoy your score ;)
(I used to read and answer a fair number of questions in the C++ section, and after a while a definite party line became apparent, presumably due to the same incentives.)
Links?
Hasn't the subject been touched recently on HN ? I think I remember a commenter stating that SO degraded because its popularity attracted a flock of "police of the forum mentality kind" posters who would close or move subject based on wording or overzealous sorting of questions in order to get gaming points and that made old and experienced posters go away in reaction.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4131462
As the mods say, nothing to see here, move along ;)
At web scale, everything is crud to 5 nines. Give me noise controls. The good stuff's in there, but you need to be able to surface it.
I have to explicitly limit myself to specific tags I'm interested in, and even then, I can't mute the idiot posts. I'll check if downvoting a question does this. But that's not always appropriate -- there are fair questions that just don't pique my interest.
If you answered "no" to both 2 and 3, I would like to gently suggest that the community is only as good as its members make it.
Nitty-gritty problems tend to be the edge-cases that don't attract a lot of attention, hence fewer user participation.
That said, StackOverflow is without a doubt the single best programmer resource out there.
This applies to just about any business venture that involves investment by outside parties. There are obviously exceptions but usually when money gets involved, compromises start being made to make more money.
This has disillusioned me for my entire 16yr career... I have never found a company that wasn't internally corrupted by money.