As a complement to my previoust post, I thought it might be useful to try and address what we are NOT trying to build:
- Not an improved collaborative encyclopedia;
- not an improved forum.
Our objective is to build an improved Questions and Answers platform.
And what is a Q&A platform used for?
- ask questions;
- get answers…
- without the fluff*…
- with the possibility that, as a bonus, it’ll also be helpful to other people.
(*) to be clear: I think short “hello” and “thank you” notes in posts are _fine_.
In answer #18, @gilles shares a reasonable opinion: the world doesn’t need another discussion platform. I would just go one step further and state, with almost certainty, it also doesn’t need another collaborative (impersonal) encyclopedia, particularly not one with less strict citation requirements. And, in any case, that does look like a recipe for failure, to me, personally (in terms of quality control).
Now, to address some considerations from this answer (also echoed in another thread):
I don’t think the competition for the highest score is as serious as this makes it sound like. Besides, the “careful editing” culture has been in place (afaik) for almost as long as the platform itself.
For a while now, we’ve had (among others) the following reason for rejecting suggested edits:
clearly conflicts with author’s intent
This edit deviates from the original intent of the post. Even edits that must make drastic changes should strive to preserve the goals of the post’s owner.
The word owner at the end is of particular note. Although the article you linked from Jeff (from 2018), and even the help page on editing makes mention to the fact that Stack Exchange is like Wikipedia, the reality is that no, it’s very much not like it: Not only there’s such a thing as copyright ownership for any content you contribute (even though you agree it is “perpetually and irrevocably licensed to Stack Overflow on a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive basis pursuant to Creative Commons licensing terms (CC-BY-SA)”), but also the reputation system is a core component of the platform and has been since its inception, as demonstrated in the excerpts below.
From: Coding Horror - The Gamification (October 2011)
(…) how do you encourage groups to do what’s best for the world rather than their own specific, selfish needs?
When I looked at this problem, I felt I knew the answer. But there wasn’t a word for it in 2008. Now there is: Gamification.
Gamification is the use of game design techniques and mechanics to solve problems and engage audiences. […] Gamification works by … taking advantage of humans’ psychological predisposition to engage in gaming. The technique can encourage people to perform chores that they ordinarily consider boring, such as completing surveys, shopping, or reading web sites.
I had no idea this Wikipedia article even existed until a few months ago, but we are featured prominently in it. It is true that all our stolen ideas about reputation systems, achievements, identity, and vote scoring are in place specifically to encourage the adoption of the brave new no-nonsense, all-signal Stack Exchange Q&A model. Without those incentive systems, when left to their own devices, what you get is … well, every forum ever created. Broken by design.
(…)
Yes, we have ulterior motives, but let me explain why I think gaming elements are not tacked on to the Stack Exchange Q&A engine, but a natural and essential element of the design from day one.
From: Joel on Software - A Dusting of Gamification (April 2018)
(…) I had to think for a minute to realize that Stack Overflow has “gamification” too. Not a ton. Maybe a dusting of gamification, most of it around reputation.
Stack Overflow reputation started as a very simple score. The original idea was just that you would get 10 points when your answers were upvoted. Upvotes do two things. They get the most useful answers to the top, signaling that other developers who saw this answer thought it was good. They also send the person who wrote the answer a real signal that their efforts helped someone. This can be incredibly motivating.
Now, this wasn’t an original idea. It was originally inspired by Reddit Karma, which started out as an integer that appeared in parentheses after your handle. If you posted something that got upvoted, your karma went up as a “reward.” That was it. Karma didn’t do a single thing but still served as a system for reward and punishment.
What reputation and karma do is send a message that this is a community with norms, it’s not just a place to type words onto the internet. (…) Our goal is to get the best answers to questions. All the voting makes it clear that we have standards, that some posts are better than others, and that the community itself has some norms about what’s good and bad that they express through the vote.
(…)
By the way, Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, the creators of Reddit, were themselves inspired by a more primitive karma system, on Slashdot. This system had real-world implications. You didn’t get karma so that other people could see your karma; you got karma so that the system knew you weren’t a spammer. If a lot of your posts had been flagged for abuse, your karma would go down and you might lose posting or moderation privileges. But you weren’t really supposed to show off your high karma. “Don’t worry too much about it; it’s just an integer in a database,” Slashdot told us.
This article goes then makes some excellent remarks such as “Stack Overflow’s reputation system serves to recognize that you’re a human being and we are super thankful for your contribution”, and then discusses a few of the downsides of the reputation system; and the end conclusion is not entirely clear.
However, a careful analysis will reveal that these problems are not inherent to reputation in a broad sense - rather, they are mostly specific to the implementation used throughout SE and can be solved in a number of effective ways, each very minor and incremental.
Jeff’s article from 2018 goes to great lenghts to draw similarities between SE and a wiki. The similarities are there, but limited. For instance, a wiki doesn’t have this:
Furthermore, the entire Stack Overflow is a competitive system of peer review section is populated with pro-reputation arguments. And the end, there’s an open question:
Maybe competition just isn’t your jam. Could there be a less competitive Q&A system, a system without downvotes, a system without close votes, where there was never any anxiety about posting anything, just a network of super supportive folks who believe in you and want you to succeed no matter what? Absolutely! I think many alternative sites should exist on the internet so people can choose an experience that matches their personal preferences and goals. Should Stack build that alternative? Has it already been built? (…).
Now, is that what we’re trying to build? If you ask me, I maintain my position: no.
I was satisfied with Stack Exchange. Well, not a 100% of course. The duplicate proposal system was unfriendly and inneficient, comments are excessively ephemeral, people still get away by answering duplicate questions, deleted posts are way too secret. And what bothers me the most (at least on Stack Overflow, where I participate more): beginners are repelled - even when their questions are totally conformant to all rules and guidelines, they’re often swiftly downvoted and removed just own grounds of being “too basic”; and the same happens to questions that are arbitrarily deemed “too localized”.
Regarding the first point, even Jeff seems to agree with me on that in the 2018 post:
perhaps it’s time for a more beginner focused Stack Overflow where duplicates are less frowned upon, and conversational rules are a bit more lenient?
– Yes! Well, maybe. I’m not a proponent of two (or more) separate sites. The simplest approach would simply be to have a beginner meta-tag that can easily be ignored by the most grumpy seasoned members. I’m sure there might be more sound strategies.
And btw: I’m a contributor to Wikipedia too.
In conclusion, reputation is a great mechanism for community self-moderation, a filter for spam and vandalism, a motivator for self improvement, and a reward for contributing your time and knowledge to helping others. It was a design consideration from day one in Stack Overflow, the first Q&A platform to *actually* succeed (to the best of my knowledge!). The SE model as currently is has its shortcomings, but ultimately, it has been demonstrated to work. I don’t think we want to forgo that lightly.
Implementing reputation when every post is a Wiki can’t possibly work without massive efforts - and even then, I remain skeptical it can work as well as the model I’m defending.
Has it been done before? I think so, more or less - thankfully. Remember Stack Overflow Documentation? That ended up discontinued and archived? (kudos, riptutorial)
Did I like it? Yes. Contribute to it? Yes. But how did it go? Did it fail? That depends on how you look at it, but… It never came even close to replacing “classic” Q&A, and never intended to, anyway (despite some expectations).
The reputation system, however, took a long while to be implemented, a couple iterations to be adjusted to a decent level, but even then, was never entirely satisfactory as far as I know.
Can we do better? And most importantly, should we?
Hence, when it comes to this project, I vouch for sticking to what works, improving (carefully) only where necessary.
In conclusion: Joel and Jeff started Stack Overflow because, at the time, the alternatives frankly sucked. The platform took off, helped millions of people and we were satisfied. But now, ten years later, it’s got its own sucking too. We have waited, hopeful that it would get back on the rails. With time, we progressively lost hope. More recently, it became so much clear just how unlikely it is that things will ever be fine with the platform once again, that we decided that enough is enough and realized that an alternative is direly needed. “If you want a thing done well, do it yourself”. Usually, we can settle for something that is just good enough; but, when the best thing you got actually sucks, it is time to take a stand. 
And finally:
But do you want to?
I know, you aren’t talking about yourself, but rather, of the largest proportion of SE users, who aren’t as concerned with any of the pressing problems that are driving us away. That is certainly true about Stack Overflow, and much less so about the smaller communities - though, of course, actual data would be needed. However, the members who are being pushed away are those who actually care about quality, about the community, about fairness and I’d even risk saying, about making the world a better place. These are the pearls. They deserve better.
Now, granted, if by some miracle SE actually manages to fix all of these ***k-ups and regain trust and engagement from their most valuable contributors, then it’s quite possible that I’ll happily go back to their platform and this project will not be as essential for me as it is right now.