Joel Spolsky used to work for Microsoft and Jeff Atwood was a Windows developer and they built StackOverflow on Windows + SQL Server. They commented that their audience is pragmatic developers who build for Windows because that's what their customers have to run software on.
When you look at experts from Microsoft world - the likes of Raymond Chen (Old New Thing), Jon Skeet (high profile Stackoverflow contributer in C#/.NET), Mark Russinovich (SysInternals creator), Dave Plummer (early Windows dev with YouTube channel now), they are/were employees and they present as polite and professional. Either they would not assume that everyone who doesn't know some obscure thing they know is an idiot, or they would keep that thought out of polite discussion.
Google AI answer says there are 35 million more developers today than in 2005, citing Evans Data Corp and Slashdata. There are tens of millions of developers around the planet writing internal desktop software, dashboards, reports, CRUD web pages, who have been in their jobs <3 years, and likely arrived to a language/framework/tooling/libraries they weren't familiar with.
I bet Spolsky naively expected that would be SO's userbase. Millions of company employees around the world asking each other politely "how to merge two lists in Python" or "what's the idiomatic way to read lines of text from a file in C#" or "what's this second parameter in this Win32 API call" and building an 'internal' company wiki of common questions and answers that people entering any environment/language/API/library commonly have.
Instead they opened to a world where flames and insults that would get someone written up or fired from a company are celebrated, particularly when directed at Microsoft users and ordinary company programmers. A world where people will not only assume that if someone doesn't know a programming fact they are an idiot, but will prefer insulting instead of saying nothing. A world where everyone is either an expert or an idiot with nothing in between.
It's a wonder SO worked as well as it did, for as long as it did.
When you look at experts from Microsoft world - the likes of Raymond Chen (Old New Thing), Jon Skeet (high profile Stackoverflow contributer in C#/.NET), Mark Russinovich (SysInternals creator), Dave Plummer (early Windows dev with YouTube channel now), they are/were employees and they present as polite and professional. Either they would not assume that everyone who doesn't know some obscure thing they know is an idiot, or they would keep that thought out of polite discussion.
Google AI answer says there are 35 million more developers today than in 2005, citing Evans Data Corp and Slashdata. There are tens of millions of developers around the planet writing internal desktop software, dashboards, reports, CRUD web pages, who have been in their jobs <3 years, and likely arrived to a language/framework/tooling/libraries they weren't familiar with.
I bet Spolsky naively expected that would be SO's userbase. Millions of company employees around the world asking each other politely "how to merge two lists in Python" or "what's the idiomatic way to read lines of text from a file in C#" or "what's this second parameter in this Win32 API call" and building an 'internal' company wiki of common questions and answers that people entering any environment/language/API/library commonly have.
Instead they opened to a world where flames and insults that would get someone written up or fired from a company are celebrated, particularly when directed at Microsoft users and ordinary company programmers. A world where people will not only assume that if someone doesn't know a programming fact they are an idiot, but will prefer insulting instead of saying nothing. A world where everyone is either an expert or an idiot with nothing in between.
It's a wonder SO worked as well as it did, for as long as it did.