It wasn't supposed to be like that. Atwood and Spolsky had an insufficiently refined concept of what makes a good question, that was overly tied to "keeping the riff-raff out" and insufficiently based in having a searchable reference that covers a full spectrum of "difficulty levels" but still having every question clearly posed and properly scoped.

Also, they had the usual incentives to avoid doing things that would slow down initial growth. They were trying to build a community, and they definitely succeeded at that.

It took until the "middle times" for people to really develop an understanding of how questions for a Q&A site are supposed to look. And then the rest of the time was spent trying to convey those standards accurately, caught between the usual archetypes of angry forum users, in a place that was not supposed to be a forum.

▲ NoMoreNicksLeft a day ago | parent [-]

And yet it was best when it was before everyone really developed an "understanding of how questions for a Q&A site were supposed to look like". That's the time everyone in this thread is looking back at fondly.

▲ zahlman 9 hours ago | parent [-]

No, no it really wasn't. People were yelling about the flood of crap back then, too.

For reference, here is the verbatim (except for code formatting for HN) Markdown of the initial version of a question asked in 2010, my answer to which became my highest-ever scoring answer (and which ended up getting over 2 million views):

  if I have list of numbers as [1,2,3,4,5...........etc ]
  and I want to calculate as that (2+1)/2
  and for the second
  (2+3)/2
  third
  (3+4)/2
  ...... etc

  how can do as that ?
  like sum the first point with the second and divide it by 2 .. then sum the second with third point then divide it by 2 .... etc ?

  also how can i sum a list of number ?
  a = [1,2,3,4,5,......ect ]

  is it:

  b = sum(a)
  print b

  in i get one number !?
  it doesn't work with me 
  help me plz