Ironically enough, this article’s pretty trollish: it’s mostly name-calling (“soup Nazi”, “troll”, “cool kids” etc) and, more importantly, doesn’t suggest a better alternative. Without that, the author’s conclusion should be, “This is one of the best models we have for creating useful content on the internet, and I have zero idea about how to improve it without breaking other stuff.”
…democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time… — Churchill
It might help to remember that SO is not a discussion forum or a tutoring service. Its purpose is to create and curate highly accurate, useful knowledge for programmers (and others, within the SE network). It’s not there to help people who are just starting out with programming, although that does happen (sometimes going to huge lengths to help very new people, e.g. this question.). I’ve recommended tutoring services for people numerous times on there, to help them on their journey, but, again: just because people answer programming questions on SO, it doesn’t mean that SO’s model owes people an answer to any programming-related question. a) It’s free advice and b) tutoring is not its raison d’être.
Finally, the criticism that other people can answer before you and if you write a bad answer you get downvoted is not a criticism at all. More like a brilliant system that gets the best answer to the top. Not the one that complains the most, or the one written by the person who networks the best, or even the one that appears on a free publishing platform that has no QA on articles, but just, as far as is possible when dealing with humans, the best answer. And I’ll take a load of high-quality content online over having one or two more worthless internet points any day.
