I used to love stackoverflow when it was a read-only site for me. Since I have started participating to answer questions I have been having some mixed feelings about the site. Here are my thoughts in no relevant order.

• The site reeks too much of gamification. Even Wikipedia lists the site as an example of the new phenomenon (fad?). The site’s founder Jeff has confessed to it in his blog and in public fora albeit distancing himself from the terminology.
• The gamification is very efficient. Even while I don’t feel great about it, it is addictive.
• Is the gamification a better incentive, in the long run than organic online communities, e.g. R-help, or Archlinux Fora? In the long run are incentives at all a good idea for fostering online & open communities given the surprising truth about motivations?
• The talk about getting better job offers by the other founder Joel¹ are suspect.
• Niche languages like R and projects provide much lesser opportunity to garner higher scores because of fewer users.
• There is some doubt about whether the top users are slackers, really smart slackers no doubt, or stars. There is some doubt in my mind whether it will make me a slacker.
• Fluff questions or simple questions or hot-off-the-oven questions are the only ones that earn majority eyeballs and answers. One of the questions I scored highly on myself was one where I had just mentioned to a user to use the names function in R to get names of a list. Some other answers that I personally felt were more challenging were left in the cold.
• Personally I am wondering if time I spend on stackoverflow is better spent on books and blogs and open courseware that will push me in areas of weakness such as test driven development and low-level and systems programming. </span>

This is a nebulous mess of ideas in my head. I have not been able to decide if I want to keep participating. Time will tell. Meanwhile, I will be more conscious (and cautious) of the perils of being gamified and hitting a plateau. There is so much more still to learn on the long road.

Must stop talking about it then. But must sleep first.

Adieu.

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