Both Joel Spolsky (Joel on Software) and Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror) had considerable celebrity among their target demographics. Compete estimates about 158,000 uniques per month at eith site (my guess is they get more than that) and both link to and often talk about Stack Overflow.

People paid a lot of attention to Stack Overflow from day one because of who was behind it. It definitely couldn't suck (and it doesn't -- for the reasons you mention in this article)... But the answer to your "How?" question that's closest to the truth probably has more to do with the celebrity of the founders than anything else.

This claim sounds highly bogus and sticks out like a sore thumb among the otherwise solid advice. The 'millions of pages' per month quoted come out at only 6 pages per second. I think we could all manage that given two 8-core servers loaded with memory, even without the mystical benefits of an MS stack.

I believe SO also uses memcached, which last I heard was an open source component. That and the fact SO's servers are stuffed with memory and CPUs probably has a lot more to do with their success in serving pages quickly than has SQL server.

Seriously, is this product placement?

You could be the smartest programmer and the best anthropologist in the world, but you can't think up Critical Mass.

Takeaway: If you want to start a community, make sure you do it in a field where you are a respected expert with a following (or partner with a respected expert). If not, start a blog, build a following first, then launch your community.

Sadly, the rest of the premise is a joke. Does the site use social mechanisms to shape behavior? Sure. Does that help shape the quality of content? Probably.

But is that the secret behind its (theoretical) 1/3 audience coverage? Could another person duplicate that? No. It's a function of fanboys, and the audience they chose (nerds).

That two super-famous people who have legions of fanboys in a field which is super impressionable and addicted to shiny new things, could create a social site which attracts a lot of people... not a surprise. But it can't be broken down to individual points of success which another person could use to duplicate that success.

My fave is 'Google as the [initiating] UI', increasingly a universal truth for almost all websites that are not yet discovered, community or otherwise.

But the other 8 building blocks could easily have been a different '8'... glaringly missing are things like 'Community/Stickiness', 'Accuracy/Relevance', 'Sharability/Openness', 'Authenticity/Authority'.

Perhaps RRW holds a little social media experiment and asks readers and social engineers alike to submit (vote, tag, ; > etc.) their nine most critical buildings blocks for social media site success.

And what about http://ask.metafilter.com, which was the first of the answers sites and another in which the quality has consistently been high?

For those that are calling BS on the MS stack I will ask how many of you actually use it? I have always found .net/iis/mssql can take a huge volume of traffic out the box.

And he's right, it does reduce participation. I was going to post, but close the window when I realized I'd have to register.

I'll be reading this more than twice, I think!

Reverse engineering social interaction - as done by Stack Overflow - isn't anthropology, as Amy and Cooper have said. Two reasons: wrong way round (anthropologists watch something already in existence, rather than invent a social scenario) and because it's not a cultural but a behavioural approach. You might be able to call it applied social psychology... But that wouldn't be such a catchy headline.

The buzzwords tossed out by @Thom are too vague to be useful. The snarky dismissiveness of @Amy just smells of jealousy. And, @Daniel, critical mass isn't sufficient to make SO useful. Yahoo! Answers, AskVille, Fluther, etc. have critical mass. It's the quality of the answers that make SO valuable to programmers.

In programming, the knowledge is so arcane and specific, if you're struggling with a problem, you may need to find the 2 or 3 people *in the world* who have run into the same problem before *and* successfully solved it. It's quite possible that your problem has never been dealt with, but you need a community of people with similar skills to help you find a creative solution.

That's not going to happen on those other sites.

Anyway, I find it amusing that non-programmers are bagging on Spolsky's depiction of SO's special sauce. 8 of the 9 "building blocks" (and, actually, performance does, too, just not that it has to be powered by Microsloth) have face validity to me and, importantly, are specific enough that someone wanting to build the Stack Overflow for, I don't know, sewing patterns could take them and implement them on their site. Badges? Yeah, I can implement that. Stickiness? Um, not so much.

For completeness, here's what I had to say about Stack Overflow immediately after asking my first question on the site: http://andrew.hedges.name/blog/2008/09/20/stack-overflow

However, I agree with most of the criticisms in the comments here. The biggest factor is the influence and popularity of the founders in drawing attention to the site. Having said that, I actually found it first through google. Their SEO is very good, and will only get stronger with time.

The claims about MS architecture vs. Linux/MySql, or whatever else the comparison may have implied, is completely off base. To be credible, publish real benchmarks comparing apples to apples. For that kind of stuff, unprovable anecdotes are not necessary. It takes away from the real point: Stack Overflow is a great site for programmers.

Cheers!

Walt

Nice link-whoring though.

This is, in fact, seen when some users are identified as "anonymous (google)" or "anonymous (yahoo)". These are people who keep returning to the site but haven't registered. The site is totally usable if you aren't registered.

Nice name calling, though.

However, it has as much to do with anthropology as it does with Chinese take-out. Maybe less.

These poor people need a basic liberal arts education. I suggest all StackOverflow users leave tips to finance this.

Anyway.

It seems to me that an ignored factor that makes the answers on SO better, is that that the questions are better. The subject matter itself creates a barrier to entry that weeds out most of the Yahoo Answers-level questioners (and answerers). Ask better questions, get better answers--to me that explains more than "badges" does.

Secondly, yes "celebrities" do have their role to play in "branding" and getting the "sales up". But if its a good thing, it does catch on. If the public does not like it, no matter who dishes it out, it just doesn't catch.

Thirdly, the "modus operandi" used here is I think the most important to understand, be critical appreciative, and not just write it off and brush it under a carpet.

The kind of voting mechanism, and that besides the community, even the one who has submitted the problem and which of the solutions was the best fit, has the say, is what I think has "anthropological underlying meanings" (be it ethonography, cultural anthro, behavioural anthro:lets stop splitting hairs here). An example of this would be village situation wherein a problem is taken to the community headman, in front of all the community. The headman does not think of it himself, but with the community involvement. Many solutions are forwarded, the best fit is accepted by the "initiator". The village recognizes that but also accepts the rest of the solutions as possible ones that others that could be used to solve similar other issues of their own, and everyone has gained here and learnt here. Evolution at its best ever visualized in a small "tool" that has helped win over the other tools that have yet to capture your imagination.

Secondly, yes "celebrities" do have their role to play in "branding" and getting the "sales up". But if its a good thing, it does catch on. If the public does not like it, no matter who dishes it out, it just doesn't catch.

Thirdly, the "modus operandi" used here is I think the most important to understand, be critical appreciative, and not just write it off and brush it under a carpet.

The kind of voting mechanism, and that besides the community, even the one who has submitted the problem and which of the solutions was the best fit, has the say, is what I think has "anthropological underlying meanings" (be it ethonography, cultural anthro, behavioural anthro:lets stop splitting hairs here). An example of this would be village situation wherein a problem is taken to the community headman, in front of all the community. The headman does not think of it himself, but with the community involvement. Many solutions are forwarded, the best fit is accepted by the "initiator". The village recognizes that but also accepts the rest of the solutions as possible ones that others that could be used to solve similar other issues of their own, and everyone has gained here and learnt here. Evolution at its best ever visualized in a small "tool" that has helped win over the other tools that have yet to capture your imagination.