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Some thoughts:
"What Jeff and Joel don't realize is that no amount of Ajax is going to solve the problems that places like
CodeGuru and Experts Exchange have: a glut of mediocre programmers with no real experts to guide them.
Experts are, very rarely, going to spend their time mentoring beginners and untrainables.
They'd rather be writing software and discussing their ideas with other experts."
http://blogging-harmful.blogspot.com/2008/08/stack-overflow-blind-leading-blind.html
"These incorrect, inaccurate and often unintelligible answers go rocketing up the charts.
Later attempts to get correct information included are doomed to obscurity, being dwarfed by the popularity of the initial wank-fest of mediocrity."
http://ivan.blogs.chimerical.com.au/post/2008/09/07/Date-raped-by-StackOverflowcom.aspx
"It motivates you to think about how your answers or questions will be perceived by the crowd rather than about how helpful they are to the person asking the question, or how relevant they are."
http://www.thefreakparade.com/2008/08/stackoverflowcom-first-impressions/
"So if you post something wrong ... I can either ignore it or lose 1 point of reputation for giving you the down vote that you deserve (even then it will take five of us to fully cancel out the one up vote that you got from someone who didn’t know better)."
http://blog.uncommons.org/2008/09/12/stackoverflowcom-first-impressions/
"Because I think there's, like you mentioned, there's sort of the 'expert bias' which I think is kind of an illusion that you have all these experts waiting in the wings to do stuff.
There's really just a bunch of amateurs trying to do things together. The people that are truly experts are too busy to even help.
And if the experts are too busy to help, what difference does it really make if there are experts at all?"
Jeff Atwood:
https://stackoverflow.fogbugz.com/default.asp?W24224
Experience it yourself.
(Nothing personal against Joel Spolsky or Jeff Atwood, nor the decent programmers who follow them... just the masses of clueless morons voting up misinformation)