The Problem with Stack Overflow

I love Stack Overflow. I think it’s a fantastic resource, not to mention a beautifully-engineered social community. But sometimes mixing knowledge resources with social networking can be… distracting. Let’s say you’re, I don’t know, trying to choose an open source blog engine to add to a .NET site you’re working on.

It starts like this:

Then this:

Ah-ha… *click* -

Oooh – how exciting! A comment! *click*

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Some time later:

Thanks to xkcd for the cartoon, and for many, many more I have loved over the years.

Inspired by the last comment to my accepted answer for this. Where do I even begin?

Also - you have any idea how hard it is to get a screenshot of StackOverflow's squawk bar? Once you've seen it once, it goes away and never comes back. And you can't spoof it by setting up another user account to post a temporary comment on your own thread, because your second user account can't comment until it has reputation... I'm actually really quite impressed now at how hard it would be to game the system.