Stack Overflow is:
A language-independent collaboratively edited question and answer site for programmers.
— StackOverflow
It is booming. USENET is not.
What did they do right that USENET got wrong?
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Before you can do much interesting trolling, StackOverflow requires you to invest time to build an identity, and get enough reputation to do more interesting things. All an anonymous troll can do is ask a question that’ll get flagged and hidden immediately. No fun there.
Nothing–USENET was king for *years*. Before the WWW. The WWW is a better medium, however, than the average mailing list.
Usenet’s big “problem” is that nobody ever wrote a user-friendly web interface for it. Instead, the people who really wanted to chat found is easier to hack up web forums filled with animated emoticons using PHP and MySQL, rather than figure out some bitchin’ gateway into the great gray world, ruled by curmudgeons content to seal themselves off from the hoi poloi.
-d