#stackoverflow

One big problem with StackOverflow's model is that it naturally selects for a certain kind of narcissist. This might prove fatal in the long term.

This became clear to me after I acknowledged and understood the narcissistic traits within myself. Sure, most of my motivation is wholesome and pro-social: desire to help, empathy, altruism. But we all know the upvotes, public reputation, and earning special privileges also feeds self-esteem. And narcissism tends to be pretty drawn to sources of self-esteem.

The upside is that deeply knowledgeable and insightful people can often get a lot more value for their time than StackOverflow yields, but if they have some narcissism you can really get their own motivations to compel them to keep trying to write great answers.

The downside is that us narcissists tend to get our ego invested in any public disagreement or challenge. And we tend to be hyper sensitive to embarrassment and insecure about how people might see us. Most of us aren't very self-aware of any of this. Which ends up being a bit of a problem for other StackOverflow systems for improving the Q&A quality - comments, meta, close and duplicate voting, and so on.

Because I think you end up with a higher-than-average amount of people who over-fit comments as disagreements or criticisms, or take things personally, or who start to get a little too much of their self-esteem from how great of a job they're doing at the thankless task of keeping back the torrent of bad and duplicate questions, and so on. You get people who are more invested in what they already said or did being right than in becoming righter.