Up the barrier to entry to being able to be an off-topic/duplicate question Nazi. Sometimes those low-lying fruit are too tempting for some of the more OCD types not to pick.<p>Don't get me wrong, we need to police and remove / flag off topics and dups. But sometimes the flaggers don't understand what they're flagging and nuances get lost.<p>Make it harder for people to do what can amount to useful information being lost, which in my opinion is a costlier risk than a duplicate question or whatnot.
There should be a real difference between good questions and questions which could be solved by having a look at the docs.<p>People are just too lazy, SO became a replacement for many references, docs and trivial things.<p>At the current state, it's not possible to judge a developer by the SO points, we have to check the profile, browse through a few given answers and eventually create an opinion based on the quality of the answers.<p>It's simply because they might have answered a question called "How do I fill an array with 4 elements".
Thousand of people are lazy and voted that question up and also the answer.<p>What we have now, is a guy who got a ton of points by asking a stupid question and a guy who answered a trivial stupid question and got 120 up votes on that.<p>Why should we change that?<p>SO is a great huge site, developers can show what they have to offer, you can set up resume and you can search for jobs over SO.<p>SO just establish itself as an important tool for recruiter and companies looking for top notch developers but the points are misleading, someone who has answered lots of trivial questions isn't necessarily a good developer because of those trivial answers to trivial questions.<p>On the other hand, we got many people with below the 3k mark, who just answered really hard questions with 3-4 up votes.<p>What I'm afraid of is that someone with more points gets preferred in a decision between two developers from SO for a job position.
The <textarea> place where you write your answer really needs to be improved. It would be nice if they could make it wider, or allow for it be expanded by native browser functionality. Also, it would be great if when I pressed the tab key, it inserts a tab into the text buffer.
Make it clearer WHY so called 'homework questions' are not allowed and maybe come up with a different terminology. I see so many questioners get annoyed and say "But it's not homeowrk!!!" - it may not literally be homework, but it's a trivial question that you are just asking someone else to churn through for you.<p>On the other hand, more and more lazy questioners are just hiding the fact that it's a homework question. Confusingly, of course, there is the help-vampire/point chaser feedback that encourages this whole mess.<p>Furthermore, the rules that require MVC (minimal, verifiable, complete) examples don't work in all areas. The [algorithm] tag, for example tends to attract speculative questions where the questioner naturally hasn't written any code because they don't have an algorithm yet!<p>Finally, it might be nice to be able to combine answers to make one comprehensive one where two different answerers have different parts of the answer.
This is a hard one: Drop the gamification (badges, points) and find a way to intrinsically motivate a healthy community rather than extrinsically motivate people to game the system.
Make it possible for me to contribute. I'm a busy experienced software developer and I can't contribute anything to Stack Overflow because I haven't done enough piddly bullshit elsewhere to be able to upvote an answer or provide my own. It's a vicious cycle of non-participation.
Allow you to filter out certain topics you are uninterested for the questions page. (i.e. Right now you can choose what you want to see, but say I want to see all things that having nothing to do with windows, I can filter that out)
Up the barrier for asking:<p>I see moderators complaining about an endless stream of low quality questions.<p>By requiring users to lurk or something they get an idea before being allowed to "spam".
Find a place for all those interesting questions that are "not a good fit for our Q&A format", because it's frustrating to end up on those all the time.
The reputation system should be overhauled. A user-based PageRank-style system would highlight the quality of work over quantity and a high rank would give a user voting power that would take some burden off of moderation.<p>A monetary voluntary "tip" system (or cash "bounty" system) would be nice too. Talented people would be more willing to contribute if it supplemented their income. Wrought with unforeseen consequences I'm sure...
I would come up with a better way to organize the information and also maybe have a filter to only show entries that have an accepted answer.<p>Many times there are a ton of duplicate questions just because the information on existing posts is not well organized and people cannot find it.
The good answers are often linked to in blog posts. You know the answers that have taken time to construct. Use the link back to improve the standing of the author