Stackoverflow has of a lot of terrible answers that get voted up by people who aren't equipped to evaluate them properly, and closed threads when anyone starts actual substantive discussions. It also suffers from lack of decent rewards for contribution. That's not what I would consider a good community.
Well, very often I will click through to SO from Google to a closed thread that got downmodded like crazy, but that nevertheless exactly solves my problem in less than a minute from the first answer.
Perhaps on some level SO knows this, and also knows that their mods are perhaps somewhat overzealous, and therefore has adopted the current state of affairs as a sort of compromise/duct-tape solution.
I too, have found so many downmodded questions to have the exact answer I needed for a particular problem. It's by far the most frustrating part of using Stack Overflow.
The overzealous modding has had a chilling effect on my desire to ask a question on SO, because nobody wants their question to be downmodded as a stupid or pointless question.
It would be quite interesting to know which topics you find this happening. I don't tend to see this kind of toxicity on SO. I'm frequenting C# and .NET. Maybe Jon Skeet drags the C# community up to his level!
The overzealous modding is a feature not bug of SE sites.
I find some of the moderation really frustrating but it's worse when the people closing threads and answers are also the ones leaving zero-content comments.
While I also whine about Stack's broken moderation, I still contribute because its heart's in the right place as a site that genuinely wants to help people learn and get answers. The problems you mention are more like implementation details that are subject to ongoing experimentation and can't be changed overnight.
The good thing about Stack is anything I write there will be as easily accessed as if I'd posted it on my own blog, not re-purposed as SEO-bait and blurred or hidden until the user signs up. Furthermore, it's licensed under Creative Commons instead of serving as a donation to the site owner.
Quora is actually a great site once you're logged-in and I find a lot of the content fascinating, but I also wonder why people continue to contribute to such a closed system.
this is absolutely not true, stackoverflow is an invaluable resource and what you say might happen very occasionally, but the vast majority of upvoted answers actually helped a lot of people.
Despite what you claim as lacking rewards it seems to have thrived and attracted contributions. I don't really care what you consider a good community, or even accept the premise that there needs to be any notion of community. Why attribute labels, the model seems to work just fine.
