Constraints and Semantics
What makes Stack Overflow so successful? I was thinking about this the other day. What came before Stack Overflow? Mostly forums and mailing lists. And in a forum or a mailing list, what you get is a pile-up of data in basically chronological order. This turns out to be a difficult structure for asking and answering questions. So what Stack Overflow really did was this: Constrain the domain of possibilities to questions & answers Elaborate the types of communication that happen in that context, their operators and semantics You can talk about anything on a forum, or a mailing list. »