I'm a moderator at
CodeRanch, a large programming forum. We have discussed a number of times the differences between our discussion forum and Stack Overflow's Q&A format. They are different and serve different purposes. Reddit is a little different, but I think much of the same still holds.
Discussion forums like this (chief delphi) and CodeRanch have a few benefits:
- Build community
- Mentor new members on good conventions (downvoting doesn't accomplish that. And often you are downvoted without any explanation of the actual problem)
- Professionalism (or GP here) - both CD and CodeRanch encourage real sounding names. People tend to be nicer when talking to someone who sounds human
- A "be nice" rule. CodeRanch calls it "be nice". Here we call it GP.
Different formats are good for different things. Reddit isn't "the one true way." Neither is CD.