The main thing they got right is that pages on the Stack Exchange network include (as primary content) exactly one question, followed by the answers to that question. That's it. All other side discussion, requests for more info, expressions of gratitude, etc, are secondarily attached as comments. They are visually and conceptually separate.

In retrospect, this is totally, obviously what you want, but there was a lot of momentum behind making Q&A sites look like a forum.

In other words, their success is well-deserved.

This is well deserved.

A little off topic but still about SE.

If you ever want to understand "social" not as in the buzzword but as in "what's it really about" I can highly recommend the Stack Exchange podcasts.

I know this is not their aim but it's actually one of the most insightful podcasts about social networks out there. So many great insights simply stemming from the conversations they have. For instance the one with Chris Poole from 4chan.

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/11/se-podcast-29-chris-po...

Good stuff and I am glad to see them move up the ranks.

I'm 90% sure that 15M of those new users are just Jon Skeet clones that upvote him!

But in all seriousness, stackexchange have completely stolen the parade from all other community driven Q&A sites.

Joel was correct when he withdraw support for customer hosted Stack sites, and went through the incubation process.

Stackoverflow has totally wiped out all of the other failing programming websites, and the community is a great one to be apart of. (I hated those sites that would obfuscate all the answers and try and get you to pay to sign up, while cloaking everything on Google).

Congrats.

One of the things I love about StackOverflow is that I learn even when I'm the one answering the questions. People are always happy to point out how I can make my code more clear, idiomatic or elegant all without trying to belittle me. Not to say other communities are worse--it's just that the absolute level of quality at SO is very good.

And, of course, since it's basically an MMORPG, it's addictive. Not that I mind--one of the best ways to learn a technology at an intermediate level is answering questions there. It's much more productive than a real MMORPG and more convenient time-wise than just learning from a book or by having a project (of course, I use those too: all the different methods augment each other).

Here's me trying to convince the Groovy mailing list to use StackOverFlow back in 2008.

http://osdir.com/ml/lang.groovy.grails.user/2008-09/msg00714...

Those guys wouldn't buy into it. It seemed liked such an obvious solution to the existing solution. Walking down an email thread then getting to the end with no answer. I think it's especially useful for a new or esoteric technology because it allows new users to come up to speed quicker. Scala, Go, Haskell can be learned in short order.

The one thing that could be improved is to partition answers that become dated. Also, some questions could be asked every 3-5 years. For example, best frameworks, etc. Tech changes fast.

I decided to learn ruby on rails (via http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ I highly recommend it) and stackexchange.com has been an invaluable resource. Both as I learn the ruby language, and troubleshoot issues as I'm coding.

Did anyone else notice that the page uses custom-made buttons for all platforms other than G+? I wonder if those buttons were made with not allowing Twitter and Facebook to track users in mind.

I think that's the prettiest page I've ever seen on their network. Hopefully we'll see some creative/design refreshes this year -- it makes a big difference.

Love StackExchange network, they deserve their success!

"Let that be a lesson kids: video games CAN make you succesful."

I agree.

I was probably responsible for 100k of those views as I was learning Rails. Cool note: I put a question on stack, went to do a Google search seconds later, and my question (I just made) came up. Cray

Have they published any revenue numbers? I'm happy to hear that they're growing like crazy, but knowing that they'll still be around in a couple of years would be even more awesome.

I wonder how their growth is within established sites, vs. adding new sites.

Lets get some revenues figures in here.