At a smaller company, it becomes much more evident that the contributions are being made more for self-promotion than for anyone's benefit. Either because you know the person making them and their personality, because the volume:quality is out of alignment, or because the person posting the question/answer wasn't actually having the problem and were just posting it for points.
Also the volume of organic questions is on the lower side, and could get easily drown out by what amounts to astroturfing. So in my experience, it never really gained adoption, and withered shortly after it's introduction.
I really fail to see how this is a negative thing. If anything, it's the people not doing it that caused the whole project to fail.
Measuring reach? certainly not. It was just setup as a confluence plugin by the corpit team and left as a free-for-all with no direction.
> I really fail to see how this is a negative thing
It discouraged engagement. You can argue until you're blue in the face if it should have or not.
If there's something to take away here, I imagine that it's not "internal stackoverflows are doomed to fail", and more "unstructured adoption of internal stackoverflows don't go as smoothly as one fantasizes"
Had we made some set of individuals as having been responsible for the adoption and moderation of it, it may have gone better.
