Scientific references or studies related to the Discourse/Stackoverflow's design

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Dear discourse team,

I read some interesting posts on coding horror’s blog (on the gamification for example) and I’m wondering if you have any references that helped you to build the wonderful StackOverflow and Discourse?
For me it’s clear that discourse or stackoverflow are way better than other existing platform. Yet I would like to understand and explain why.
I think you have some theories about managing people on teh internet. Did you use some studies or scientific papers as input for your design ? For example about the gamification, the reputation system, using markdown, the user interface, etc …

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Stack Overflow is not on topic here, check blog.stackoverflow.com archives.

One reference we used for Discourse is Randy Farmer’s book:

You may also like this talk which goes into some depth:

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I will look more closely to the archives of stackoverflow, I hope I will find some references I can cite in a scientific paper.

Thank you, your talk was really interesting.