It's full of people who can't be bothered to do even the most trivial investigation into their own damn bugs - the same trivial "I didn't configure it lol" and "I have no idea what I'm doing, nor interest in developing one, fix my thing for me plz" bugs that the site already has a dozen answers for. It stays that way because volunteer moderators don't want to wade through sewage all day. So it goes.
The topic-specific SE sites are often better; Emacs.SE, just off the top, is consistently of very high quality, with maintainers of several high-profile packages and Emacs itself regularly active there. But I abandoned any attempt to participate on SO proper years ago, and rarely even check there except on the off chance that some weird exception has an obvious cause that'll save me a source dive on a library or some similar large investment of time.
There are also many questions that I asked myself or googled and that I found shot down by overzealous SO moderators before someone could bring some element of response.
Fair, but that's the point of upvoting questions, no? As someone who uses SO through google searches 95% of the time, I mostly see high quality discussions.
And that's OK because discussions tend to lean in different direction, very often, and before you know it you are talking about something completely different. If you are sticking to the topic and have something really important to add, don't worry, moderators won't get in the way.
On SO I pride(d) myself on asking good questions. That is formulating the question clearly and precisely was itself a kind of investigation. Often, the question never go finished, because the work of writing it up caused me to solve my original problem.
Probably SO should have weighted question upvotes at least as high as an answer upvote. Now it would take stronger medicine: e.g. pushing questions by people with low rep down the list.
I feel like you should still ask the question, and then answer yourself shortly afterwards. It'll help others in similar situations, and you might just get a better answer from someone else.
Same. I think I've asked one question ever on SO, and it got no answers - fair enough; I didn't have one, either.
What to do about it, I've no idea. I have the rep for most mod powers, but the Augean stables lack appeal. Beyond that, I wouldn't presume to venture a suggestion.
One problem is that the correct answers have to change over time and SO does not account for that except by having drive-by downvotes from dweebies who have no business even answering questions.
I used to answer questions on SO, but got so tired of arguing with idiots that I decided it wasn't worth my time anymore. It's too bad, too, because I strongly believe in "giving back" where I can and SO was a way to do that. No more. I still google for answers on there all the time, though.
