This kind of cuts both ways. I stopped answering Stack Overflow questions because now there is such a huge amount of trivial questions that are easily answered reading manuals or tutorials that it became hard to find interesting questions to answer. There are certainly other factors at play like me getting more experienced and therefore what I consider interesting shifted, Stack Overflow already has answers to a huge amount of questions and so on. But I am pretty sure that the kind of questions asked objectively shifted quite a bit towards trivial questions.

Now it depends on what you think about what Stack Overflow is supposed to be. I personally think Stack Overflow should be focused on providing information that not already exists, I don't think it should try to replicate or link to every manual and tutorial out there. This stuff already exists and is hopefully actively maintained by the language and library developers, so what is the point of duplicating it? I think Stack Overflow should not be about teaching people how to code but help them to solve hard problems.

What constitutes a hard problem of course heavily depends on one's experience and abilities so the line is kind of arbitrary but I would say that if it is in a beginners tutorial or the manual, then it is not a hard problem. I certainly unterstand the desire to get problems solved within minutes but I also think that is not really a good thing. No matter how good and experienced a developer you are, you will come across problems that take hours and days to solve again and again. Reading ten pages of a manual should really not be considered an annoyance but a valuable skill.

Very often you will already have a rough idea of how you want to solve your problem and just look for some very specific information, but if you take the time to read about it you will often find that your initial solution is actually not that great and there is a different preferred way to do it. So if there is one advice I would give to beginners than it definitely is »Read the fucking manual!« and probably read it twice.

I think it's a bit like Wikipedia: the more you hang around, the less you like it. It's understandable though; after the 12324th question that basically boils down to "please do my homework", even a saint would lose his shit. It's the inevitable fate of every "beginners' resource", from IRC to forums, in the long run.

Personally, I had decent experiences in most cases. I never got over the fact that it refuses to become the de-facto point of reference for stacks, i.e. questions like "what are the best web libraries for $language", "what is the best practice for deploying $framework" are brutally rejected. And it's a shame, because those would have helped immensely -- it's very easy to learn a language, but it's really hard to figure out what you should use from the surrounding ecosystem.

I'm split on this topic, I've often asked a few questions and got very hostile responses & topic closed. On the other hand, some of my questions have been answered in depth by some very nice contributors; Jon Skeet being one of these.

In my opinion, it's just another unfortunate side effect of anonymity on the internet. It's terrible, and I wish people were nicer to each other.