For the first time in a while, I've picked up a language I have not used for almost 15 years.
Google is helping immensely, and I've been shocked at how often (>95%) of the time the first result is SO, and that answer is perfect. So much so I've stopped searching google, I've just got a lot of SO tabs open.
It might not be perfect, though I'd say it's the best by a massive margin.
I don't know how many times I've scanned down a SO page hoping, hoping, hoping that someone managed to smuggle in the answer to my question before the red guards noticed and put a stop to it.
Google simply wants to find the best answer it can to my question, while StackOverflow would rather try to find reasons to prevent it being answered.
I don't want a forum where answering my question is a last resort, and their highest priority is finding a justification for not only not answering, but actually preventing anyone else who was willing to answer from answering.
What we need is a developer forum that is totally open to questions, but with the amazing addition of Google-like search to do ranked prioritization of all answers instead of old-fashioned red guards to prevent answers they didn't like from ever existing, whether you needed those answers or not. You could ask anything you wanted, as long as you were polite, and the worst that could happen would be that your question would be re-tagged (ex: that's actually a DELPHI question, not PASCAL language, because it's not about the language.)
People would then be free to answer or not, as they wished, with votes for answer quality and links to other answers that add to the quality measures. They could express opinions (horrors! opinions from people with experience that you lack! who would EVER want that) or quote the docs, or insert a link to another answer that (in their opinion only) probably answers your question, too, but they do so without preventing anyone else from going ahead and offering their own answer.
Google manages to sort through an entire web full of comments that are "possible duplicates" or "primarily opinion based" and it's amazingly useful. A mini version of that is what we need for software Q%A.
If Stack Overflow really wanted to make life easier for people, they would delete closed questions, or move them to a directory that is excluded from search engines. Closed questions are basically bait-and-switch for searchers; they show the question, but don't have an answer.
So whilst I'll often choose an SO site I can't use their search.
Try "KDE notifications from bash scripts" for example. Google will show that there are answers on SO and Unix.stackexchange - searching at AskUbuntu (I use Ubuntu with KDE on top) will return zero results and won't even suggest results from other SO sites. SO itself has the best result but seems the least appropriate of the silos to place that search in.
Then there's having to register at each of the different sites on the network. The siloing of the site is PITA IMO. The only reason to do it this way I can think of is to separate computing resources, it seems there are probably better ways around that issue too? Why not a unified site with hierarchical tags such that you can choose a tag as a preferential search term?
I have 10+ memberships at Stack Exchange network most of them math/programming related and it seems so silly.
Sure, keep the multiple brands if that is what your investors want but make it searchable and taggable across sites.
Often I will see a question posted on main SO that would have been perfect by the Stack Exchange rules on some other stack exchange site.
Instead it just gets closed and whoever asked must feel quite dispirited of asking again.
with all due respect but SO search isn't quite stellar.