I have a hard time telling whether this reflects a change in developer culture online over the years, or a change in the types of questions I tend to ask as I have become a more experienced programmer.
For example, if you find a question from 2015, with all out of date answers, if you ask it again today it will be flagged as duplicate with a link to the 2015 answers and no further discussion is allowed. The older SO gets the worse the content gets.
They're trying to make a "Wiki site" but in a Q&A format, it doesn't work and doesn't make sense. Until they realize that their moderation policies are going to keep driving away questions that would warrant modern/fresh answers.
For example try searching SO but set your Google to only show content from the last 12 months, the results are simply low quality with half mod-dead. Most of the good content is from two years ago or more, back before the site switched from Q&A to "confused Wiki-site."
I'm starting to think that calling the edit button "improve this answer" and "improve this question" was a mistake..
That is probably 50% of it. I find myself using google to solve problems about once a day these days.
When I first started, it was easily 5-10x that.
> I have a hard time telling whether this reflects a change in developer culture online over the years
SO no longer really tolerates hard questions that an experienced programmer asks.
For the past 4 years, every question I've had that I couldn't find the answer to I've had the question closed or the answers being badly flawed. Admittedly, my sample size is only ~12 questions.
The reason for this is they really, really want to restrict the playing field to questions that are jr to mid-level with clear, math/code correct answers.
When you get into more complex problems, there is usually trade-offs involved that cause moderators to close questions. (i.e. How do you X as securely as you can while still enabling Y use case that breaks the most secure option available? This isn't ideal obviously but the trade off is acceptable.)
The other problem is this discourages answers for "new" stuff because they'll often close questions as duplicates even if you are asking about Version 8 and the answer from 2 years ago is about Version 7. The problem is, if you are experienced, you already know how to solve answers for Version 7 (because you've used it for 2 years) while Version 8 is new.
Questions I have are more specialized to the domain I'm working in rather than general programming questions.
No longer of the kind "X in language Y". Most of the questions about the system that I'd have nowadays can also be answered by colleagues over slack with the domain knowledge.