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Comment by gamma3 | Hacker News Reader

I've had almost all my questions on Stack Overflow answered, usually very quickly.

If you frequently get 0 answers, work on the quality of the question - clear, short, include clear code snippets.

I don't think I've ever seen a 0-answer question where the question was worthy of an answer unless it was incredibly niche and hard.

99% of the time, the person asking the question didn't even care to help anyone help themselves and, to answer their question, you'd have to play a game of 20 questions with them.

In recent years every single question I posted on StackOverflow was a 0-answer. It didn't use to be.

First, it's only natural that as you get better as a developer, the only questions you need to finally ask StackOverflow are harder questions with a smaller audience.

By the time I'm asking a question on StackOverflow, it's a question I couldn't answer after 20 years of learning to solve my own questions, so it's going to be a hard and niche problem with a tiny pool of people who could answer it. I look back at the first questions I asked on SO when I was a beginner, and I kinda cringe at how elementary it was. "StackOverflow is really going down in quality" would not be the right conclusion.

Second, if you shared the question, the reasons it went unanswered will generally be obvious. Got a link?

> First, it's only natural that as you get better as a developer, the only questions you need to finally ask StackOverflow are harder questions with a smaller audience.

That will be true, but it does contradict your original statement that there haven't been 0-answer questions which were worth answering. Particularly an experienced developer is way more likely to pose a reasonable question.

> "StackOverflow is really going down in quality" would not be the right conclusion.

I did not complain about quality, I actually did not complain about StackOverflow. I just expressed an obvious change in the landscape.

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