Ask HN: Alternatives to Stack Exchange

Over the years, the Stack Exchange community is becoming increasingly irksome to me. I'm having legitimate questions closed as "not a real question". Not a real question? According to who -- the person answering the question? I'm the one who asked it, so it has significance to me. It's not even subjective things; legitimate objective questions are being closed. I've made it a point lately to go through and upvote questions on there that I think are being unfairly downvoted.

The general trend I've observed for any long-lived online community is that you get a small core of "fanatics" who prefer to bend the community into whatever their ideal for it is. Many popular websites are prone to this trend (SE and Wikipedia being the two I can think of). And I don't think this is good, because these people have a large emotional investment (and apparently a lot of time on their hands) and will out-endure anyone seeking to challenge their views.

It's so frustrating, because I remember when Stack Overflow first began I could post a question and get really good, elaborate, and helpful responses from people that seemed to really enjoy programming. Now it's a lot of short quips in the comments section below my question: "This isn't meaningful", "-1 too obscure", "Google it".