I hate to be contrarian, but I have not experienced much of the negatives people are complaining about here. StackOverflow has been a fantastic resource in my programming career.
I used to be pretty active on SO and Programmers.SE as a young buck, and back when SO was still pretty new and shiny. Nowadays it just feels like a race to the bottom as someone trying to answer a question. The winning strategy is to post a shitty, incomplete answer and get the upvotes and while that is happening, update to a better, clearer answer, oftentimes poaching content from the guy or gal who took the time to do a detailed, "good" answer. I get the notion of consolidating the answers into that one perfect answer, but working on a good answer and having it poached by the highest voted answer will leave a bad taste in most folks' mouths.
In the case of Programmers.SE, there was a shift in the site topic and, in my opinion, some rather overzealous moderators along with the handful of folks who just seem to sit on the site and close-vote any and everything that does not perfectly align. Always be wary of those that seek power over their fellow man...
StackOverflow and the surrounding sites are a good force overall, don't get me wrong, but as someone who tried to be active and use the site, it leaves a lot to be desired. I'm not interested in answering "How do I do X in jQuery" and I'm not interested in having someone plagiarize me.
That's true, if you care about the points, badges, etc.
Jeff Atwood has discussed this subject fairly extensively, and it does matter to a lot of people, which helps make SO more successful than it would otherwise be.
Could you build an incentive strategy and reputation system around collaborative answers?
While I don't argue the demonstrated knowledge and skills, having talked to job recruiters, SO is actually very far down their list to my surprise.
So if you are getting discussion, you are actually just experiencing the common case of getting your needs addressed before the terrible moderation kicks in and closes good content.
Also confusing from the point of view of the site operators - aren't they missing a lot of site interaction and pageviews and additional free content, etc. ?
That's not very smart. Sometimes, even a technical problem's context can be complicated enough to merit several different "good" answers, depending on other factors.
Maybe someone should formulate a law -- over time, any site's moderation starts to suck. There are factors involved with this, such as depletion of low-hanging fruit, popularity drawing more attention from spammers, and increasing workload of moderators.
It happens quite often that I look up something that I already have (or could write) correct working code for. It's when I notice that there's more than one way to write that code, and I want to do it the "right" way the first time, so the decision doesn't come back later and bite me, when I go out looking for what is considered "best practices" in such a situation.
Usually there's more than a few "correct" answers to what is considered the best practice, and the choice depends on the context of your problem. That is when the discussion is invaluable, without it I cannot determine which of the choices apply to my problem.
But of course it's your fair right to say "well okay, but SO is not intended for that".
I don't think that SO is a bad tool, but it may well be a bad tool for a certain subset of programmers seeking help. I would be interested in figuring out who that segment is and what they want!
The issue I see is that they have been so successful that now they are THE place where you'll find someone capable of helping you.
And then you have a question where you are sure that you could get great input from the expertise assembled on SO, but you aren't supposed to use it because the question has the wrong format. And there is no other (obvious) place to get the answer, because SO has all the mindshare, because they cover most questions.
A site that only caters to "questions not applicable to SO" would have a very weird scope, and a general site has to compete with SO for the SO-type questions, which is hard to do because SO does those very well.
I don't see why "closed" as such is problem. I could interpret it as "someone asked this question and it's been answer, we're moving on".
Sometimes I find an answer on a random web forum - if the forum still permits answers, there will 20 or 100 pages to look through and the usually the only good things will be right after the question.
The web at scale is just messy and cruel.
Closed as "out of scope"/"duplicate" isn't saying "this is finished, moving on", but "don't ask this kind of thing, go somewhere else, even if you probably would get a good answer to your related question here".
Voting is also possible on closed questions and answers.
Additionally, if the relevant information ever changes, no new answers can be submitted.
I'm not sure if that's the best way to do it, but it's an option.
Something tells me that's never going to happen, though.
I think if a question is closed, that would mean no corrections or updates would be possible.
You can't vote on closed questions or answers to closed questions.
A question can't just be closed. There needs to be a reason to close it. "This question is a duplicate of this other question" is frequently used. Often the questions are similar but different enough to need a new question. You can't ask a broad question to capture all the variation - that'll get closed as too broad. You can't focus in on your exact problem -that'll get closed as too narrow. The gap in the middle is full of dupes. It's pretty demoralising to have people picking over your question and closing it for (seemingly bogus) reasons or asking for pointless clarification.
Anyhow, SO isn't the same site it was 5 years ago. It's actually pretty darn toxic for new userbase and seems to cater to the mods themselves.
That's another frustrating gap in SO: the absolute ignorance of the notion of time and change. Both questions and answers often have a significant timeliness attribute (ex: what are the best online resources for learning <x> as of Jan 2015), and SO has no support for this. To be fair it's a hard problem, but I'm not even aware if it has even been discussed.
I'd like to think that the platform is now mature and tuned enough that they could start to introduce some major new functionality rather than just keeping the lights on.
Here is a question of mine for example (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4701538/javascript-based-...).
Leaving aside the question if the question is indeed off-topic, I don't know why anyone will come 4 years later and question intelligence of person asking the question and person answering it. Are these mods suddenly wiser than participants 4 years ago or here to stroke their ago?
There used to be a question about popular programming blogs. To me it looked like a good and popular question, so I asked a similar one - which was then closed, because by then the consensus among the mods had moved on to discourage that kind of question.
Which brings us back to the original question: why isn't it welcome. Yes, I understand the very real requirement for SO to drift towards a forum, but I think they've drawn the line very far from the optimal place. Furthermore, the insane success of SO has largely killed off specialized forums where that type of very valuable conversation formerly took place. I wish SO would introduce a discussion forum site or "layer" (integrated into SO itself in some way).
Jeff's motivation for SO was something along the lines of making the internet a better place - in my opinion, many of the current mod's actions are contrary to that initiative. SO is still a massive net benefit, but it could be better with a little common sense.
"Update 2: Thanks to the Hacker News community, the post has now been reopened!"
One would hope it would prompt some discussion and soul searching, but I expect not.
Over the past year or so, we've altered the mechanics of close voting to encourage fast closure and discourage gradual accumulation of votes. If you're interested in the details, see: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/250223/age-close-vot...
A question about a *nix software on an Apple device? That could be superuser, or unix, or askdifferent, or maybe the ubuntu one whatever that's called.