Q&A isn't necessarily Q&A, it really depends on the audience you target. If you attended an advanced mathematics course would you really be surprised if the lec

Q&A isn't necessarily Q&A, it really depends on the audience you target. If you attended an advanced mathematics course would you really be surprised if the lecturer refuses to answer a basic question you are just supposed to know the answer to as a prerequisite? Yes, it comes across as rude but there is a tradeoff because answering it wastes the time of everybody else in the room. I was pretty active in the first years of SO but over time essentially stopped answering questions and that mostly because the question became less and less interesting. Questions you couldn't easily find an answer to got more and more replaced with questions that are easily answered by just reading the manual of whatever you are trying to use or learning to code to begin with. Another factor is that I got more knowledgeable over the years and previously interesting problems now seem trivial but I am pretty sure this is not the main contributing factor. Now it depends on what you want SO to be or what it is supposed to be. A source of solutions for non-trivial problems or a copy of or link to the manual of everything out there plus an introduction to software development? I thought of SO as a source of information that you couldn't easily get from manuals, now it looks to me more and more like a collection of manuals, so I lost interest.