I'm a bit divided about Stack Overflow. On one hand side it's simply one, if not the best, resource for programmers. On the other hand it's become somewhat toxi

I'm a bit divided about Stack Overflow. On one hand side it's simply one, if not the best, resource for programmers. On the other hand it's become somewhat toxic and counterproductive. The better you become as a programmer the less value you derive from it. The true niche experts are less and less to be found (ie Product/Project -owners and Microsoft/Google/Apple etc -employees) and the other replies will often be exasperating mixture of trying to give answers they've googled or complain about some meta-aspect of the question. Any community that reaches a certain size will face unique problems and I think Stack Overflow has some of the same problem as reddit does: you have to be very careful on how you give power to users. Power corrupts and becomes a goal/game in itself. Karma/power is a great incentive in the beginning of a community, but can become destructive in the long run. That some programmers have a certain type of personality is probably not helping either. There seems to be many småpåvar on Stack Overflow that loves to wield the small amount of power they've accrued without actually contributing that much. On the other hand you have to enforce rules and curation to keep quality up. It's a very fine balance and hard to get right. It's mostly about human psychology and incentives. I think there's some tweaks they could do to improve things but I also understand that from their perspective why change something that works? The danger is that the true experts stop helping/answering questions on Stack Overflow because they find the community becoming too toxic. Might turn into a downwards spiral until there's mostly trolls and newbies left.