On top of that, the QA style is simply not a good fit for helping "new users", as you put them. If you are just starting out with programming, you don't have a

On top of that, the QA style is simply not a good fit for helping "new users", as you put them. If you are just starting out with programming, you don't have a feeling for what constitutes a good question that people can effectively answer. As of a couple days ago, StackOverflow now tries to guide you into putting in the relevant parts of the question with a wizard. But still a very high percentage of questions is just lacking the information to make the question answerable. Even if you have lots of patience and work with the user (through comments on the question and edits) to shape the question into something that can be answered, the format is still bad: You can now write an answer, but depending on the problem, the user may still need some help understanding parts of it. Or they have trouble using the code in their program. Now a discussion in the comments of the answer starts, but in the comments you can't really write any code. Or you keep editing the answer with new information. Or ask the user to write a new question, referencing the old one, but it's a mess. The point is, helping people to learn new things is a discussion. You need to probe them for what they understood, and where they need more help. It's a back-and-forth. And StackOverflow is completely unfit to provide this. It's great for people who have gathered enough knowledge to clearly identify their problem. But it's awful for newcomers. I'm also interested to see how this develops, it's definitely not an easy task to solve.