>, on the front page right now [...] "We help you get answers to your toughest coding questions, " -- Clearly that is something very different from building a "

>, on the front page right now [...] "We help you get answers to your toughest coding questions, " -- Clearly that is something very different from building a "Q&A wiki" which you allude to. That text blurb on the landing page is relatively new. It may not accurately reflect Stack Overflow's long-standing strict editorial focus. The new SO landing page appeared less than 4 months ago around June 27, 2019.[1][2] In contrast, the following "wikipedia" intention is from the SO launch 11 years ago back in September 15, 2008: "Stack Overflow is a _collaboratively edited_ question and answer site for programmers"[0] So from September 2008 to June of 2019, it has been ~11 years of endless confusion from users because Atwood/Spolsky's intended editorial purpose of Stack Overflow has been poorly explained -- and I would also contend that it's non-intuitive for most users and hard to understand. E.g. The following is too nuanced to explain to drive-by casual SO users: I'm not just asking _my_ particular question to get _my_ particular answer but actually seeding _a_ question that's also also a _helpful_ contribution to the _community_ to build a repository quality answers to questions. >I guess the impedance mismatch [...] So individuals go on SO and think the site is about helping them, and then get confused about what happens next. Yes, I totally agree why the confusion happens and why the same complaints about SO have been repeated for over a decade. It's because SO's editorial purpose is basically invisible and only manifested in the powers given to moderators[3] to downvote/close and for the tradition of fellow users pushing back with X/Y dissection instead of simply answering the question. Does the June 2019 landing page mean that SO has changed and they want to be more of "Siri/Alexa" type of resource? I'm not an employee and I don't know. [0] 2008-09-15 launch: http://web.archive.org/web/20080915103343/http://stackoverflow.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20080915103343/http://stackoverfl... [1] 2019-06-26 old: http://web.archive.org/web/20190626143412/https://stackoverflow.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20190626143412/https://stackoverf... [2] 2019-06-27 new: http://web.archive.org/web/20190627173410/https://stackoverflow.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20190627173410/https://stackoverf... [3] footnote about "moderator" powers : a Stack Overflow user only needs 15 points to flag a post as "duplicate". And voting to "close" only requires 250 points. Those thresholds are so low that SO is basically asking non-hardcore users to also exercise moderation powers. In other words, the "moderators" are not an elite cabal; they're your fellow users voting to flag questions as "duplicate". Why are my peers flagging questions as duplicate?!? I don't know. As the old saying goes, "maybe we've met the enemy and the enemy is us." List of reputation scores required for various "moderation" privileges: https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/privileges https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/privileges