Up until 2010 or so I used to be pretty active on SO. It was Jon Skeet, Marc Gravelli then me on the top users. I stopped for a variety of reasons, some of whic

Up until 2010 or so I used to be pretty active on SO. It was Jon Skeet, Marc Gravelli then me on the top users. I stopped for a variety of reasons, some of which are completely unrelated to SO but here were several big issues I could see then (and I commented about on Meta SO at the time): 1. Moderators were already getting out of control. They had decided among themselves that questions without a provable answer needed to be purged from the site despite them having clear value. A question like "Should I use Java or C++ for X?" can have an answer like "These are the benefits of each and things you should consider". By 2010, that was an automatic "closed, not constructive". 2. Users didn't understand what was and wasn't a duplicate. Two questions may sound simimlar but one important detail can ccompletely change the answer. 3. SO had its most value when all the information was current but as time goes on answers become no longer current and I didn't know how that would be handled. A correct answer in Java 7 might be incorrect in Java 14. I believe this is still handled haphazardly and is a huge problem with, say, Android; 4. The system rewards low-hanging fruit and pretty much discourages any complex question or answer. A complex but legitimate question might be closed as being too specific. It's less likely to find an answer and fewer people understand the answer so won't upvote it (or, worse, will upvote the wrong answer that sounds right). 5. It suffers the problem that all sites do that require users to effectively to rank answers (be that with upvote/downvote, liking or whatever) and that is that people vote for what they like, not what it is correct. Post an objective question about an issue in C++ and a provably correct answer that is perceived to be negative of C++ will attract downvotes from C++ devotees. This applies to SO, reddit, social media sites, HN, etc. This is a pretty negative experience for the answerer. Forums suck because they're time-ordered. SO's big value was that answeres were net vote ordered so the top answer was often (but not always) the best and/or correct. I wouldn't necessarily call SO "documentation". "Ossified opinion" would be more accurate in a lot of cases.