It's true: Stack Overflow has changed. It's not bad (yet?), but it is different. The discussion on the linked page focuses a lot on bad questions, and there a

It's true: Stack Overflow has changed. It's not bad (yet?), but it is different. The discussion on the linked page focuses a lot on bad questions, and there are plenty. But it's also much, much harder to ask good questions. To some extent the site is a victim of its own success: whereas I used to ask a basic question [1] and get several up-votes and a good answer, now I ask a basic question [2] and get almost as many down-votes as up-votes, plus the answers themselves get as many down-votes as up-votes, including some answers I actually liked but the community decided were so bad they couldn't just leave them at 0, they had to push them down to -1 and into the leper colony. Tons of comments and answers insist I had an XY problem [3] when I did not. Some of it is because "The good questions have all been asked and answered," and some of it is that the legitimate complaints about absurdly low-quality questions have gotten people into such a mood that a so-so question from a veteran user makes them spend their own reputation to down-vote each others' answers. Stack Overflow has an XY problem: the real problem is that a lot of questions are just bad because the barrier to entry has remained too low for too long, but it thinks the problem is the XY problem. [1] http://stackoverflow.com/q/148951/ http://stackoverflow.com/q/148951/ [2] http://stackoverflow.com/q/22856977/ http://stackoverflow.com/q/22856977/ [3] http://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem http://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem