I can't stand Stack Overflow. Quite obviously it is dominated by people who would much rather show you who's the boss by competing, not for who can provide you

I can't stand Stack Overflow. Quite obviously it is dominated by people who would much rather show you who's the boss by competing, not for who can provide you with the most useful answer, but by who can be first to find a reason why your question doesn't deserve an answer (and then to block anyone willing to answer from being able to do so). Yes, of course, I understand the assertion: that by attacking questioners instead of helping them, the alpha dogs are laboring selflessly to defend the quality of Stack Overflow. You should thank them for biting you. What nonsense. Imagine if Google took the SO approach to quality and prioritized making you jump through hoops with your question over trying to find the best answer it can: "your phrasing is ambiguous; if you think otherwise, you can try rephrasing your query properly and try again", or "you have misspelled one of the search terms; you should figure out which one and look up the correct spelling before submitting a search; this is, you'll agree, in everyone's best interest". Or, "not a constructive search query; might lead to pages that include opinions". Or how about, "some of the words in your query resemble those in another query made several years ago; here are their results; if their results aren't helpful to you, you should have asked a better question." Of course SO, unlike Google, stores the questions, but SO could still learn from Google's example. Google is so useful, because instead of improving quality by strictly limiting what it will index and what you can ask ("no pages expressing opinions", "index no new pages discussing any aspect of a topic if some aspect of that topic was discussed on another page already in the index", "the answer to your query has been found but will not be displayed, because it was not of interest to our moderators"), it includes as much real (not fake) content as it can and uses technology to lead any question to the most relevant answer it can. How ironic that when you use Google to find a programming answer, it so often judges some Stack Overflow entry most relevant. Then, if you follow the link, you find that someone was trying to provide exactly the answer you were looking for, but the mods spotted him, ruled that what Google had correctly deemed most relevant to be "Not Constructive!" and had forbidden anyone else from answering. I'd love to see an alternative to SO that optimized for answering questions instead of controlling them. One that allowed almost any programming question, allowed anyone who wanted to answer to freely answer, that collected reams of overlapping explanations and answers to multiple variations of programming questions, and that used state of the art technology to lead questioners to those answers that were likely to be most successful at answering your specific question, while leaving the question open to anyone who wanted to volunteer new answers, even if they are repeats or opinions, or provide their own best-guess links to previous answers.