Gosh, this is quite a lot more negative than is warranted, IMO. StackOverflow's biggest problem is that it's hit saturation; the low-hanging fruit is all picke

Gosh, this is quite a lot more negative than is warranted, IMO. StackOverflow's biggest problem is that it's hit saturation; the low-hanging fruit is all picked (which is good; that knowledge shows up in Google results), which means that much of the continuing activity on the site is low-quality questions with the speed hounds competing to be the first to answer a trivial question to reap reputation. That's unfortunate, but I'm quite sure how you'd solve that in a product with SO's maturity. (Side note: Try resetting your tag preferences on SO. You'll find lots of questions on languages/technologies you don't often use, which can be great for dipping your toes into less saturated waters, and you might find some things to learn while you're at it.) My experience is that SO is a really great grimoire of solutions to specific, common problems. I get answers from it multiple times per day via Google (pasting in an error message often results in an SO question which has been answered satisfactorily, permitting me to rapidly move past the issue), but I've asked a grand total of 2 questions in my 5.5 years on the site (both of which I later ended up answering myself after research) - for whatever reason, it's a poor platform for me to get help when I need it. For that, I generally turn to IRC or mailing lists specific to the project at hand, because those come with an interested community built-in. However, as an answerer, SO is very useful to me. I make it a point to generally only answer questions that are trivial and boil down to a race; the interesting ones are the ones that require some research. I get to learn something while I'm helping someone else out. For example, I recently answered a question about Ruby's require system as compared to Javascript's, which gave me the opportunity to get into the source and figure out exactly how Ruby loads constants and methods from files (answer: It creates an anonymous module which it then extends Object with). "SO hates new users" Well, yeah, by default new users are treated as potential spammers, trolls, and otherwise unsavory types. There are lots of people who are extremely ready to poop all over any platform they can find. SO does a pretty damn good job of making it hard for them to cause significant disruption until they've proven themselves. There are lots of bad questions on SO. The number of people who would have their question answered if they'd typed it verbatim into Google rather than SO is depressingly high. There are an awful lot of help vampires who are basically just looking for someone else to do their work for them. Those people make SO worse. The visible impact of these people, though, is what posts like this see and complain about - moderation is aggressive in an attempt to stamp out this low-quality content tends to leak into less-bad questions sometimes, which is unfortunate. (I wish that SO had a "no, this question doesn't deserve closure" mechanism so that I could nullify a close vote on a partially-closed question, rather than having to wait for it to be closed to start a new reopen vote.) The characterization of the established userbase as "trolls" and "Führers", though, just seems a bit...I don't know, bitter. There is certainly more than its fair share of overeager moderation on SO, but in general, it does its job, and it does it better than anywhere else on the internet at the moment (and remember, SO grew out of a dissatisfaction with ExpertsExchange, so if SO is failing, there's quite the market opportunity there for someone!) - where you see "Führers" I see "dedicated contributors and curators" who are directly responsible for SO having so much quality, well-ranked content. It's certainly not perfect, but it's a damn sight better than it once was. At the end of the day, while we can complain about SO aggressively closing questions, it's still the thing that tons of people find their answers from on a daily basis, which is pretty hard empirical proof that it's working on a macro level, even if individuals experience pain with it on a micro level.