I used to be a daily visitor to SO and was active in the early days when Jeff and Joel were active and I felt part of the community. After recently seeing moderators rampantly closing questions as if to say 'I consider your question unproductive or unintelligent by my standards', I rarely visit.

Apparently Code Golf is considered a valid question while questions lacking extreme detail that may help people are not.....

Anyhow, SO isn't the same site it was 5 years ago. It's actually pretty darn toxic for new userbase and seems to cater to the mods themselves.

I'm a semi-competent programmer with a few thousand SO reputation (or whatever it's called). Every question I have ever asked there has gone unanswered or has been answered insufficiently.

The moderators are also awful. They manage the community in a very autistic fashion - quality questions with quality answers get closed because they are slightly subjective, which completely obliterates the community feeling.

The other truly irritating thing about SO/SE is their propensity for closing opinion based questions. I am sure that I am not the only one that finds domain experts arguing about for example, the merits of 1 library over another, or language A over Language B, rather useful (I often use their answers as a basis for further research to see if I agree or can find supporting evidence). Allow the community to vote up the opinion based answers they like and downvote the trolling/flaming answers.

On the other hand, I find the the "questions police" are sometimes a little too hasty to shut down actually useful questions, that may stray a bit into the grey zone or may not be phrased as well as possible. I see a lot of new users posting questions that aren't quite clear enough, and then rather than commenting in a way that will help them clarify the question, people just downvote, vote to close, and move on.

There are some people who are just hopeless; no matter how much guidance on asking good questions you provide, they won't get it. But you shouldn't assume that when someone asks a question, and just vote to close. It can really hurt to have a question downvoted or closed, and put someone off the site. I think those tools should be used only for blatantly abusive or off topic questions, or users who really don't get it and keep asking the same things over and over again.

My own personal reason for leaving SO was because I could not sort / filter questions by high rep. I found questions by low-rep users too easy to answer and boring. High-rep users - users who got that rep from answering questions - ask good questions, because they already know how to Google, look up documentation, play around and experiment, etc., so all the easy answers have already been considered. Unfortunately Jeff Atwood dismissed my suggestion out of hand.

SO is driven by people who can tolerate answering lazy, ignorant or possibly not very bright peoples' questions. Perhaps they even thrive on this. But I think this leads them to develop a certain kind of immune system, one focused on shepherding users into asking answerable questions, and a short tolerance for wasting too much time. More open-ended discussions by the average SO questioner vs open-ended discussions by a more interesting participant can be hard to tell apart; a stupid question can seem almost philosophically gnomic when viewed charitably. And when you have lots of average people participating in the discussion, you get a lot of noise. All this noise is amplified by popularity, and SO is unquestionably popular.

So I think it's lamentable, but not really avoidable in light of SO's mission purpose.

The worst are the ones where some new mod has trolled through four-year-old questions closing them whenever possible. Makes me wonder how much great information has simply been deleted to give a new mod, what, a feeling of power? More history (ironically)? It's also darkly funny when a mod clearly doesn't understand the technology involved, and thus doesn't understand that it is, in fact, valid and properly worded.

I suppose it's no different than the rest of the tech community, "blogosphere", social coding sites, etc., where it's a self-promotion-centric approach that dominates. You'll get further working on the latest and greatest stack than you will solving hard problems with an older tech stack.

SO should add a “Vote to close because: Obsolete” option - which keeps the question visible but locks new answer replies and displays a very visible and prominent banner infotmjng users it’s for an old version (with the version range displayed and helpful information to find out what version you’re using).

When I asked the person why it was closed, I was informed it was too broad and not a 'good fit' for SO. Of course it was broad, beginners don't know what they don't know. I then looked up this persons history to the first questions that they had asked themselves. I was not at all surprised to see that they were all very similar types of questions to the one that was just closed.

I pointed this out and how their questions had gotten 50+ upvotes and multiple answers which then led them to help others and become a mod vs this poor person that will never bother using SO again. His response? SO has changed, it's not for beginners anymore.

I spent a day or two trying to get karma on SO and then gave up. SO is still a good resource for some types of questions, but for the most part, it's not worth hanging out there to answer questions.

Nothing is more frustrating than finding a google result to SO, clicking through, and arriving at a 404. Nothing is more frustrating that searching for that great answer I read last year and not being able to find it because the question has been deleted. These are often questions that have been kicking around for 4 years, and, well, gone.

Of course, if you have enough SO points, then you probably don't care whether you've deleted a question, you can still see them.

While we're at it, SOers have always been, and are increasingly... well, jerks! If you are a new programmer, then of course your question will have incomplete information, because you don't know how to ask a good question yet. So stop downvoting into oblivion, please, and give people a little bit of time to acclimate and improve their question before closing.

I am in the top 10% of SO users as measured by points (lol.) What can I do, as a community member and hacker, to fix these things?

From personal experience, I have come across numerous questions that appeared to address the exact issue I was struggling with, only to find them closed as duplicates, off-topic, or something similar. Often, the suggested alternative Q&As are unrelated except for the surface-level similarity, which is especially frustrating.

Sometimes, when I find one of these closed questions, I feel a strong sense of empathy towards the asker, as if I'm the only person out there who understands them.

Unfortunately, I have always been primarily occupied with whatever problems I was dealing with at the time, so I don't have a list of examples I can share with you.

SO is undoubtedly a valuable resource, and I don't completely disagree with the moderation style. However, it has been a slow burn for me.

I loved SO in the beginning. Now it's a cesspool.

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.

SO could have been a place where someone could post a question, and a decent search algorithm could offer answers from previously answered questions; if it was a unique question then it could be opened to answers. Instead, SO decided you needed to earn the privilege of posting a question by answering questions posed by others. That right off the bat excludes a ton of people who don't have the time to wait for a question in their domain, and answer it before 1000 other people.

Sure, it's the Eternal September for tech sites. Comes with the territory. If you don't want people to visit your site (and contribute moderation and content for free), be hostile to new users. Reward aggressive closing of questions. Sure is a good way to drive away anyone but the most pedantic control freaks.

I used to refer people to SO when they would come to me with a question I couldn't answer, (I even have an SO t-shirt hanging in my closet) but now I'd only do that to my worst enemies.

These practices of gatekeeping, being opaque, and failing to practice patience and interactive dialogue on SO are extremely frustrating, and cause the system to fail to support some of the people that most stand to benefit from the community. It creates an attitude of elitism, and while I see how these attitudes can be self-serving for the karma elites, and help create a perception of the community being concise and clean. But it leaves many people falling through the cracks, and when questions aren't answered within 3-5 replies, the threads are often locked, deleted, and otherwise 'swept under the carpet'.

For this reason, I don't contribute to SO at all anymore. If it comes up as a result in a Google search when I need help with something, I'll use the info made available, but otherwise I'm intentionally just a leech because I don't feel it's worth navigating all the negative aspects in order to contribute.

Edit: I do hope that the changes and attitude they've outlined in the OP blog post do help resolve a lot of what I've just described, and I do intend to re-evaluate my opinion after enough time has passed for real changes to manifest.