[pavlik_enemy]

For me the biggest problem with SO is that it's hard to get answers to advanced questions in some areas. Not a lot of people could answer the question in the first place, because it's about some obscure and rarely encountered problem, and these experts are constantly spammed with basic questions from inexperienced programmers. Though it depends on the area you're interested in - I've got almost no answers to advanced Rails-related questions and got pretty good responses to Scala-related stuff I'm interested in (but maybe it's because Scala questions were about more basic stuff)

[coldnebo]

Yeah, unfortunately looking for advanced Rails answers means sifting through lots of silt: answers that were correct for version X but no longer, answers that avoid the question by doing something else, cargo cult solutions.

[Annatar]

That's a good indicator of the quality of the software.

A piece of software is only as good as its documentation and compatibility to itself.

[2-4-Flinching]

Yea, I asked an advanced Java question and got downvoted -20 with no answers. It was downvoted because it was something you actually had to have understanding of Java and the API. That has been my experience with stackoverflow. Ask a simple question get love. Ask something advance get downvoted and sometimes trolled. So sad people can't just move on if they don't know and answer and have to downvote to make them feel better.

[pavlik_enemy]

Same thing happened when I wanted to know how to convert private method to public in Ruby. Yeah, that's not what people usually do (and not what they should do) but I really needed to know. The reason was laughable, "unclear question" even though it was perfectly clear what were my intentions.

[jakub_g]

This is why bounties were invented - not a silver bullet, but might help getting visibility to the question.