[Zergy]

I used to be very active on SO and I stopped because dealing with new people to the site is a waste of everyones time.

SO has the goal of being a Q to A catalog. You're not contributing unless you are asking a new, answerable question or providing and answer to a new or existing question.

There are tons of people asking questions that are already answered, tons of people asking questions that would take a book to answer, and tons of people asking questions that are subjective and time sensitive. All of this needs to be closed and removed.

The fact of the matter is that tons of questions have already been asked and answered. In fact unless its for a newer technology there are probably not that many left to ask. Because of this about 95% of all new content ought to be removed. In fact you will find a vastly different culture if you stick around the GO tag vs the Java tag.

But the issue is there is a never ending trickle of people who don't realize the above. They sign up and start asking answered or impossible to answer questions, trying to start discussions, or trying to make you debug their specific issue.

You either ignore them or try and help them understand the site by telling them to RTFM.

[collyw]

A more recent problem with Stack Overflow now that its a few years old. The tech gets updated, and previously good answers are now out of date, as libraries and frameworks have changed.

[tedmiston]

We have an edit button though! And edits are community validated before being merged. I use it regularly to update other people's answers. If the update breaks backwards compatibility, I'll just add a separate section "For Python 3.x, use .items() instead of .iteritems()" etc.

[Zergy]

Very true but I think SE does a poor job incentivizing upkeep. Its very little Karma compared to new contributions. Honestly the only thing I with they would change.

[JeremyBanks]

I agree, and would like to see a change like that in Q&A, but it would be a pretty big deal at this point in the site's life. However, the new Documentation section does a much better job with this. Each edit is worth +2, and upvotes give points to all significant contributors (+5 or +1 depending on size of contribution), not just the author!

This system has had some issues and may still be adjusted, but I think it's a lot closer to the mark. I've probably gained close to 1000 rep so far from documentation I contributed to but did not author.

[tedmiston]

> and upvotes give points to all significant contributors (+5 or +1 depending on size of contribution), not just the author

That's interesting. I wasn't aware of the trickle down karma like that.

[Ajedi32]

Keep in mind that's for [Documentation][1], not Q&A (which is what most people think of when they think of StackOverflow).

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/documentation

[tedmiston]

This is fair. I think it's +2 for an accepted edit vs +10*n upvotes +15 for accepted. Another approach is to just make a new answer on the original question later. I see that a lot for Python 2/3 stuff too.

[overcast]

Your core group of know it all people, won't be around forever. If you keep discouraging new users, by treating them like second class citizens, and a "waste of time". Then the old boys club, is not going to last. I agree entertaining basic programming questions is foolish, but I've seen many examples of legitimate questions, that get the boot because they've been addressed(poorly) previously. At what point do you start just running a Wiki of programming answers, and not a community of programmers. Because the former sounds like what the programming police at stackoverflow want.

[JeremyBanks]

I don't agree with your premise. I've seen many users join the site and succeed in recent years, because they cared to understand what they were joining, and how they could contribute to it. If you're only looking for an answer for yourself, people are not going to cater to you. It's not a great environment for random newbies looking for personal help because that was never the primary goal. They're more expected to benefit as consumers of the content that more experienced programmers generate.

From the announcement of Stack Overflow, before the site was even in private beta (https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/):

> Stack Overflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange meets wikipedia meets programming reddit.

The community elements of the site are nice, and I have made some friends there, but "wiki of programming answers" is much closer to the original vision of the site than "community".

[Zergy]

Old boys club is a misleading way to describe the scenario.

There is content that doesn't belong and content that does, this is established by the company at a broad scale and customized for various boards by the community.

I haven't seen the case where content belongs but is denied because you're not well enough know or w/e. If by old boys club you mean long standing members are preventing new members from changing policy then yeah thats true.

Another thing you're failing to realize is that that plenty of people who do RTFM, become contributors, and stick around. More than enough to keep up with demand.

> that get the boot because they've been addressed(poorly) previously

This is a valid complaint. I believe SE needs the Karma system to do a better job at rewarding cleaning up existing questions.

> At what point do you start just running a Wiki of programming answers, and not a community of programmers.

Its more we want a community to create a q/a based wiki. There needs to be a question answering community (no need to focus on the asking one it will come) and strict question moderation helps attract and retain the answering community. Retraining and attracting 15+ year industry vets is much more vital to SE's health than retraining new users.

[wool_gather]

So your premise is that the site will die because only people who know what they're talking about will use it?

I have to admit some skepticism of this idea.

[0xmohit]

Exactly. How many times would you want to answer (or even read different questions and answers for) how to compare strings in Java? And it's not limited to one programming language. There was a time that I used to answer but then it started to suck.