[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.