[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".