[alex_sf]

I know it's the tacky thing to say, but: I feel like StackOverflow has gotten worse over the past couple years. The questions and answers are both lower quality.

It's possible that Google is leading me astray since that's typically how I'll find Q&As on there, but I don't see the same issue on the other sites in the Stack network.

[trollied]

Their best engineer went to work for Microsoft https://nickcraver.com/ As did their SRE SQL Server DBA. I don't know if their replacements are up to speed.

[stephendause]

Maybe, but I don't know see an obvious causal link between that and the quality of the answers and questions.

[shagie]

The user experience of the people in the 1% (the 90-9-1 rule - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule ) is diminishing. Existing systems showing their age and failing to scale, processes and norms that work in tandem between technology and people are straining as times change.

In these cases, the technology needs to keep pace with the systems (both computer systems and people systems) that it supports. Failure to do that means that the people who are creating content are having to expend more effort to make up for it.

Be it people leaving, or needing to spend more effort to attain the same quality - the result is the same. The quality of the site (questions and answers) is diminishing as people are less able to provide good answers and curate existing material to make good content more visible.

[jeffreygwang]

Incentives are super out of whack for sure -- website is saturated and answerers have no real incentive to wade through the mud.

It's for reasons like this that there are new startups cropping up in the field. One that's exciting to me is Quidio, a bounty-based Q&A marketplace that demolishes the 90-9-1 rule for better quality results.

[Kwpolska]

Stack Overflow’s engineers aren’t writing the questions and the answers. How is your comment related?

[trollied]

I'm an idiot and didn't read past the first sentence.

[xwowsersx]

How does that lead to lower quality questions and answers?

[DoingIsLearning]

One factor you can't discount is that we are also getting older and so are more capable of challenging both answers and question quality.

I am not sure if SO is less useful or just has become less useful _for_me_ over time.

[Helmut10001]

I find that Github is becoming a better place for more focused questions, mostly in issues, sometimes in the new discussion feature.