I can tell you exactly why my engagement is down with the site. It’s because every time I ask a question, it gets closed as a duplicate by people who clearly haven’t read my question carefully. It’s exhausting and not really worth the effort to fight for it to be reopened.
Yep, knowing this problem well, I asked a question the other day and defensively linked to the other similar questions to explain why they were not duplicates. My question was still closed with the claim of it being a duplicate. Last time I’ll ever bother trying to use SO again.
The decision to close my question in spite of it having a clear technical difference made no sense at all. It honestly felt like a bot that just noticed that a lot of the content of the question was related to other questions-a bot without the ability to understand why the question is literally different.
Why is SO like this these days. Is it just because there is such a large history of content in the site, that it’s easy for people who don’t want to think to just mark questions closed?
The reason is that while using SO you generally reach similar errors and then read answers and try to make sense out of the problem you are having, that's fantastic, but being able to explicitly state your problem and make followup questions on it is even better.
Yesterday I had to engage with a project using Redux. It has been a while since I touched that technology so I went forward and gave a summary of it to ChatGPT asking if I was correct on my assumptions, from there onwards I made a couple more explanations, a couple questions and I was done. I think this ability to further prod with questions is too good of a feature to pass on.
moderation there is done so poorly it continues to discourage users from participating while not really slowing down entropy as the site ages and the number of posts grow
moderation there is done so poorly it has become a meme of sorts, so even if and when it improves, any improvement in perception will lag... and because users choose to use the site based on their perception of its value rather than its true value, it has sort of become a vicious cycle
Documentation, GitHub issues, language forums, reddit. Nowadays it seems more often that those resources help me work around the issues I'm encountering rather than stackoverflow. There are also the AI tools that help me easily get answers to the question "how do I do X in language/framework Y"
Not OP, but I’ve been trying to formulate problems in ways that first principles and primary sources (language docs, etc) can answer. It’s more work but also more rewarding and a better learning experience for me.