[joe_the_user]

I worked my reputation up to nearly 2000 at the start and then gradually fell off with considerable disgust.

Part of it is that it seems that within a year, the good questions were pretty much answered. It's notable that in the first year, especially the first six months, the site was carefully curated and had a friendly feel to it.

In the present SO, answering questions has become a matter of getting your low-quality answer to a low-quality question out extremely quickly or having some pretty obscure technical knowledge (even then, you're going to get karma only for obscure knowledge, not for a quality answer). And, yeah, I suppose you game things by creating a question similar to an existing high karma question (and this stuff also lowers average site quality too since the best answers kind of hide within ten similar questions).

Further, SO ironically turns out to be much useful when you Google than when you ask your own questions - questions beyond a given difficulty go wanting even if you give a high Karma reward. It seems the smart answers just skim for simplistic questions rather than spending time on any hard questions.

It seems like SO is now just kind of a low-quality-question fest because they've got a troove of good answers from their first year of existence.

I mean, one can claim hn has declined but any decline in hn is a thousand times less than the way StackOverflow has tanked as a site (but it's still great for googling all the good answers from yesteryear. When you're doing that, take note of the answer's dates, btw, I believe that it revealing).

[chx]

I disagree. I have 5K rep, I am not quite a newbie myself so I rarely ask. But just this month I have been under a lot of pressure with a site launch so I did put in a few questions. When I've asked a tricky MySQL question someone came in like ten minutes, produced a working answer, soon edited to add a fiddle. The dude is programming almost longer than I am alive! I asked a regexp question -- someone with over 50k answered that. Where else would you find free advice like that? SO is amazing.

[Kluny]

I made this site: www.rocketships.ca/fixmybug due to that very frustration. It doesn't in anyway replace SO, it's intended to help us help each other solve minor syntax errors and misunderstandings... the sort of thing that gets you banned from Stack Overflow. It's pretty quiet now though as I never got around to drumming up users.

[jgoldsmith]

Just a heads up for anyone tempted to run the code from the third question (bash script to play triforce through the system speaker), don't.

I know I'm an idiot for running random code, but I'll save you the suspense - it prints "rm -fr" but doesn't run it, and then prints a message berating you for running it, and insults the Q&A site.

[Kluny]

Baha, that's hilarious.

[smsm42]

Well, that's because a lot of people use SO as either "do my homework for me" or "I'm too lazy to RTFM, please read it for me" kind of site. But under the pile of this manure, real content is still there, real people with knowledge still answer real questions. But I admit it has become harder to contribute - even in areas that I have considerable knowledge, most questions aren't either interesting or worth the time, and those that are I'd be missing since I can't keep up with the inflow of low-value questions. I wonder if SO has any ideas how to fix it...

[joe_the_user]

But under the pile of this manure, real content is still there, real people with knowledge still answer real questions.

No, not really, not in a density that makes it worth it from anyone. I mean I looked hard at several points for question answerers as well as attempting to be one. You yourself admit the place broken by the end of your post.

The obvious thing is that good answers that involve effort on the part of the answerer generally don't get you anything like the appropriate Karma.

Even more, SO actually reduced the amount of Karma you could get by asking questions so there's nothing to distinguish good questions from crap questions.

[smsm42]

I don't see it as black and white. I still use it and even answer things from time to time. But I recognize there's a problem.

[JeremyBanks]

The purpose of Stack Overflow is not to serve the people who ask the questions, that's just a happy side-effect. The purpose is to create a resource to serve future Googlers.

There are less broadly-interesting new questions in areas of established technology, but that's fine: there's less need for new questions in areas that the site already serves well. Stack Overflow is not having any trouble getting good questions about new technology as it becomes out.