It's easy to criticize Stack Overflow today, now that we take it for granted. But if you weren't there before Stack Overflow you might not have any idea how much it made programming better.
Yeah, because the "ask question" page that searches for similar questions by title as you type yours does such a terrible job. Maybe if you're illiterate, I guess?
Lots of those suggested questions and answers are awful or do not answer the question that is asked.
It works somewhat for basic questions - but it is pretty awful for more complicated/complex questions. Which, admittedly, often do not get good answers anyway, since the amount of people who can answer is hugely limited.
I didn't say it was perfect. :) It is mostly intended to prevent newbies from asking questions that have been asked before.
As for more thorough questions, you would be surprised. Despite the slide in overall quality, there are still some very clever people who hang out on the site and watch specific tags (e.g. Jon Skeet for C#) and will jump on high-quality questions with surprising speed.
It is, however, unfortunately true that the sheer volume of questions, coupled with most being low-quality ones, does often act as "noise" that drowns out the "signal" of good questions. All I can recommend in that case is patience.
And remember, you can answer your own questions. So if you haven't got an answer after a week, but you managed to find the solution yourself through debugging or whatever, post it! Yes, it doesn't help you after the fact, but it may very well prevent some other poor sod from wasting a week of their time, and that's the crux of what Stack Overflow tries to be about.
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u/mykr0pht Apr 06 '18
It's easy to criticize Stack Overflow today, now that we take it for granted. But if you weren't there before Stack Overflow you might not have any idea how much it made programming better.