Part of it is that SO wants to think of itself as some kind of long term knowledge base and is obsessed with the idea of pruning "duplicates", even though whether aqquestion is actually a duplicate and whether the original answer is actually still up to date requires deeply understanding the old question, the old answer, the new question, and what the answer to the new question would be.
A very large part of SO questions is "how to use this poorly documented library feature?" or "what is the idiomatic way to solve X problem?", and answers to these kinds of questions become stale and useless very fast. Even more frustratingly, if you have a question like this and an old answer does exist, there's a good chance that you wouldn't be able to tell if the old answer is applicable without further assistance.
Additionally, hardcore SO contributors and SO senior management are constantly at each other's throats, very stubborn about their own interests and often out of touch with and callous about the question-asker plebs' experience in different and conflicting ways.
For many, SO karma internet points are a CV item.
EDIT with some other points:
I feel like documention of libraries and such has often gotten a lot better. AI is actually really useful and can help solve a ton of problems in the space of things I don't know how to figure out myself by reading docs, but don't need to have an actual human expert look at my situation, which is most of the stuff that ends up on SO. Support chatrooms for libraries have gotten a lot more polite and accessible, with clearly marked streamlined paths for asking your questions and much less "hop into #foobar-support on irc so you can be told to RTFM".
There's a bunch of misaligned interests on something like SO:
- Upper management is running a business, cares about user metrics and actually making money;
- Actual question-answering follows a power law, with a handful of power users being responsible for most answers. Like I said, these people often consider this internet reputation as something important to their livelihood, plus your usual ego stuff;
- Question askers don't care about SO as a platform. They are working on some kind of project, run into some kind of blocking issue, and want to find a way to get that resolved ASAP so they can continue with what they were doing.
A very large part of SO questions is "how to use this poorly documented library feature?" or "what is the idiomatic way to solve X problem?", and answers to these kinds of questions become stale and useless very fast. Even more frustratingly, if you have a question like this and an old answer does exist, there's a good chance that you wouldn't be able to tell if the old answer is applicable without further assistance.
Additionally, hardcore SO contributors and SO senior management are constantly at each other's throats, very stubborn about their own interests and often out of touch with and callous about the question-asker plebs' experience in different and conflicting ways.
For many, SO karma internet points are a CV item.
EDIT with some other points:
I feel like documention of libraries and such has often gotten a lot better. AI is actually really useful and can help solve a ton of problems in the space of things I don't know how to figure out myself by reading docs, but don't need to have an actual human expert look at my situation, which is most of the stuff that ends up on SO. Support chatrooms for libraries have gotten a lot more polite and accessible, with clearly marked streamlined paths for asking your questions and much less "hop into #foobar-support on irc so you can be told to RTFM".
There's a bunch of misaligned interests on something like SO:
- Upper management is running a business, cares about user metrics and actually making money;
- Actual question-answering follows a power law, with a handful of power users being responsible for most answers. Like I said, these people often consider this internet reputation as something important to their livelihood, plus your usual ego stuff;
- Question askers don't care about SO as a platform. They are working on some kind of project, run into some kind of blocking issue, and want to find a way to get that resolved ASAP so they can continue with what they were doing.