When and how did StackOverflow become so terrible?

Question

Things have changed. It seems there are now certain gatekeepers who just shut down every question or mark it as related to other questions which it is not related to. The folks are not even polite and have a holier than thou attitude. These are only my issues but I have heard several concerns from other folks as well.What happened, what went wrong for it to become like this?

bityard · Accepted Answer

I gave up asking questions on Stack Overflow at least a decade ago. Questions get closed as dupes, even when you mention them right there in the original question. Answerers want to believe that every non-trivial question is an X/Y problem. Answerers will nitpick irrelevant technicalities instead of answering the question. Stuff like that.My biggest problem with SO right now is that the most popular questions are outdated and temporally incorrect. A big problem when you are trying to learn a programming language that has evolved considerably in the last 10 years. Go ahead and take 3 common beginner-level tasks in Javascript and Google them. The first result on at least two of them will have been last updated in, say, 2012. Even if the modern answer is there, it won't be the accepted answer.

uberman · Answer

I'm not sure what you mean by:"Things have changed ... What happened, what went wrong for it to become like this?"Has this not essentially always been the critique of StackOverflow?

lostdog · Answer

Could you give some examples of questions that should not have been closed?I'm still glad when google sends me to a good stackoverflow answer, because it's usually high quality and helpful. I don't ask many questions there, so it's hard to know if the problems are serious.

muzani · Answer

This is where it went right: https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/03/09/the-value-of-downvotin...
They thought about the system really well. It's based off HN's. And it worked. HN's system still works.
Years later, they removed the reputation penalty from downvoting questions. They trusted the community to be mature with this new privilege. And it all went to hell.
I don't have the data for this. I found the article above while searching for it. But this is the hypothesis.

dyingkneepad · Answer

100% of the times I search for something and click on a stackoverflow link for the answer, it gives me a captcha. I hate this, so now I actively avoid clicking stackoverflow results. I've been slowly replacing those searches with questions to ChatGPT.

When and how did StackOverflow become so terrible?

I'm not sure what you mean by:
"Things have changed ... What happened, what went wrong for it to become like this?"
Has this not essentially always been the critique of StackOverflow?

Could you give some examples of questions that should not have been closed?
I'm still glad when google sends me to a good stackoverflow answer, because it's usually high quality and helpful. I don't ask many questions there, so it's hard to know if the problems are serious.

100% of the times I search for something and click on a stackoverflow link for the answer, it gives me a captcha. I hate this, so now I actively avoid clicking stackoverflow results. I've been slowly replacing those searches with questions to ChatGPT.