The Stack Overflow Age
SO is definitely a force, but I feel its usefulness has faded from inattention to the user experience and use cases.  For example:<p>#1.  There&#x27;s a huge &quot;homework problem&quot; (narrow, specific questions that aren&#x27;t broadly useful).  Consider flagging homework as homework (and excluding it from searches), trying to divert questioners to other resources before their question is posted (&quot;this looks like homework...&quot;), and more thinking about ways to codify the use case.  I&#x27;d gladly help with homework if there were tools focused on that (e.g. ability to comment on specific lines of code -- Gooogle Docs for posted source code, etc.)<p>#2.  There are oddly subjective editorial decisions, such as closing my question about an API for generating USPS priority mail labels as &quot;off topic&quot;:  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;5690713&#x2F;how-to-programmatically-generate-usps-priority-mail-labels" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;5690713&#x2F;how-to-programma...</a><p>(My view:  &quot;is there any API for doing X&quot; is no different than &quot;is there any method&#x2F;function for doing X&quot;, it&#x27;s a question of existence, not opinion.  But even then, opinions are often very useful!)<p>#3.  The best answer is often buried under the &quot;accepted&quot; answer.  Over time, highly upvoted answers should drift to the top.<p>#4.  There should be explicit UI support for flagging stale&#x2F;out-of-date information.  SO has a long tail of information now, and much of it is dated. It should be super easy to note and see that.