The fall of Stack Overflow, explained?
The perceived unfriendliness of Stack Exchange comes from a simple conflict: It&#x27;s meant to be a knowledge base, a collection of &quot;authoritative&quot; answers to &quot;general-purpose&quot; questions. For better or worse, it&#x27;s <i>not</i> a forum by design. In fact, forum-like behaviors are effectively banned. Stack Exchange wants the site to be an FAQ database, &quot;there&#x27;s no chit-chat.&quot;<p>This mode of operation, to my knowledge, is unprecedented in the history of the Web, unlike most things that came before or after it. A question must be asked and answered in a very particular way. For example, one is expected to do the following:<p>1. Show one&#x27;s knowledge. Whenever a question is asked, one should write an introduction to present the background of the question to fit inside the knowledge base format. One should also write down all the previous solutions one has already attempted and why one has failed so far.<p>2. Case minimization. If one has a question from a large system, one <i>must</i> extract the core part via minimal reproducible example and present the problem in isolation (but also introduce just enough background to show a clear motivation and that it&#x27;s not an X-Y problem). Ideally, the question must have a laser focus on an extremely narrow technical point. Come up with a proper minimized case may take an hour, just like when one&#x27;s submitting bug reports to Bugzilla or mailing lists.<p>3. Encyclopedic tone. Ideally, each answer must be written as if it&#x27;s a Wikipedia article on the matter of the question.<p>If anyone&#x27;s asking for clarification, it means this question is probably not properly asked. A question must be as &quot;non-specific&quot; and &quot;objective&quot; as possible. Similarly, the answer must also be as &quot;authoritative&quot; and &quot;objective&quot; as possible.<p>I found Stack Exchange is a great site and the knowledge base model works extremely well if you have a suitable question, or if you have the writing skill to frame the question into the proper form, as I&#x27;ve received helpful answers from multiple experts in the fields.<p>However, the fact that Stack Exchange is not a fourm is completely alien to most visitors, and there&#x27;s an strong and serious need of forums. The large amount of negative feedback from new users is hardly a surprise.<p>Another problem is that it&#x27;s only suitable for a particular kind of question, the kind of question with a clear and authoritative answer. If the question is opinion-based, it&#x27;s out of scope. If a question is extremely specific for your setup, the question is out of scope. If the question needs discussions for clarifications and conversations, it means the question is probably out of scope.  It&#x27;s also extremely difficult, by design, to debate on anything should a disagreement arise, since the site intentionally does not support replies or threads (comments are only usable for quick remarks) - anything that can&#x27;t be answered with hard facts is out of scope.