Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow
I think a common misunderstanding about Stack Overflow is that it&#x27;s a place to get your questions answered.  It&#x27;s not - that&#x27;s only a secondary use case.<p>The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers.  They&#x27;re optimizing for being the first google result for &quot;how to do X in Y language.&quot;  They&#x27;re <i>not</i> optimizing for being the best place for an individual to ask &quot;hot to do X in Y language.&quot;<p>When you consider S.O. through that lens, I think a lot of how the site works (aggressive close-as-duplicate-ing, for example) makes more sense.