I feel that lately the answers to my questions on Stack Exchange are low quality

Question

I started using Stack Overflow¹ a few years ago when I was learning c-sharp. I remember that when I was asking something, I was either getting a link to an existing question (duplicate or similar question) or I was getting upvoted and somebody was posting good answers.

In the last months (let's say 5 months) it happened several times that I posted a question, a few persons tried to answer, but posting low quality answers.

I do not think it makes sense to report all these answers, but in fact they do not answer the question.

Usually, after I find the solution I post the answer.

From 11th of March to now, I posted 9 questions, accepted 2 answers, 3 questions are unanswered and 4 questions have answers which are not solutions to my questions.

Scenarios

1. Question gets answered after a longer time — e.g. 1 week

   This is a happy one.

2. I find the answer and I post it

   Sometimes getting some upvotes, but not many, because of the low view rate.

3. Getting poor answers/comments, but no solution

   At least the question has activity.

4. Question gets marked as duplicate, with another obsolete question

   Sometimes questions were quickly marked as duplicate of similar questions, with no actual/tested solution.

5. Question does not get answered, or commented, but gets deleted

   It happened a few times when nobody commented or answered the question, and the "Community user" deleted the question due to lack of activity.

   Sometimes I could find it (using the browser history), sometimes not.

Example

Today I asked a new question about using the WordPress API — mentioning I am getting success responses from WordPress, but the expected thing was not happening (in this example: creating a WordPress post) and somebody answered to check the username/password — which obviously does not make sense in the context: I am not getting authentication errors.

Question

• Am I doing something wrong (e.g. adding too many/not enough details)?
• Are there other users in my situation getting low-quality answers to their questions? Is this is a known situation on Stack Overflow?
• What can I do to improve the quality of the answers I expect?

Sometimes I feel frustrated: because when I ask something I expect to get a good answer, but instead I waste time answering/commenting with the users that post these answers that do not answer my question who in most of the cases read the question in a superficial quick way.

I don't want this question to be like a rant, but rather to understand what it is actually happening.

---

¹ I use Stack Overflow as example here, but the trend is the same on the other SE sites (e.g., Ask Ubuntu, etc.).

Answer 1

No, it's not you. This is just a natural consequence of Stack Overflow shifting the focus from a high-quality library of knowledge towards quantity, i.e. attracting as many users as possible while at the same time driving away the people who used to curate the content and wrote good answers.

Looking at some stats, you should be lucky to still get any answers, because the number of questions and answered questions is drifting apart (please note that the results older than 365 days are affected by undergoing roomba, thus artificially improving answer rate and unanswered count, thanks to Robert Longson for pointing this out, but the decline in the answered count is still impressive).

https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1136522/answered-unanswered-questions-by-month#graph

Answer 2

I stopped asking questions a few years back on Stack Overflow because:

1. My questions were no longer "easy" since I could both research myself as well as I've become a much better engineer in the last years. And hard/difficult questions don't get answered.
2. I got sick of people who clearly don't read my question "helping" by posting an "answer" that wastes my time and shows my question as answered
3. Most of my questions ended up being self answered because of how hard it was to find information on a topic, so I'd write up a self-answered question

(2) is so immensely frustrating to me that it nearly single handedly caused me to stop wasting my time doing a lot of research and writing up a question, only for someone to post some irrelevant pointless off topic thing that SE has decreed is an "answer" but something I couldn't get rid of.

I switched to various other mediums where I have been able to get my answers answered and not deal with everything here.

I've been much happier with the quality of my learning, engagement with actual experts, and general frustration levels as a result.

Answer 3

I've noticed this trend myself as well. However, some of that might be attributable to my questions leaning more on edge cases (i.e., long tail programming questions) that seems to arise with more experience with software development. More often than not, when I do write something up for Stack Overflow it ends up being rubber duck debugging since the answer will come to me (similar to point 2).

However, I've also observed points 3- 5, which is a bit concerning. This might imply that either these questions are very niche (although I find this a bit unlikely), or that a lot of the gurus that know the answers have kind of moved on from Stack Overflow (or similar Stack Exchange sites). That is significantly more concerning if it has been happening in mass without people really noticing; however, it is also understandable to an extent as well.

Point 4: there might be a technical solution to it since closing a new question as a duplicate of an old, unanswered question helps nobody. Since the older question isn't "bumped" by the link, it effectively just buries the question. However, that could be corrected by simply bumping the old question (although the asker may not be around to address it), or not allow questions without answers to be linked as duplicates. That all requires further discussion though.

Long term, I'm not sure what the solution is since Stack Overflow doesn't really follow a Wikipedia model (i.e., articles may in fact be "done"). If anything, it appears that it seems to be entering the same sort of decline as Experts-Exchange without the associated subscription model.

Answer 4

While it's hard to argue about SO's quality decline and focus on quantity over quality, as is shown in @samcarter's answer, there're more factors at play than just quality decline.

Experienced users of Stack Overflow and other sites tend to attain experience in the fields they're asking questions about. Also users learn to solve problems themselves and to search. This results in their questions becoming harder and harder.

Another factor is volume. Finding good questions is hard. One look at the front page of some sites can cause depression. One has to dig through dozens of trash questions to find one worth answering — unless the user in question is farming rep at all costs, which everyone loses interest in, sooner or later.

What this means is your questions are likely not seen by users who can answer you. The solution I'm using myself is slapping / bounty on my every question. This is the only thing that works. And even that fails sometimes.

Is this bad? If you're an experienced programmer who saw SO for the first time, then maybe. But if were developing your skills along getting SO experience, then you have enough reputation to spend on bounties.

Answer 5

I can feel you. I myself stopped contributing to SO a long time ago. I like the green internet points and it's nice when their number increases. It's a small sign of appreciation that makes you think you're useful.

However, it is really hard to get them on SO and often not even OP will reward you with it. Not even with the green tick. This is disappointing because it let's you think that your work was completely in vain. You also won't get any feedback whether or not it was useful.

I also rarely ask anything because this is the easiest way to receive downvotes. Rarely anybody will tell you why, so you're left with the negative number without knowing how to improve your question. It might contain working and reproducable examples you're still going to be downvoted. I don't know why this happens and I don't like it. This makes you feel you did something wrong and don't know how to fix that.

I find that SE is partially to blame for this situation. They strongly discourage comments so I guess ppl avoid them. I find it's a nice gesture when someone says something kind in comments - like you do it here ;-) This shows you that someone cares enough to talk to you and makes this place less cold and more social. I especially like a comment by the OP saying that something was useful on a not-accepted answer.

Be nice IMO is not only about being nice in questions and answers but also to say something nice just because it's nice to do so.

Answer 6

I guess it is related to the licence change. The company behind SE seems to claim that the content is theirs and they are free to do whatever they want, including illegal licence changes.

Before this most thought they would work for the community, now it is clear that your unpaid time is used by a for profit company.

In my opinion that is also the reason why they do not react in any way to the current snowstorm about pronouns and Monica, because it is a great smokescreen to distract from the real elephant in the room.

Answer 7

I can comprehend the question:

• 41 questions since Jul 27 '14
  • 5 since Aug 6 '19:
    • 298 views
    • 3 answers (including 1 own)
    • 1 downvote
  • 25 votes (up and down) in 0 to 3 + a statistical outlier of 17
  • 33 answers (including 12 own) in 0 to 3 + 7 at the mentioned statistical outlier (which had a bounty of 100)
  • Comment that fits your question:

If it'd that easy I wouldn't have asked on SO. – Gerold Broser Nov 12 '18 at 12:12

UPDATE

This answer, for instance, took me a day of developing. It has 5 upvotes and it hasn't been accepted since the asker couldn't make it work in his environment. That's a bit frustrating sometimes.

On the other hand I've seen answers on SO (mainly with popular tags) which basically repeat the contents of the accepted answer a few months later and got 40+ upvotes.

A while ago I thought about proposing a dynamic reputation system on SE:Meta like:

Reputation calculated weighted by the number of tag questions + answers

Example:

• TagA is assigned to 50 % of all questions + answers at an SE site
• TagB 33 %
• TagC 10 %
• TagD 6 %.
• TagE 1 %

With a simple reputation formula like: 5 / (tag percentage). So that:

• Qs/As with TagA get 10 rep per vote
• Qs/As with TagC get 50 rep per vote
• Qs/As with TagE get 500 rep per vote.

(with "5" and a possible smoothing facter to be discussed and maybe defined based on historical reputation data to make a transition as smooth as possible)

Such promoting, dragging more attention to less popular tags.

Then I found a question with a similar idea on Meta, with a clearly rejecting answer from a Mod (IIRC) and I abandoned my idea.