Ask HN: Is Stackoverflow running out of questions and answers?

I think I'm observing a trend whereby you can't get basic questions answered anymore. At this point, most SO Q &A are duplications on some level, so it seems many things go unanswered, are downvoted, or closed. Is this healthy for the SO network?

It sounds like what you're mainly describing is that it's hard to ask a question that isn't already answered on the site. (You can't close as a dupe unless the duplicate has answers.) From a "helping the most people learn" perspective, this sounds like a champagne problem: There's so many answers that it's hard to find something to ask that's not already covered.

From a community perspective, we do want all devs to be able to get involved in the site, so it's not ideal if the solution set is actually so comprehensive that it raises the bar for getting involved.

But I'm not too worried. SO still gets over ten thousand questions per day, which gives devs who want to contribute to the programming community a ton of opportunities to share answers and help. Plus, and new languages like swift leave a lot of blue ocean for asking new questions.

Don't get me wrong, our two biggest product priorities are focused on how we can make it easier for new users to get involved, and how we can ensure that more active users continue to feel appreciated and find it rewarding to share their knowledge on SO, where so many others can benefit from it. There's plenty more we can do on both fronts, but I'm not too worried that we're running out of ways for devs to contribute if they want to.

Disclosure: I work at Stack Exchange. I love Stack Exchange. I am not an unbiased observer of Stack Exchange. My mom says I and my company are special, and I believe her.

EDIT: this post is grumpier than I meant it to be! Sorry.

Imagine you have images turned off. You visit one of the sites. Obviously it's unusable because images are controls, but that's okay. But you notice that they're using a font colour that is very close to the background colour (eg light-medium blue on medium-blue) and then wanting to load an image in the background (white) that would provide the contrast.

You can't tell anyone because minimum karma requirements prevent making a meta-post.

Bug reports from naive users are probably horrible, but still, how many hoops do you want bug-reporters to jump through?

See this example for a hostile response to a reasonable question where it's assumed that people visiting the site need the buttons -- they don't. Most people will be reading questions and answers and will not have accounts.

http://meta.christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/4120/is...

So long as the existing answers can be gradually refined and improved.

The other problem is when questions are sort of the same but not quite.

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/207397/what-word-...

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/12350/what-is-the...

> so it's not ideal if the solution set is actually so comprehensive that it raises the bar for getting involved.

This is precisely what I'm concerned about. I also love SE MASSIVELY. But it does seem like there is a natural ceiling on the service which doesn't afflict others like wikipedia or facebook where content can be generated endlessly.

> But I'm not too worried. SO still gets over ten thousand questions per day

> focused on how we can make it easier for new users to get involved

"still" seems like the operative word. My question hinted at whether new content on the site was "still" accelerating. My very hand-wavy feeling is it isn't because everybody including newcomers are getting the vibe that everything is already solved (Swift, etc. always being a drop in the bucket compared to JS/PHP questions).

I've made the transition from low rep to decent rep (>5,000), and am finding my incentive to participate go down as more questions & answers seem barren and I get increasingly thwarted by militant members of the community.