I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining

Stack overflow, like a lot of the forums out there, suffers from the same pathology:

it is very easy to stumble upon an answer which answers the question, and is correct in a very wide context, but is actually bad advice (low quality correct answer, which without experience is bad practice).

And now comes the catch-22: if I do not have enough experience to recognize the correct-correct answer, the answer presented will actually propagate some solution, implementation, or practice, which is bad in the long term.

EXAMPLES

Example 1: new user asking a system administration / configuration management question

"how do I change DNS settings on my system?"

"oh, just edit /etc/resolv.conf by hand."

(When the correct-correct answer would be "learn how to create an OS package which delivers the correct /etc/resolv.conf, or create an OS package which configures the system to be a DHCP client, and then keep that under revision control.")

Example 2: a developer asking how to link properly

"I compiled abc and linked with def only to find that abc cannot find the def shared library. How do I fix this?"

"Use ldconfig or set LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/shared/library." (When the correct-correct answer would be "when compiling abc, set -R'$ORIGIN:$ORIGIN/../lib:/path/to/lib' or -R'$ORIGIN:$ORIGIN/../lib64:/path/to/lib64', depending on whether you're compiling 32- or 64-bit, and always use the compiler's front end to link as well.")

Stackoverflow can be thought of a big cache for programming problems. A hit is a +1 on question/answer and walk away with the answer. A miss is when you have to find the answer someplace else (or figure it out yourself), then you make the cache bigger.

I would love to use stackoverflow actively, but wasn't very successful so far.

It's great to use as a passive user. It's a great encyclopedia. But all my attempts to ask questions were unsuccessful.

I posted 3 questions where I did not receive any answers or clues at all. The questions seem to have a lot of views, so I tried to answer them myself later (in cases I found one). Which is ok, but makes it like an encyclopedia.

On two other occasions I needed help to figure out which way to attack a problem (which systems to use). I wrote a detailed description of my data, use case, restrictions, etc. Both questions were heavily downvoted as they're too subjective and not specific enough. Apart from downvotes I received some unhelpful spam so that I deleted the questions after a while. Luckily, I got more helpful answers on Reddit.

I understand that SO wants to keep discussions on topic, but why can't I ask questions about how to implement a problem, or which design to use best for a given data set?

So the problem is, I cannot use it for too specific questions (often receive no answer) but also not for too general ones (receive downvotes as being too subjective). Everything in the middle is covered already.

Some communities in the network seem to handle that much better, GIS for example has been a great help to me (as they allow open questions).

Go is the first language I learned from the docs alone and from reddit. Never once did I go to SO. I even wrote an introductory book on it, and wrote one or two answers for Go questions. never had to refer SO. doesn't imply that I think SO is declining.

One issue I run into is finding a Stack Overflow question that exactly matches the issue I've run into, find that it's been closed for being a duplicate, click the link to the question it's supposed to be a duplicate of, and find that the other question is completely unrelated. Not only can I not find the answer from SO at this point, but if I find the answer on my own I can't even help others.

Another issue I've run into is the minimum numbers of characters needed to edit an answer. Once I found the answer that was chosen and upvoted had code that didn't make any sense. It was something like an instance of a point object "point1" and an instance "newpoint" and they wrote "point1 = newpoint;" but actually meant "point1 = new point();". When I realized the problem I tried to change it but wasn't able to because I wasn't changing the answer enough (I think there's a minimum 6 character limit). I didn't want to make random changes elsewhere just to make the minimum needed to fix it, so I let it be.

I find Stack Overflow useful, but I don't try to participate in it anymore and don't stay signed in.