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

For example, the title might be "question about rails" and the body might say something like "Uploads don't work. Here's my controller code."

There are two problems here. First, no actual question is being asked. There may be an implicit question, but that's not what SO is about as it isn't terribly helpful to those searching for answers. Second, the user may be missing so much fundamental knowledge about the subject that a sufficient answer would require more work than is worth anyone's time, and would contain more information than is in the scope of a single specific question. SO is meant for answers to precise problems, and isn't a tutorial site. Sure, some people may post good answers, but the question may be too nebulous if it exists at all.

I really don't see that kind of thing happen often enough to be a big deal, but that's the only sort of case I have seen get the treatment that you describe. As I have said before, I would rather have some of my questions be rejected on some basis than have SO be a complete garbage dump. In contrast to other sites in general, SO/SE is very clean.

And then hope their blog doesn't disappear from the 'Net before you finish digesting or need to refer back to that information. Buy their book if they have one.

The founding goal of Stack Overflow was literally "programmers seem to have stopped reading books"[1]. NOT "programmers shouldn't read books", or "book learnin' is inferior to superficial familiarity", but simply... "they appear to have stopped". There are probably a lot of reasons for the tendency folks seem to have of not investing effort into building a deep understanding of the things they're working with... But ultimately, it doesn't really matter: either you provide information in bit-sized chunks, or someone else will and you lose the ability to influence the quality of that information. Not the choice we'd like, but the choice we have.

Disclaimer: SO user since '08, employee since '11.

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/04/16.html

I think the last 3 times I've gone to SO to write a question I spend an hour finding the right code samples, explaining what the problem is and why I need to solve it. Why I've chosen this route and after all that has been put down on the page I see what the real issue is and solve it before its even submitted.

It's almost become another tool to use, "How would I structure this problem if I needed help from the community?" It forces you to think through the problem into the route cause, almost like debugging your thoughts and removing the bloat

That's... A hard problem. On the one hand, it'd be nice if we could just lower the reputation needed to flag things as duplicates... on the other, there's a real risk of abuse there if folks who aren't yet familiar with how things work go around flagging things and annoying askers: there are a lot of new questions that are similar to existing questions, but have subtle differences that a cursory examination may not pick up.

An idea that's been tossed around for a few years is to enable folks to essentially post "this is a duplicate" answers that do nothing but link and summarize another answer... If they get upvoted / accepted, the question is a duplicate; if they get downvoted, it's not. There are some potential pitfalls there too, of course.

In the meantime, my best advice would be to summarize the answers you're linking to, and spend at least a sentence or two explaining how they relate to the question you're answering... Then include a link as your source. Not only does this avoid problems when the question isn't a duplicate, it doesn't make it look like you're just trying to ride the coattails of someone else (which tends to inspire negative reactions in people even when the answer is helpful).

More advice here: http://stackoverflow.com/help/referencing