Five Years of Stackoverflow.com

In a way I suppose that's a testament to the fact that the site still works, and works well. They solved most of the problem they set out to solve originally, which is a major achievement. Nevertheless, I still have a nagging feeling that some further iterative improvements could turn stackoverflow into something that would be even more useful, and would be more inviting for people to continue to participate in actively even without having expert knowledge in some tiny sub-category or a desire to constantly tidy everything up day-in day-out.

Edit: to clarify I mean that it's hard to visit stackoverflow on a regular basis instead of just using it as an answer generating machine. Which I think is something not unique to myself and probably hurts the overall quality of the site considerably, notwithstanding the many experts who use the site heavily. Specifically I find it hard to peruse interesting topics to comment on, since the site is now very aggressively tightly focused. Even worse I find it difficult to use the site as a learning tool. Often times when I want to learn something new I'll get it in my head to go to stackoverflow first, but that's never worked very well for me. It's just too difficult to sort or filter all the data into something that is actually useful.

Overall I think the biggest problem is that the people behind the site(s) have decided they've done their jobs, that what they've presented is good enough and at most needs only minor tweaking. I think that's a huge mistake personally and I think the result is going to be that the stackexchange sites end up as a footnote in history after having been rapidly eclipsed by "the next big thing" in a similar vein.