Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

I've seen what's happening on SE before. It was called USENET back then. The best way I can describe it is that marauding hordes of extremists aggressively took over some groups mercilessly attacked anyone deviating from their vision of the world. I remember comp.lang.c becoming particularly problematic.

OK, a little over the top. Well, yes and no. One of the most frustrating things on SE and SF are the questions that are closed as off-topic when they very much are on topic. I haven't been on either of those for a while. Back a some time ago there seemed to be a war of sorts going on between the two communities's moderators as they would close topics in each and send them off to each other. For example, if I remember correctly, questions related to XAMPP was a hot-button item that almost guaranteed your question would end-up in digital limbo. In this sense, it very much started to feel like USENET when the inmates took over the asylum.

When I got started with SE I felt a responsibility to give back as much as I took. I remember devoting significant amounts of time to answering questions with well-tested clear explanations. As you clash into the reality of what these communities have become (both in terms of quality of content and quality of the people who pull the strings) the motivation to contribute at that level --or any level for that matter-- tends to go down.

Not sure what's in store for SE. It just isn't an important part of my daily routine in any way these days. I suspect this might be the case for a lot of professionals who have far better things to do with their time and skills than to play such games for points and badges.

It's great finding specific answers to highly specific questions that a large number of devs can help with. It's terrible at keeping many of the most experienced devs interested in answering questions. And it's not great as a general learning resource either. The site just stalls out at a low to moderate level of sophistication in terms of the level of knowledge that can be found there, for all of the reasons the author described.

Edit: after some reflection, here is a stronger critique of SO:

SO leverages a huge amount of effort from developers for very little real benefit. Some of the site has value but a lot of it boils down to moderately experienced devs spoon feeding answers to beginning devs, which I think could be more detrimental than helpful. By doing so such beginning devs avoid the hurdle of having to RTFM, which stunts their growth. They avoid having to level up their skillset and they know that they can just return to SO when they have their next problem, so they are discouraged from acquiring the skills to solve their own problems, they will stall out at a beginning skill level forever. Meanwhile, as many people have pointed out the true point of crisis in skill/project development lies not at the beginning but after the initial hump, after years of work. And here devs are not well served by SO because they need more than just an answer to a specific question, they need guidance, they need mentoring, they need encouragement. SO's nearly pathalogical lack of community makes it a very poor place to seek out assistance during that phase of personal development.

In short: SO may be helping the wrong people and discouraging folks who are more in need of assistance and for whom being helped would have a vastly greater positive benefit on the industry as a whole.

Evidence?