Stack Overflow is almost dead

But I don't really think that's the problem. Reading zahlman's responses in this thread makes me think that the mods fell into the age old trap that's happened since Usenet, IRC, and still happens to this day wherever there's mods: they got tired of doing unpaid labor and instead of deciding to quit decided to become meaner and stricter. The age old mod trip.

Because they usually can. There aren't enough curators paying attention. Stopping them generally requires three curators to find the same question and act on it before an answer is posted. And the person writing the answer also gets a grace period for in-flight answers.

Then when they finally get inconvenienced, they come to the meta site and make perhaps their first attempt in over 10 years to even find out what the policy is. Often they have a bad experience with this, loudly complaining as if they already know the policy while never having made any attempt to learn it, and being surprised to find out they're wrong. Sometimes they even try to make a meta post on the main site.

It has helped me in the past but yet, I could not reply nor post anything back to help others when I knew the solution because of the way how it works.

To make matters worse while working in IT, I worked with a guy that didn't know anything, if there was no SO post about the problem, the guy couldn't fix the problem.

I have been using Perplexity AI and it has been awesome, and it does provide all the sources it used making it easy to cross check the answers. It has helped me to speed my python learning curve, I am not using search engine anymore, and SO has the problems mentioned above so I have zero interest in using it.

Also, the website layout is a mess, I have to use uBlock Origin with a ton of element picker to stop loading half of its crappy.

And why are you the one who gets to make this judgment?

> So on the one hand you find it okay to delete old questions, and on the other hand you find it okay to not add new questions. But it's not dying.

Yes.

You write this as though you think there is a contradiction here. I genuinely don't understand why. There is no contradiction here.

QuickDraw wasn't "injured" when it lost 2000 lines of code, either (https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html).

> It has never happened to me that I could not find what I wanted on SO because there were too many similar questions.

Back when I was trying to sort out the mess more actively, it happened to me daily. I distinctly recall multiple instances of spending hours at a time tearing my hair out over it, and complaining in the corresponding chat about the terrible questions, the unintentional clickbait, and the sensitivity of search engines to minor variations in the query.

> closed by people who obviously had no understanding of my question (together with its answer).

This is said by perhaps 90% of people complaining about their question being closed, and trivially shown to be incorrect in perhaps 90% of those cases.

But also, "people can't figure out what you're trying to ask" counts against your question. By design. Because questions are expected to communicate clearly. So that other people who read them don't have to waste their own time making sure they're in the right place.

Of course, there are other reasons a question might not be understood. But it's not hard to distinguish between "this person can barely write coherent English" and "I don't know anything about this technology". People are, broadly speaking, just not going around the tags for technologies they don't know about in order to close questions. What on Earth would they get out of that?

> What I am saying is that SO has become a place where even good questions get closed. By people who know better, like you.

Again: please show a link to an example of a question that you believe was unjustifiably closed, and make sure that you can clearly explain, in terms of existing policy why you believe the closure was invalid.

Do this on https://meta.stackoverflow.com, where it belongs.

Or if you have done this in the past, link me an example of that. That's fine here.

the reality makes this judgment. something that was worth billions of dollars could probably be bought for $50m (this is too much…). a definition of dead