Well, the Welcome Tour tells you that SO is about “just questions and answers”. This facilitates finding a question that’s written as concise as possible, checking its answer, and leaving. SO is deliberately not like a forum.

SE seems too heavily focusing on helping a “generic public” rather than the actual people asking the questions.

This is just another consequence of not being a forum. Of course SO wants questions to be helpful to as many people as possible. I don’t see how that is a bad thing.

If you want a laxer approach to handling quality, consider if you’ve ever found useful information on yahoo answers.

[–] kazerniel@lemmy.world 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I understand it's not a forum (though tbh I can't remember a welcome tour, but it was more than a decade ago, so could have just forgot), but even with that I just find the whole atmosphere kinda cold and elitist. Not a community that invites participation, like Wikipedia does. But each to our own :)

[–] pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip 3 points 4 days ago

But each to our own :)

Exactly.

And it seems we, on average, decided to part ways with Stack Overflow.

I don't know what the best answer is, but I'm not terribly surprised that Stack Overflow didn't turn out to be it.

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 4 points 4 days ago

The big problem is that half the time the answer that you get is that you shouldn't be in the situation you're in so the question doesn't apply.

Well yeah, but here's the thing, if I ask the question it's because I am in the situation I'm in, and therefore need assistance. So telling me that the situation I'm in is not optimal is literally the least helpful thing one could do.