As others have said, the first objective of stackoverflow was to destroy expertexchange, which it has succeeded admirably at. Finding answers through search engines is now far easier.

I've posted very rarely on the software stackexchange, but I've been very active on the electronics stackexchange to the extent that I'm in the top 2% and rank #28. It has very aggressive moderation of 'bad' questions, and I sometimes wish there was somewhere chattier and less fussy we could gently steer the less well formed questions to. It does feel bad when someone asks a question and gets the door slammed in their face. But on the other hand there are a lot of repetitive 'bad' questions from people who've not yet understood what a resistor is.

Remember it's been gamified, so we might as well treat it as a game. Consider the motivation of the question-answerers.

(I also opportunistically karma-snipe the "hot network questions", so I have 1.4k rep on math.stackexchange from only two answers)