and they haven't succeeded. Try finding something for Angular 5 without getting bogged down in previous Angular stuff or seeing questions about tech choices that are ridiculously out of date because they stopped allowing people to post those questions in roughly 2010.

It seems clear that their efforts to optimize for future readers have had a lot of success. It's a big part of why they are so popular and valuable. But I'd also be the first to agree they are far from perfect. So I'd think you'd want to sharpen or reform the rules they use, rather than uniformly push them in any one direction. And so I wouldn't agree with blanket criticism of the idea of an information repository.

there's a place for freenode/gitter/matrix.org's '#programming' room and there's a place for 'correctness of the information repository' that SO provides

An information repository that is badly out of date with no effort at curation?

you think there is no value in an open question with upsie/downsie on SO? On freenode the answers are very much dependent on the time the question is asked.

Those questions invite lengthy discussion, which SO is totally not optimized for. A software like Reddit (not necessarily Reddit itself) would be more appropriate, in my opinion.

Personally I don't see how Reddit really differs. They both have up/down they both support markdown. SO doesn't have a frontpage or specific subreddits (although it does have tags).

Reddit allows for long, threaded discussions. On SO you just have Answers, and then those limited comments below. There's no space for back-and-forth.

That's a fair point but I find SO much better indexed. Now when I want an opinion on tech my options are:

* Ancient SO post

* Whoever is kicking around in freenode

* Marketing fluff pieces

Complaints about SO remind me of the Louis CK bit about WiFi outage on airplanes. "Everything is AMAZING and no one is happy." SO is a miraculous effort that took a mob of people and harnessed the best aspects of their social nature to build the best Q&A site ever seen. But it's a little annoying sometimes to people with Copenhagen morality love to have on it. SO tram knows this of course and they make a lot of UI tricks to be very friendly and gamified. The site was designed by a world class product manager and it really shows. (It's one of the biggest and best Microsoft/ASP/.Net(!) sites on the internet, especially for non-Microsoft content!). The parts where they aren't perfect (like the ego burn of getting a question closed) are highlighted by contrast to the rest of the experience.

My annoyance is when a question is closed that I've understood and am answering by someone who hasn't understood it and has poorly marked it. Also the group think of librarians winning without a healthy conversation about it.

There is also a tendency to try to mark something off-topic as quickly as possible... occasionally you see this in the Hot Question feed. A good question was initially voted to be off topic.

I saw this once with a question where some kid was asking about something wildly off-topic like how to make friends or meet a girl or something. Tons of people jumped in to answer. It was quickly closed, and rightfully so despite being interesting to the readers of the site, as it has nothing whatsoever to do with programming. Being a hot question doesn't suddenly make it on topic.

That kind of attitude is a recipe for stagnation. Sure, SO was better than everything else when it came out, but there's always room for improvement. And, as it shows, if they don't keep improving, then the quality and usefulness of the site goes down.