It's a wasteland now. Legitimate, perfectly answerable questions get hostile comments and close votes.

The other sites in the Stackexchange network aren't nearly as bad, fortunately. English Language Learners and Math/MathOverflow are very positive places. Software Engineering is pretty good, too.

There's also a lot of people karma farming (for employment reasons?). A couple of years ago I was searching for something and the same question was asked by someone else on SO and this came up repeatedly while I was looking, but after 4 years there was no answer so it was a very low quality result. A couple of days later I did find/discover an answer so I went back to SO and added my reply, miraculously after 4 years someone else added an answer about 12 minutes later, it was the same answer as mine with a little more formatting and marked themselves as correct.

So after that experience would I go to the effort of contributing back again? Maybe in this case, because the answer was shorter than this post, but the equation might change if it required more effort.

I actually deleted my account some time ago via GDPR request. So I haven’t contributed in a long time (but wasn’t a heavy user anyway). But I have noticed a major decline in my using it at all, even for just reading answers. Yes, I did look up that C++ thing a few days ago, and ended up finding the answer on SO, but before that, I have no idea when I used it last. Could be months.