Have you considered that the reason that SO's acceptance criteria for questions is the way it is because of the way the community has developed, rather than any specific desire of the founders?

My own personal reason for leaving SO was because I could not sort / filter questions by high rep. I found questions by low-rep users too easy to answer and boring. High-rep users - users who got that rep from answering questions - ask good questions, because they already know how to Google, look up documentation, play around and experiment, etc., so all the easy answers have already been considered. Unfortunately Jeff Atwood dismissed my suggestion out of hand.

SO is driven by people who can tolerate answering lazy, ignorant or possibly not very bright peoples' questions. Perhaps they even thrive on this. But I think this leads them to develop a certain kind of immune system, one focused on shepherding users into asking answerable questions, and a short tolerance for wasting too much time. More open-ended discussions by the average SO questioner vs open-ended discussions by a more interesting participant can be hard to tell apart; a stupid question can seem almost philosophically gnomic when viewed charitably. And when you have lots of average people participating in the discussion, you get a lot of noise. All this noise is amplified by popularity, and SO is unquestionably popular.

So I think it's lamentable, but not really avoidable in light of SO's mission purpose.

Couldn't you have sorted the questions yourself using the Stack Exchange data explorer[1]?

[1]: http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/new

Two and a half years ago? Probably not, no, because it didn't exist then. It's also not live data.

That's still pretty relevant, though, because you say you left because you couldn't do X.

Now you can do X, or something quite close to it (w/o researching your "live data" comment... it's not a current events site, so I suspect up-to-the-minute data isn't so urgent); so -- do you come back?

Totally. Most of the highest rated posts in SO are now "off topic". Those are the posts that gets linked over and over in other sites. Hidden gems of [programming language] posts show up in Hacker News every now and then and reaps upvotes because they are informative.

SO seems to be evolving so that each question eventually has its own individual community. I used to only have one account on SO, but now I have to track programmers, dsp, math, serverfault, superuser. Every time my questions get "migrated", I try to find answers elsewhere

My evil twin has been gradually taking over an "answers" site that has licensed technology from SO and my impression is that there's a good reason for this enforcement -- actually, asking questions is a better way to get massive amount of Karma rather than answering, particularly asking the kind of questions that lead to knock-down drag-out discussions and lots of links. If they didn't attempt to suppress this, serious Karma whores would get their Karma by asking questions and soon the people at the top of the leaderboard would be question askers, not question answerers.

Surely this problem is trivial to fix by changing the linear scoring function "5 points per upvote" to a sublinear function, that decays as upvotes increase, or has hard max.

that was totally my problem as well. I still love SO, but am sort of discouraged from starting any discussions unless it's a very direct question (and therefore will offer value to a much smaller audience that encountered exactly the same problem).

There are too many over zealous users eager to close your question before it even gets any traction because they deem it too generic or off topic (or the most annoying of all, because some new forum you're not even aware of got created that fits your question slightly better). It is especially frustrating when you see another very similar question asked by someone else that got hundreds of up votes.

This. I think SO is a great resource, and it has helped me answer countless programming questions. However, I participate less and less these days because there is a small group of overzealous users who have come to view themselves as the saviors of software development. The way they treat newcomers, and people who make innocent errors, is just not acceptable to me. I believe strongly that a community like SO can be run in a more user-friendly manner (literally, more friendly to users) -- and still be just as successful and useful as a resource of programming knowledge. I'm sorry to see SO going in the other direction.

> I still love SO, but am sort of discouraged from starting any discussions unless it's a very direct question.

That is by design and the direction that they want to focus the site.

Yes and no. While they did want to discourage offtopic and open ended discussions, they say in the last podcast[1] that the community itself took on a much stricter approach than they would have - it's probably why old popular questions are now all closed.

[1]: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/03/se-podcast-31-goodbye-...

"Most of the early items on SO that made it interesting to me are gone (deleted as not relevant)"

Could you expand on this, I'm curious to know what you're talking about.

Some questions in the early days were more like lists than questions; for example, "Hidden Features of C#/Java/C++", "What is the single most influential book every programmer should read?", "How do you clear your mind after a day of coding?", or Alan Kay's question "Significant new inventions in computing since 1980". These really aren't a good fit for the Q/A model, so they've been gradually deleted over the past year or so.

Now it's true that some of them did collect some useful content. Some of this content can be/has been migrated to tag wikis. Some of it could be blog material, but we haven't hammered out exactly how this will work. The bottom line is that big fun list-of-x questions are gone and won't come back.

That said, we've just undeleted Alan Kay's question since it really should be visible somewhere in the interim. Here it is: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-in...

It seems like an exception is being made just because Alan Kay is a well known figure in computing. If he was some random guy who asked the very same question I feel pretty certain its status would of remained deleted.

It's far from a settled subject. Nobody is (or at least I'm not) quite sure how to treat those old questions (other than the cartoon/joke threads, of course); if you check http://stackoverflow.com/questions?sort=votes, you'll see several questions that were undeleted today, not just the Alan Kay question.

Boats, of course, are always off limits.

"What Easter Eggs have you left in code" - gone. "What's your favorite programming cartoon" - gone. "What code would you have on your wedding cake" - gone. "Programmers' last words" - gone. "Most elegant, amusing or strange code one liners" - gone.

And good riddance, I'd say. Interesting - perhaps. Fun - sometimes. Useful - rarely.