We can dance around the fundamental paradox all day long. If you don't have experts, you don't have answers. So if the experts are a bit cranky, or have strong feelings about help vampires, the site has to accommodate, or there will be no experts, and no answers, and no site.

As one of the merely moderately frequent answerers, I take this very personally. You are asking for my time and attention. As it happens, I am unlikely to hit you with a snarky comment, but you can expect downvotes and close votes early and often. I do it to chase away the people who can't be bothered to make good use of my time. And I chase those people away to make it easier to help those who deserve help.

Winston Churchill famously said:

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

The same applies to stackoverflow. OP, Mick P, can you name some other web resource that works better? Where you can ask a question and have any hope of getting a reliable answer? I bet you can't. Even if you go back in time to before this site existed, you can't. These sites were designed to dodge the paradox that made the others mediocre.

So here you have stackoverflow: it doesn't ask you to pay, it just ask you to (a) work really hard to ask a non-duplicated, fully-fleshed question, and (b) put up with occasional crap. (b) is a universal characteristic of the internet; nothing on the internet will ever, realistically, be different. So this whole debate is about the treatment of questions that are duplicates, unclear, lazy, whatever.

A further observation: there is now so much good stuff already here that the vast galumphing majority of the new programmers who come here can get what they need with Google. They don't need to ask a question at all. Unless, of course, what they need is what these sites are not for.

We can dance around the fundamental paradox all day long. If you don't have experts, you don't have answers. So if the experts are a bit cranky, or have strong feelings about help vampires, the site has to accommodate, or there will be no experts, and no answers, and no site.

As one of the merely moderately frequent answerers, I take this very personally. You are asking for my time and attention. As it happens, I am unlikely to hit you with a snarky comment, but you can expect downvotes and close votes early and often. I do it to chase away the people who can't be bothered to make good use of my time. And I chase those people away to make it easier to help those who deserve help.

Winston Churchill famously said:

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

The same applies to Stack Overflow. OP, Mick P, can you name some other web resource that works better? Where you can ask a question and have any hope of getting a reliable answer? I bet you can't. Even if you go back in time to before this site existed, you can't. These sites were designed to dodge the paradox that made the others mediocre.

So here you have Stack Overflow: it doesn't ask you to pay, it just asks you to (a) work really hard to ask a non-duplicated, fully-fleshed question, and (b) put up with occasional crap. (b) is a universal characteristic of the internet; nothing on the internet will ever, realistically, be different. So this whole debate is about the treatment of questions that are duplicates, unclear, lazy, whatever.

A further observation: there is now so much good stuff already here that the vast galumphing majority of the new programmers who come here can get what they need with Google. They don't need to ask a question at all. Unless, of course, what they need is what these sites are not for.