all good points. also, the obsession with pushing "off topic" questions to other sites means that the range of questions you see on any one site goes down, which makes it less interesting as a place to go to answer.
another way of looking at this is that originally i could design my own filter (via tags) to select what i wanted to answer. but increasingly that is being done for me by mods, and what i find interesting (which tends to be "harder" questions that are cross-discipline) is sent elsewhere. meanwhile, other people are complaining that harder questions are not answered.
i guess they may go full circle and provide a way to combine from multiple sites in a single interface...
and i guess you can argue that what they have now - many fragmented sites - is a better fit to (and a response to) the problem they used to have when there were still many simple/easy questions to ask. they're late solving the problem they had and, at the same time, are making worse the problem they have which is too few eyeballs on the complex problems.
This. I have ~5000 rep, but have pretty much gone to not using at all for the past year, primarily due to shoving questions to ancillary SE sites. I dabble in administration, but not enough to constantly view ServerFault. I'm interested in algorithms, but I'm not going to spend all day only on that. The old StackOverflow seemed to be perfect for renaissance techies; there was a little bit of everything all in one place. I'd answer a question on C#, then ruby, then design patterns, then server admin. Now it's fragmented, I guess taking the "silo approach" to Q&A. It really kills it for those of us who have a variety of interests. That's not even getting into the "too few eyeballs" problem.
That wouldn't be so bad if SO didn't try to keep your user accounts for each site separate. I really don't want or need one account per site, or the constant barrage of "welcome back" animations and all that crap. Now I just ignore any site that I don't already have an account on.
another way of looking at this is that originally i could design my own filter (via tags) to select what i wanted to answer. but increasingly that is being done for me by mods, and what i find interesting (which tends to be "harder" questions that are cross-discipline) is sent elsewhere. meanwhile, other people are complaining that harder questions are not answered.
i guess they may go full circle and provide a way to combine from multiple sites in a single interface...
and i guess you can argue that what they have now - many fragmented sites - is a better fit to (and a response to) the problem they used to have when there were still many simple/easy questions to ask. they're late solving the problem they had and, at the same time, are making worse the problem they have which is too few eyeballs on the complex problems.