>I'm confident the answers are vetted and the best has risen to the top.
That really doesn't have as much meaning as you think it does. The best answer out of three bad answers is still a bad answer. If they have driven away the people who give good answers, no amount of filtering the leftover bad answers will get you a good answer.
I don't see very many experts on stackoverflow. It may be a useful resource for beginners, but as someone more intermediate, I've had no questions answered satisfactorily in the time I've tried using it. And all those questions I ended up getting answered by asking in the appropriate IRC channel. My concern is that more and more open source projects are saying "if you have questions, ask on stackoverflow", but not actually watching for those questions and answering them. When a project has no mailing list, no IRC channel, and says "use stackoverflow" I'm pretty much out of luck for getting help.
I think it's not just Stackoverflow--in general, experts have better things to do than help Newbie #258349 walk through installing Ruby. After years of watching the same questions get asked over and over, they just decide to give up and go work on something interesting, so you end up with an echo chamber of "bump for answer, I have the same problem", "has this been solved plz send teh codez", "me too".
After I wrote that, I realized I had written about experts in History. Any well-studied historian is as much, if not more, interested in historiography as the actual historical record. And I know that programming experts are the same. It is the meta discussions that truly inspire any expert. And being a novice, I am not capable of participating in those programming meta-questions, and certainly I'm not asking them, and consequently wasn't considering them in my comment. Though I should have. The Q&A format likely does not work with any meta discussion.
That really doesn't have as much meaning as you think it does. The best answer out of three bad answers is still a bad answer. If they have driven away the people who give good answers, no amount of filtering the leftover bad answers will get you a good answer.
I don't see very many experts on stackoverflow. It may be a useful resource for beginners, but as someone more intermediate, I've had no questions answered satisfactorily in the time I've tried using it. And all those questions I ended up getting answered by asking in the appropriate IRC channel. My concern is that more and more open source projects are saying "if you have questions, ask on stackoverflow", but not actually watching for those questions and answering them. When a project has no mailing list, no IRC channel, and says "use stackoverflow" I'm pretty much out of luck for getting help.