It is nice to see but without proper enforcement I am afraid that change will never come. IMHO, the biggest step they need to take is to allow repeat questions or at least to mitigate the "murder the SO" mentality that's displayed whenever it happens. It's one thing to suggest the question already has an answer. It's a whole different beast when you type out how worthless the SO is for not doing research prior to posting the question and ban against them with 50 down votes, ostracizing them completely. Moderators should be given an option to punish users for incorrect/inappropriate comments and action on questions.
Allowing repeat questions is absolutely essential to keeping a community vital.
I've seen this pattern happen on so many Internet forums, going all the way back to the WELL, where eventually they develop this surface crust of long-time users who systematically chase anyone new away by informing them that the thing they want to talk about, whatever it is, has already been talked about. At first, it might start with a chatty response that provides a link to the old conversation and also provides a summary or some other additional input. And, when done that way, it generally is helpful and friendly.
But, with practice, the procedure is optimized down to the point where the post is little more, and sometimes less, than "We've talked about this before: <hyperlink>" And that's toxic. The only way you could send a clearer message that someone's contributions are not valued is to come right out and say, "Your contribution is not valued."
Stack Overflow has, unfortunately, stumbled upon a way to accelerate this process by gamifying it.
The UI may have some wiki-like characteristics, but, when you're talking about the social environment instead of the UI, it's kind of a distinction without a difference.
Example: Wikipedia has similar social problems regarding new contributors.
SE have explicitly stated that the site is a Wiki.
"Stack Overflow ultimately has much more in common with Wikipedia than a discussion forum." Jeff Atwood, "What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?", 22 October 2018.
I think a lot of people don't realize how discouraging it is to receive downvotes. They're handed out like candy for any perceived flaws in a question. I'd rather have a dialog in the comments to get the questioner to fix the flaws.
It should be conpulsory to leave comments when you downvote a question. I always ask people to explain in the comment why they downvote me, and I would get more downvotes and 0 comment.
I've never understood that. It might be because people are afraid of retaliatory downvotes in return. I have enough rep there that I don't worry about it, but even so it never seems to happen.
IMO Removing/merging repeated questions is important to keep up the standard of SO and is what makes searching easier in the long run. I agree that comments sometimes can get very picky and discouraging.
I agree it's important, but if I had a dollar for every time a question whose answer I also needed was marked a repeat of a similar (but not identical) question with an answer that was invalidated by that discrepancy, I wouldn't need to use stackoverflow any more.
You're absolutely right about the culture changes needed to change the experience for new users, it's terrible right now. I imagine there could be a middle ground, where duplicates are allowed/answered/not aggressively downvoted, but once they're marked as a dupe they could 'fade out' to where they're eventually visible only via a user profile and not found in the main archive or search results.
Languages and tools and practices evolve. Stack Overflow is now getting old enough that the answers a question originally got may no longer be the best way to do things, and sometimes aren't even workable anymore.
If anything, what SO needs is a way to "fade out" old questions in favor of new ones.
