I'm an early SO user (userid < 500) and watched and got involved as the site developed. I'm in agreement with you, SO is still by a million miles way ahead of the traditional Q&A sites.
This isn't a personal bias and I'll admit that SO's had its ups and downs trying to find that balance between not being flooded by shit and not being overly authoritarian when trying to stem the flow of shit. I was a diamond mod on the site for a while, and despite what folks may think, the rest of the diamond crew are genuinely trying to maintain a good quality question and answer environment. I think it mostly works for the better. Sure there's the odd outrage here and there, but these are exceptions to the rule.
So here's a wee anecdote to finish up with. Whilst I'm a fairly experienced developer and engineer (30+ years in the biz) my latest project involves a bunch of Salesforce integration stuff (Apex code, triggers, callouts, inbound API bobbins...). How much did I know about Salesforce a month ago?....zilch/nada/zero; I was a complete and utter noob. Guess where I found the best answers to my umpteen google searches? Stackoverflow and the dedicated Salesforce SE site. Sure there's some good material in the Salesforce forums, but hoo...boy...there's a serious amount of utter dross that should just be deleted, which is what actively happens in SO. Sure there's the odd mistake here and there...for example, I found an answer the other week to a python thing I was having some trouble with. Google had a SO result but upon clicking through the question had for some reason been deleted. Turns out it was a misunderstanding and after a quick post on SO meta the question was re-instated. No big deal and no drama.
Every now and again we see posts like this here and there, folks bumping their gums about how terrible SO is, and how the moderation is overbearing and "my nebulous question about 'best frameworks'" was closed....blah, blah, blah. But like many things, in my experience, these complaints are usually from a noisy tiny minority. For the rest of us with a modicum of common sense SO and the SE network works just fine and we quietly get on with our day jobs.
This isn't a personal bias and I'll admit that SO's had its ups and downs trying to find that balance between not being flooded by shit and not being overly authoritarian when trying to stem the flow of shit. I was a diamond mod on the site for a while, and despite what folks may think, the rest of the diamond crew are genuinely trying to maintain a good quality question and answer environment. I think it mostly works for the better. Sure there's the odd outrage here and there, but these are exceptions to the rule.
So here's a wee anecdote to finish up with. Whilst I'm a fairly experienced developer and engineer (30+ years in the biz) my latest project involves a bunch of Salesforce integration stuff (Apex code, triggers, callouts, inbound API bobbins...). How much did I know about Salesforce a month ago?....zilch/nada/zero; I was a complete and utter noob. Guess where I found the best answers to my umpteen google searches? Stackoverflow and the dedicated Salesforce SE site. Sure there's some good material in the Salesforce forums, but hoo...boy...there's a serious amount of utter dross that should just be deleted, which is what actively happens in SO. Sure there's the odd mistake here and there...for example, I found an answer the other week to a python thing I was having some trouble with. Google had a SO result but upon clicking through the question had for some reason been deleted. Turns out it was a misunderstanding and after a quick post on SO meta the question was re-instated. No big deal and no drama.
Every now and again we see posts like this here and there, folks bumping their gums about how terrible SO is, and how the moderation is overbearing and "my nebulous question about 'best frameworks'" was closed....blah, blah, blah. But like many things, in my experience, these complaints are usually from a noisy tiny minority. For the rest of us with a modicum of common sense SO and the SE network works just fine and we quietly get on with our day jobs.