I think a common misunderstanding about Stack Overflow is that it's a place to get your questions answered. It's not - that's only a secondary use case.
The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers. They're optimizing for being the first google result for "how to do X in Y language." They're not optimizing for being the best place for an individual to ask "hot to do X in Y language."
When you consider S.O. through that lens, I think a lot of how the site works (aggressive close-as-duplicate-ing, for example) makes more sense.
The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers. They're optimizing for being the first google result for "how to do X in Y language." They're not optimizing for being the best place for an individual to ask "hot to do X in Y language."
When you consider S.O. through that lens, I think a lot of how the site works (aggressive close-as-duplicate-ing, for example) makes more sense.