What is a way to fix this? Is this some part of an endless long-cycle of adoption for social networks over some kind of crossing-the-chasm style adoption curve? Or is there a structural way to fix it? Stackoverflow is better than its predecessors, but clearly is much less valuable now than for its first few 5 years or so.
For me SO could be more powerful if more answers would link or refer to documentation/github landing pages supporting/documenting their solution.
Often I see some weird way to implement something in the .NET world, especially Core/.NET 5, search Microsoft docs and find an 5-10-min read article updated last Wednesday that explains in-depth (relatively to a SO post) three different newer way of doing it.
A big weakness of SO, as I see it is aging. Most upvotes and marked-as-answer is most likely also the oldest.
Maybe the page could warn for old answers or highlight newer answers that are gaining traction.
Maybe questions and answers should be encouraged to specify version of tools. Asking identical questions for V1 and V2 of a tool should not be met by "POSSIBLE DUPLICATE" warning or get downvoted to oblivion. Posts shouldn't need "EDIT 1 updated for V1", "EDIT 2 updated for V2", as this is OK with 2 versions but what about 10?
Maybe points (or some score system) should decay over time? Idk. But I think something needs to be done.
It's not just that social networks go bad the way cheese goes bad, but also that any "social network" business becomes opposed to the interests of its user base at the moment it becomes a "sustainable" business (e.g. the users would want 100% of the surplus to go to improving the system, but management, employees, investors and such won't agree)
Once you are #1 in the Google Economy there are many reasons to say "why try harder?" Questions might have better answers some place else but there is no one site that threatens the SO hegemony. Also, a site like SO has a proven compatibility with Google SEO -- if you made any big changes to a site like that there is a high risk that your traffic would drop catastrophically.
What I would do:
StackOverflow Q/A are all available by a "cc-by-sa" license, so it would be a good starting place for something better: an "antisocial" project curated by a small group of people. Take the top 0.1% of questions from SO and only the best answer and strip away the "socialjunk" (e.g. see "chartjunk") and you are starting to get there.
A system like that could justify itself it were your own personal knowledge base, but to make something generally useful I'd expect to curate 100 questions a day for 3 months or so: about 10,000 questions in all.
There are a number of methods that could speed up that curation a lot, not least of which is that you'll find some authors who consistently write great answers and others who consistently get upvoted with mediocre answers, etc. No amount of analytics will make up for zero manual curation work, you could be maybe 5x as productive once you've curated 10,000 questions and developed some automation.
I had the notion their membership was limited, like a country club or fraternity or something, to a fixed number. To join, someone else had to first leave. I can't now confirm this, so I probably misremembered. Regardless, I've always liked this idea.
Wiki claims a distinction between virtual communities and social medias. The Well, MetaFilter, Ravelry and others have membership fees. Some have verified identities. Those frictions would certainly deter most dysfunction, antisocial behaviors now plaguing social medias.
I think curated social media is mostly fruitless. Having done a lot of online moderation, I honestly don't know how u/dang and others pull it off.
Culture and civility is much easier with preventative measures, like verified identity.
