My own personal experience with SO as a Q&A site is I've had a literally 0% success rate. None of the questions I've posted have ever been successfully answered. (Now I don't even bother.)

I think that's because the site encourages people to get all the internetpointzzz reputation currency, and not to, you know, actually answer questions. And the questions I asked were somewhat difficult, because I'm not a dummy and I did a lot of research before posting them. So, as a software developer, I do not find SO "successful" as a Q&A site.

As a community, it seems their biggest flaw is they try to solve literally every problem with the reputation system, and they've turned it into a weird mess. For example, the SO FAQ says "if you know or find the answer, go ahead and answer your own question". But the reputation system says, "Nope, no permissions. We were just yanking your chain." Very off-putting for literally everybody who doesn't spent 4 hours a day there farming reputation.

Have you found... anything... anywhere that will answer your questions?

Because like you, I'm relatively bright and I do a lot of research before asking my questions. Hence they tend to get zero answers from:

IRC, mailing lists, personal emails of luminaries, Stack Overflow, Slashdot, or anywhere.

Generally I just keep hammering away and digging deeper until I figure out which CPU register is flipping wrongly that, to the top of the stack, caused the database query to return the wrong result (to give a synthetic example of the sort of thing I tend to run into and solve).

Not really.

I usually just assume if the question isn't answered by 2-3 different mediums, it's unanswerable. Then I work-around it, usually with some horrible hack that I hate.

Most recently, I was trying to twist and mold WebAPI2 into accepting a multipart/form-data request while also using the auto-serializer. I asked everywhere and every one, and nothing. The work-around is just awful, goddamned awful, but oh well.

I blame the developers who apparently think this REST API is "done" despite it being impossible to, for example, upload a user's profile image using it. Guh.

Catching all the pointzz (it also has badges!!) can be a problem. Especially on SO itself, there can be a race to answer a question, which means the quality of the answers suffers sometimes.

Difficult questions really don't work well, sadly. Unless there is the rare situation that some expert out there happens to know the answer and has the spare time to post a long detailed reply.

Didn't realise you couldn't answer your own questions without sufficient rep - that sounds a bit rubbish. Don't think you get any points from it either (obviously, otherwise you could just rapidly post a bunch of empty 'questions' and accept all your own answers).

Ultimately, stack-exchange sites seem to work well for a certain volume of questions, with a certain minimum number of enthusiastic varied experts in some field, for a certain level of question (not homework, not blue-sky research). This is kind of Goldilocks-obvious I suppose...

Right; but the thing is, the only questions I ever have are the difficult questions. Easy questions are either:

* Something I can figure out myself if I think about it for a few minutes, or

* Already on StackOverflow or another Q&A site so I can look them up.

IMO if the site doesn't tackle difficult questions, what's the point? I don't need yet another site for easy questions, I need a Q&A site to get my questions answered.

RE: the answering my own question thing -

Yeah, the people in control of the site all have like 573453247,3048294723847 rep so they think nothing of saying "well doing action X should require rep" followed by the old canard, "it's really easy to get that much rep!"

I seriously wonder if any of those people have actually created a new account and tried to use their own website. Because there's SO MANY LIMITATIONS on SO MANY THINGS tied to rep, if you come in from the outside there's actually very little you can actually do. And there's no way to ease-in to using the site, because you can't (for example) post comments on other people's answers until after you gain rep.

So if you're like me, and you have no patience/desire to play the internetpointzzz game, nor did you start using the site "early enough" to benefit from its population growth, and the fact that early users could do a LOT more without rep limits-- then you're kind of just stuck in this weird no-man's land.

(I didn't use the site when it was founded because of it's bizarre and foolish insistence on using OpenID. Thankfully they've finally moved away from that.)

Theoretically, I could gain rep (by playing the game), then add a "bounty" to my difficult questions to get them answered, but I ain't got time for that! Who does?

Agreed, there's a problem in both directions on the stack* sites, but Overflow is the single worst offender.

An observation; reading the meta sites (where they discuss the community) turns up a lot of downright vitriolic ire directed at the stinkin' no-reps who pollute the site with their ill-thought-out questions, like someone traipsing through the house with muddy shoes on.

In fact, I'd wager that if someone who had a mind to ask a question on SO read the meta site first, they'd be completely turned off from the attitude on display.

And I say this as someone that's been on both sides of the equation. I've had questions closed for "too broad" even when they're asking a pretty direct question with an equally direct answer, I've seen the flags pile up in the review queues.