The problem for me is not that SO became difficult as all popular/large systems inevitably become, it's the seeming lack of action to solve some of the issues involved.
The reputation thing is still nonsense. I can ask a noob question and end up with 10K reputation because of the likes it gets or I can answer a complicated question that takes all 25 years of experience to articulate well and get nothing. People can offer a bounty but it should also be possible to "reward" people who obviously know what they are doing and not reward people for asking questions.
The problem with duplicate questions is big, but again, the search isn't great at finding them, especially if you don't quite know how to ask the question.
They don't do much about people who just appear with 1 reputation asking something like "What does Null Reference Exception mean?". I ended up being allowed to moderate questions but the moderation queues get stuck constantly so I couldn't even help with that - after all, the crowd-sourcing is a great way to solve the volume of moderation needed and some of us are happy to help but as soon as you start seeing "Moderation queue full" after only moderating 2 posts, then you give up.
The reputation thing is still nonsense. I can ask a noob question and end up with 10K reputation because of the likes it gets or I can answer a complicated question that takes all 25 years of experience to articulate well and get nothing. People can offer a bounty but it should also be possible to "reward" people who obviously know what they are doing and not reward people for asking questions.
The problem with duplicate questions is big, but again, the search isn't great at finding them, especially if you don't quite know how to ask the question.
They don't do much about people who just appear with 1 reputation asking something like "What does Null Reference Exception mean?". I ended up being allowed to moderate questions but the moderation queues get stuck constantly so I couldn't even help with that - after all, the crowd-sourcing is a great way to solve the volume of moderation needed and some of us are happy to help but as soon as you start seeing "Moderation queue full" after only moderating 2 posts, then you give up.