Whenever I search a google many of their questions pop at the top. A lot of these questions end up closed. However some of these questions have a ton of votes. Some questions are down voted or closed and obviously where asked by someone who just started programing.<p>You can't even answer them because they were closed. Everyone is there at some point.
I like lurking around SO as there is a lot of good knowledge flying around, and I've seen my share of closed questions.<p>Honestly, I hate the abuse of power you see on many forums, but I've never seen a topic closed without appropriate justification.<p>SO is meant to be a place to ask for a solution to a specific problem you've narrowed down as best as you could, not copy-paste a bunch of stuff you don't understand for people to analyze. I think it's awesome, because it keeps the quality very high, and makes it an extremely useful resource to quickly find solutions to not-so-obvious problematics.<p>Posting links to some of those threads would help having a better look at what you've witnessed though, maybe as someone said it's specific to certain areas of the site?
The issues appear to be symptoms of the gamification employed by the site. There are users with high scores that are eager to protect their position, and dominance of their particular subject area. These users are putting their scores on their resumes and online profiles to advance their careers. You could create your own new stack overflow site focused on helping beginners.
This totally infuriates me as well. Some bizarre snobbery over there. Nearly every time I follow a Google search link to stackoverflow I find the topic closed for one bullshit reason or another. Rarely does the logic make common sense.
It's likely that this viewpoint depends on the language you tend to view – I haven't seen much evidence of this trend. SO is a large site now and has different subcultures within it.
I think stackoverflow is just following the normal curve or market dominance - first you solve the problem, then you become the problem.<p>I think it is a side effect of the way some policies that were needed are now culture/institutional memory.