I don't think SO is declining either. I myself don't contribute that much anymore either, but I used to. Mostly because of reasons stated in this article.
There are some valid points though for both contributing and not contributing to SO. The fact that you need to be 'really fast' to answer questions does indeed hold mostly for the simple answers. And actually there I found that it's best to write a short, concise answer to the question and post that - more chance of being first - and then alter your question to add additional information that was not crucial, but still nice to have.
Anyway, SO is still a good resource for problems that are not that esoteric. With esoteric questions, the odds of someone finding your question and being able to answer it in reasonable time is smaller, and you're probably better of either looking through the docs yourself or, if possible, looking at the open-source code.
That it's hostile to newbies could be true. But it can also be hostile to people who have been using the site for quite some time. That is, unfortunately, part of the internet these days. Trolls are hard to avoid on websites with a big community.
There are some valid points though for both contributing and not contributing to SO. The fact that you need to be 'really fast' to answer questions does indeed hold mostly for the simple answers. And actually there I found that it's best to write a short, concise answer to the question and post that - more chance of being first - and then alter your question to add additional information that was not crucial, but still nice to have.
Anyway, SO is still a good resource for problems that are not that esoteric. With esoteric questions, the odds of someone finding your question and being able to answer it in reasonable time is smaller, and you're probably better of either looking through the docs yourself or, if possible, looking at the open-source code.
That it's hostile to newbies could be true. But it can also be hostile to people who have been using the site for quite some time. That is, unfortunately, part of the internet these days. Trolls are hard to avoid on websites with a big community.