I got offered a job (through some automated recruiting methods, I'm not that special) where the concept was to write SO answers with extremely tight style restrictions. I ended up turning it down because I disagreed with their style guide but presumably some alternate me got paid to write SO answers.
Biggest grievance was an example where a question would ask someone like "how do I safely open a file in Python 3.11?" Obviously the answer is a context manager. But they would say that's not generic enough, the answer shouldn't use language specific features. Even though the question was for a specific language. Meaning I'd be spreading bad practice.
> What does being an SO contributor actually get you?
I had a reason to dive into obscure and esoteric corners of some languages/frameworks/toolkits. I practiced helping people with technical problems, which was likely a major contributor to getting my current job where developers also provide technical support to the customers (who are also software developers). Having this out in the open and being able to point at the fact that I was ranked in the top 100 contributors certainly helped.
However, things have changed since the early days, of course. Basic documentation and tutorials for programming languages and toolkits have become better overall, I'd say. We've got good centralized knowledge bases for certain topics, e.g. MDN where you previously would have had to piece together information from SelfHTML, W3Schools and other partially wrong sources, or go straight to the relevant specification (not for everyone, of course). Stack Overflow has become the repository of answered questions that is pretty searchable and there are a lot of questions that simply don't need to be asked again. LLMs have scraped SO, so ChatGPT and others can answer many programming questions fairly well (with the occasional hallucination or error).
By now I only rarely open SO anymore. But I go through different hobbies every few years anyway, and while I was still studying, I had the time, I learned a lot, and to this day I still like explaining things and helping others.
I agree, and I see similar trends in OSS projects.
The worse the economy is, the greater the inequality between the masses and the top 0.1% the less we can afford to be idealistic and give away our time.
Spam sites that scraped SO content where a big problem for a while, so that would have certainly pulled traffic from SO.
If I had to guess about other reasons, I'd say we've moved on from giving our knowledge and content away for the benefit of corporations.
What does being an SO contributor actually get you?
Whats the point in monitoring new posts and answering questions?
The economy is hard enough as it is. I dont need to be giving my time away for free to help corporations generate more billions from Ad Revenue.
But whow knows!?
Like I say, is it actually declining by any metrics that are public? (genuine question)