Stack Exchange

Can't even contribute to an answer or upvote someone's answer that made your day. *sarcastic voice* "Sign up! Oh sorry you need reputation to tell everyone else that this answer worked and that you appreciate it...". Ridiculous.

Years ago, Stack Exchange was a decently good place to seek help for your problems, with so many different sites for different topics. These days, however, the site has no interest in helping anybody. Good, well-written questions constantly get closed without reason or for reasons that don't actually apply on the whims of fickle moderators. Getting questions re-opened or migrated is practically impossible and because it goes against the Stack Exchange rules you can't simply ask your question again at a different Stack Exchange site where it may be a "better fit" so you're completely out of luck.
Just about any other website is more helpful than Stack Exchange.

The people that run these websites act like losers instead of professionals. Do not bother wasting your time asking them a question. They'll just be losers. Listen to the negative reviews here. Go use something like Wyzant instead.

I first used Stack exchange some ten years ago. It wasn't perfect then, but it was far better than what it became later: a cesspool of egotism and petty people wanting to express their insignificant sense of pointless authority.
Anyone reading this who wants to improve it? First of all, disallow negative scores. 0 serves the purpose of showing minimal effort or low quality, yet doesn't have the aggressive, amassing effect of -3 (or -4, or -5). Secondly, stop pretending everything is quantifiable. It isn't.

I have used stack overflow many times for programming questions and am always able to get the help I need. I used stack exchange for a biology question and was met with rude and arrogant moderators. This should be a site where people can feel comfortable asking questions without being attacked. I will only be using stack overflow for programming questions from now on.

I was trying to ask a question but it was stopped as it apparently was not clear, so I edited to make it as clear as possible but apparently that was not good enough. I contacted customer support and just got sent a generic email with a link to a post that was not helpful in any, way, shape or form. Would not recommend asking questions on this website unless you're willing to keep editing the question until someone can actually answer it

Found this site while looking for an answer to a Facebook posting issue I have. A poster has the same question, freshly posted. The only answer given was unhelpful to me as stated, so I asked to detail his answer so I might replicate. I was given a negative and then my post was deleted. I tried again, only given a negative, again.

They have posting guidelines, to not be mean, rude, to be courteous,... like everyone, but allowing someone to negative score a question honestly probing for a detailed answer is an unhelpful site (and is rude BTW). Within a week I deleted my account there,... better quality sites are everywhere.

If you want a curious exchange of ideas, go somewhere else.
If you want some arrogant hostile people to bash you for daring to ask, then go ahead and try it out.
There is particular hostility for any question the deem "un focused", however their idea of "focused" means they'll only answer "questions" where you already have the solution, the code, and just some minor typo. God forbid if you're in the solution-seeking stage ("I'm trying to chose between Kafka and RabbitMQ given this architecture and these network requirements").

I wouldn't mind the existence of this useless site, but its Google promotion is monopolising and makes it hard for developers to reach actual real discussion communities.

Not a good place for novices as the best answers are often downvoted whilst the worst rise to the top. If you have no knowledge of the subject you are asking about you will not notice this and end up being misinformed. However, if you are already familiar with a subject and just want further specific details, it can be useful as there are some good, knowledgeable contributors. Put bluntly, there are too many geeky sci-fi fans posting on hard science and engineering subjects they have zero experience of, who get angry when corrected on their ignorance and downvote their superiors. Poor moderation allows this behaviour to prosper.