Programming

One of the key points nailed it.

There's way too many new questions. And frankly, new users do ask questions that are answered already. But the other problem - it's difficult to know how to ask the good questions. Because novices don't know what they're asking for. Which also means, they don't know what to search for.

But worse there's a gamified part to it. Badly written questions don't get much points. So even if you help, you aren't acknowledged unless the question asker is active. So you get weird ass questions like "How do I install Tailwind on Windows?" And you try your best to understand what they mean, spend half an hour on an answer, for them to reply "No" or worst, ghost you.

It makes it weird as a community because on one end, you want to help them. But on the other end, because of SO's own set of rules, you are limited to how. SO encourages new questions, they are badly written, experts feel like their time is being wasted because of the lack of response, experts become bitter. While the the bulk score chasers only go after extremely hot questions that have 20+ answers already. There are still jQuery answers (a pretty outdated framework from 10+ years ago) that get incredible activity, only because that's where the points are, compared to more modern tooling.

Source: I'm apparently a top 10% contributor (?) because a few of my answers from 2011-2015 hit the top page and are highly upvoted. Also guessing it's not hard to be in the top 10% because I'm not at all active, just been answering questions on SO for like a decade.