Disclaimer: This is no flame, and this is no whining. This is my personal experience with stackoverflow, which may entirely depend on me doing complicated akward things.
My experience with stackoverflow boil down to these two situations:
I ask a question, write my little heart out to provide context, to provide things I have tried already and to state my problem, because I don't have trivial little coding problems I can solve with google (yes, that was arrogant, I am aware of this.). After I have posted such a question, I usually get like 3-4 1 line answers and then the question goes dead, because apparently, the answer to such a question is more complicated.
On the other hand, if I answer a question, I usually look and poke around a bit in order to provide a good, complete answer to an interesting question. Once I have posted such a question after like 10 minutes, there are like 3-4 one-line-answers posted already, upvoted already and my answer (which usually is more accurate and all) is just ignored and stays somewhere in the middle.
Joining these two experiences together, I have moved on to use groups and certain IRC-channels, as these are more helpful for nontrivial questions.
I agree entirely - I've had exactly the same experiences. I think both of them boil down to the site suffering from it's own success.
This seems to be fundamentally because once one reasonably correct answer picks up an upvote or two, it often snowballs into picking up many more because future visitors won't add other answers of their own and just upvote that. This leads to there being a significant reward for getting your answer in first - more so than for it to be complete (or, in some cases, correct) - so users aim to answer as fast as possible. As their user base has grown, that time threshold has gone down, and the quality of many of the answers follows it.
I don't know what the answer to that is though - maybe there's not one.
I also agree....almost a year ago this problem was actually discussed on the SO podcast (people doing the instantaneous one liner reply in order to get upvotes asap, the problem somewhat originated from a blog post someone did one specific ways to game the SO rep system).
I have a similar problem in that I ask questions that are generally "harder" and don't often have a perfectly black and white answer, but I'll get a few "little effort" answers and then they go dead, and I am left with a poor answer acceptance ratio. If I ever eventually figure out a question, I always go back and answer it myself, so really I'm trying to do the right thing as I am a big believer in the site, but I think it misses subtleties like this. It's not particularly easy, but I think they could improve things to stop gaming of the system.
In this and other contexts, I've wondered about the viability of stepped intervals. Accumulate responses, and later further responses and votes, behind the scenes, but only update the published thread every 1 minute, 2 minutes, 5 minutes, or some to-be-determined optimal interval (that might change over time / post age, size, etc.).
I'm curious why Google searches don't turn up higher ranking google group posts. This is where I get almost every question answered. There must be a wealth of info there and I almost always search for the google group, then reenter the question inside groups.
Smaller support communities (IRC, groups) seemed to be the best niche for getting questions answered, and it doesn't appear StackOverflow is seeing that.
1) Karma-seeking individuals are likely going to try find a way to get as much of the good stuff with the least effort. Easier questions will get snapped up.
2) You can still use the system, just offer a karma reward for a good answer.
I just don't see the reward of extra effort anymore. Once I have found the right mailing list (which is not that hard), I can invest exactly the same effort I invest into posting a nontrivial question on stackoverflow and usually I can get far better answers without any extra effort, without having to handle any kind of karma-politics.
My experience with stackoverflow boil down to these two situations:
I ask a question, write my little heart out to provide context, to provide things I have tried already and to state my problem, because I don't have trivial little coding problems I can solve with google (yes, that was arrogant, I am aware of this.). After I have posted such a question, I usually get like 3-4 1 line answers and then the question goes dead, because apparently, the answer to such a question is more complicated.
On the other hand, if I answer a question, I usually look and poke around a bit in order to provide a good, complete answer to an interesting question. Once I have posted such a question after like 10 minutes, there are like 3-4 one-line-answers posted already, upvoted already and my answer (which usually is more accurate and all) is just ignored and stays somewhere in the middle.
Joining these two experiences together, I have moved on to use groups and certain IRC-channels, as these are more helpful for nontrivial questions.