SO's accepted answers being "no dont do what you want to do, use this corporate™-certified library instead, we ALLLLL use it too"
Like bitch if I wanna kill myself with a knife, tell me which vein to cut, dont recommend me a gun, I dont want it. ffs.

SO is not about you and your problem. It's not your helpdesk. It's about the question and the hundreds of people who read that afterwards, and getting them in the right direction does make sense.

The X/Y problem is pretty rampant where people ask how to do X with Y while actually, they shouldn't be doing it like that at all.

@Fast-Nop right direction devoid of context?
It's like someone stuck in a village-road post storm asking how to get to the city, and people pointing out the local Expressway name?
Right, sure
Ideally should've been that? yes

But in this context is makes 0 sense and 40%-50% being those answers is retarded. It's like people just want to answer for the heck of it

@azuredivay There is almost always enough context for an answer. What is missing is assumed to be the common case because that is what most other people will come there for. Both, questions and answers can also be edited by the same and/or other persons - so further refinement can happen at any time.

SO is truly agile QA and at the same time aims to solve the question for all - not just the one specific case. I hate asking, so it really helps me a lot that almost all of my questions are answered there before i have them.

@Fast-Nop @Oktokolo these two answers logically conflict and the fact that they're brought up together so often demonstrates that they're both qyoted in more cases than they're relevant.

The X/Y problem applies in a specific case; given enough details about a situation it can be concluded that the asker is asking the wrong question.

General questions and only general questions can have answers that don't apply to the asker's situation but are more helpful to future readers.

What usually happens on SO is that score grinding regulars replace questions with simpler ones that neither apply to the asker nor to the plain stated problem (what future readers will have been searching for) but are easy to answer.

don't get me wrong, both of these happen, and they can even happen at the same time, but that just means that some SO questions should have both a link to a better question and a correct general answer to the question as written. That way future readers can ensure that they're not falling in the same trap as OP and then follow the exact answer.

@lorentz @Oktokolo if something aims for "everything", it'll achieve "nothing".
Im not expecting SO is a 1-stop-shop for All answers, but I'd rather people NOT answer than answering something totally tangent to the "scenario/context" in which the question was asked.
The refinement you talk of, rarely happens. Usually majority, who isnt in the same context as the asker, will just upvote the tangent-answer since thats the "industry standard n everyone uses it"

too much attention is given to points and awards, while good, but this means majority dont answer questions in good faith. It's just to get points and that's what causes such needless tangent answers.

@lorentz There is a conflict of interest of course. But it happens sometimes on StackOverflow, that a question gets refined later and that there iteratively evolves an answer that answers the common problem and some more specific edge cases. Normally, those question answer pairs are the most informative to me.

What you describe obviously also happens. That is the price for not making StackOverflow a subscription service employing paid moderators which then moderate tons of content they actually have absolutely no clue about as StackOverflow is for all languages and frameworks and nobody can really know them all.

In the end, the StackOverflow moderation model works pretty well despite its problems. Noobs can still ask and answer. And moderator abuse happens - but it doesn't happen more than on other community-moderated sites. I know no moderation model better matching the target audience and type of content.

@azuredivay Well, for me, StackOverflow almost is a one-stop-shop for dev-related answers. And it only is that because it answers the common questions and the specific ones. The "not your personal helpdesk" part isn't exactly true in practice. You can ask your personal specific questions and will get answers for that question if did some research first and explain, why you didn't just chose one of the obvious answers that came up in your search.

If you can communicate with devs in written form and take your time to understand the platform - as usual you get good answers like back in the Usenet days. It is just, that you shouldn't ask if the answer already exists.

I had to stop using SO fairly quickly, because it was either "this is a dupe of a completely different question" or being completely ignored, and then being blocked for spam until "old posts get enough points, please edit them to make them better and some one will help soon!" Fun fact: I did, and still to this day they've been ignored, so I still cannot use SO even if I wanted to.