From time to time I still use it, but for me it has jumped the shark.
No, it explicitly forbids questions that involve discussion.
The point of Stack Overflow is (and to a large extent always was) to be the place for definitive answers (and their alternatives) to well-asked questions. It is not a place for discussions, ranked opinions, interesting conversations, or anything else that does not have a "right" or "best-guess" answer.
It so happens that many questions are interesting to the community of people who visit Stack Overflow, but that doesn't mean they are contextually appropriate. If you want a discussion, go elsewhere. This isn't just a "if you don't like it, leave" judgement: it's explicit in the design and mission of the site[1]. There are better places to discuss things, just not on Stack Overflow.
[1] "This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat...Avoid questions that are primarily opinion-based, or that are likely to generate discussion rather than answers.", from http://stackoverflow.com/tour
This is nonsensical, because the reason that it isn't a duplicate is inherent in the question itself. I'm not sure how I would edit it without writing a non-sequitur. Even though I've actually accepted a correct answer, I cannot get rid of the prompt.
Arbitrarily closing/rewriting questions, removing useful information etc. The site can be useful - but only in spite of the community tasked with running it (not because of them) and it makes it frustrating to use.
We added that prompt because a huge number of people were asking questions that were either duplicates or were so poorly presented that the nugget of information that made them unique was obscured; either way, the asker wasn't getting an answer. It's been live for just under a year now, and the response has been incredible: more duplicate questions are confirmed by the askers themselves than are closed by voters; meanwhile, the number of people editing their questions has also gone up.
Sorry you had a bad experience with it, but this is part of the work we've been doing to reduce the amount of conflict and frustration on the part of both askers and answerers.
Despite me being a very experienced programmer (I started to learn coding when I was 6 years old), I find SO extremely hostile.
Examples: One question of mine from 2010 got vote closed in 2014 (yes, people will hunt down questions even that later!) and now has vote deletes, also the same question the most upvoted answer is a snarky answer (copy paste of the answer: "You can't eat your cake and have it too.")
Recent questions: They all get downvoted and vote-duplicate even when they aren't.
I made some questions about RDTSC, people kept arguing with me about how I was doing something wrong, my CTO is retarded, or that I was retarded, or whatnot... and all I wanted was to fix some games (RDTSC behaviour changed from counting CPU cycles, to count whatever arbitrary frequency the hardware wants, this break old games that rely on it counting literal CPU cycles).
Another was when I asked details about some bizarre behaviour of Objective-C in recent versions of XCode, people said it was dupe (not exactly), that I was retarded, that it was all in the fucking manual, or that I could google it, and noone EVER replied with a single official answer.
I asked then on Quora, found out that XCode DO have non-standard behaviour (ie: stuff that ins't in Obj-C standard, and ins't in official distribution of LLVM), and that the Apple manual is wrong, thus no wonder why I wasn't finding the info on the manual or on google.
I asked about these issues on Stackoverflow Meta, got attacked, downvoted, deleted, etc... no meaningful discussion.
I am impressed that some people went to great lengths to argue with me without posting a proper answer, one guy even wrote something I considered an answer in the comments, but lacking details, I asked him to expand in an actual answer so I could accept it, and he replied in the comments: "Nah, that would be a waste of bandwidth."
Like at which point do they understand that maybe their desire conflicts with how most community wants to use SO as.
It's just stupid to reduce such a portal to only questions that can be answered by RTFM.
Questions that need discussion due to missing information should be voted away, I agree on that. But some allow subjective answers - and those are frequently those that require experience. (What's the best way to solve this-and-that? It depends, in situation a use solution A because, in situation b use solution B because, ...) Such questions typically are being closed by the moderators as well. And frequently the person who asks is not aware of all the factors influencing a solution, so there's a lot of useful information in such questions.
[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16392260/which-websocket-... [2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5062614/how-do-i-decide-w...
OTOH there is definitely a need for a forum for the questions that get closed on SO but collect a huge number of upvotes. These are important questions and answers, people want and need them, and keep asking and answering them.
One important question is whether the approach to the site governance used on stackexchange sites would work on such a forum.
Quora tries to somehow serve as such a forum, but it lacks the focus of SO.
In fact, many of the most impressive developers I've gotten to know, like Rich Hickey and others, have low scores on the site. You can't judge the contributors by whether or not they know what they are talking about, just whether or not they are addicted to answering questions first before anyone else. And many of them just like the power they have over other users to close and moderate things, often in an unpredictable way.
That said, many of the contributors are genuinely helpful and the site has helped me tremendously in the past. But just as many contributors are narcissistic and think they invented both chickens and eggs.
By the way, showing a talented beginner where good documentation is - I think that's frequently the best way to help them along.
In other words: just because Google ranks a result best doesn't actually mean it is best for you: I have frequently found the actual result I was looking for two or three result pages down.
I did, and they replied :)