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No, SO has not retained quality. It’s a wasteland of promising questions that moderators turned into dead ends, to the point that finding an SO link relevant to your issue in a Google searches is practically guaranteed to leave you more frustrated than before. It pollutes the troubleshooting process with false hope.

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Yeah, a haystack full of needles is better than a single needle in a haystack. That is to say: having the same information repeated tons of times is better than not being able to find the one canonical place the information is written.

Are those the only two options? How about a haystack full of maybe-needles, where each answer is subtly wrong because no one has the willingness to go through and vet all of them?

Simplest thing would be to delist closed questions from search (including Google).

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