alt Hacker NewsEveryone seems to say that it was always a terrible place to ask questions where you'd have your question closed for no reason.
I don't understand this at all. In its heyday, I found it working really well. The questions that would be closed were either copy-pastes of homework tasks, vague descriptions of some overarching goal ("how do I implement this?"), walls of code ("why does this crash?"), or obvious duplicates.
I think it's good that the site got rid of those quickly. Sure there'd be some snarky high-rep users around, but they'd mostly listen to facts or at least be drowned out by more useful contributions.
From what I recall, there was a golden era where the site was growing and it was useful and entertaining. One problem is that it had a learning curve. I think it got worse when every answer became editable by other people, and power users and rules lawyers became entrenched and they started closing basically every question as a duplicate. That often resulted to sending people to questions that weren't precisely the same, and often with out of date answers. It felt like they never seemed to figure out whether it was supposed to be a Q&A site, a wiki, or a forum (I suppose forum was generally nixed, other than discussion in comments).