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 That often resulted to sending people to questions that weren't precisely the same, and often with out of date answers.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).