It's tricky. The SE concept is somewhat flawed - like all the "free" internet "services" that make money from advertising, just in a slightly different way.
@andy256 oh yeah, and there are some parts of it that are just a disaster. the presumably paid-for ubuntu one, for example is a fast churn of newbie questions and hardly any upvotes, let alone answers. Why answer when at best you're going to get one or two votes?
@andy256 Yes. But they try to do that by having the best answers. That intermediate goal of really good questions and answers that show up well in Google searches is more what I concern myself with.
Yes, that's the tricky part. The site can't grow without new blood, but the rules can make getting started hard. OTOH I cannot understand people who post without looking at all those suggested similar questions.
@nhinkle that's interesting. I'm one of the awful freeloaders who aggressively adblock so I don't see any of it. When I look at other people's computers I'm often shocked by how intrusive the ads are. Or the autoloading videos, advertising or not.
@andy256 add-ons, but several. Adblock, Adblock Plus, FlashBlock, Facebook Disconnect (in Chrome), add Ghostery and Self-Destructing Cookies in Firefox.
That's at work. I use a more thorough set when I'm at home, but for work some of them interfere with testing our website(s) because the test tools rely on doing less than desirable things. Much as anti-piracy tools make debugging executable programs harder...
Ah, I would never have noticed if you hadn't pointed it out
bicycles.stackexchange.com/a/24953/7044 This answer was a comment + copy of my answer, but Gary Ray edited out the comment... so now it's just a copy of my answer