StackOverflow has saved my bacon more than a few times, so good for Joel and the gang, they provided an invaluable service to the development community. However, I feel like StackExchange needs to get its priorities into check.

Unbeknown to some, there are tonnes of StackExchange Q&A sites. Picked on Area 51 and then voted up by the community. Many start with good intentions, but lose steam and never make it to a fully-fledged Q&A site because they didn't meet the minimum requirements (the Startups StackExchange is a good example of this). There is literally a StackExchange site for every single niche; cooking, scepticism, music, science fiction, mathematics, database administration, Apple products, web services, Wordpress and tonnes more.

You have to ask yourself, are a lot of these individual Q&A sites simply using unnecessary server resources when they're probably being carried and offset by StackOverflow's advertising revenue? I would love to see StackExchange go down the path of focusing on programmers more than I would cooking or mathematics. I contribute to a lot of individual StackExchange sites, mostly the Wordpress one.

Reading the about page seems to highlight that not even StackExchange themselves know what they want to be or the fact they target a wide range of niches.

Stack Exchange is the largest network of websites for software developers including Stack Overflow, the pre-eminent destination site for programmers to find, ask, and answer their questions.

This statement seems to indicate they focus on catering to developers, but going through the list of over 100 StackExchange Q&A sites yields sites for niches like; marketing, mathematics, cooking, science fiction, gaming, DIY, Apple software/hardware, electrical engineering and tonnes more. I would say a few sites relate to programming, but many do not.

Then there is the issue of overzealous moderators (mostly on StackOverflow). How many times have you Googled a problem, SO comes up as the first result, you click it and the question has a few hundred, sometimes a few thousand upvotes and it has been closed? Happens to me quite a lot. I see questions being closed as duplicates when they're in fact not duplicates and were closed because the mod simply lacked the understanding of what was being asked. Questions closely related to a duplicate often get closed as a duplicate and once a question has been "moderated" it rarely ever gets re-opened.

The issue is in part with the points/badges system. You have an imbalance of power. It is virtually impossible for a new user to get high enough to make even a subtle difference to SO. Those at the top want to keep their spot, unfortunately many of the moderators are a little too click happy. Instead of the site feeling like a community moderated website, you have these select few power users telling us what is right or wrong (especially evident by the fact of high ranking Google results leading to closed questions).

Things have been broken for a very long time on SO and I hope the investment means they can try and address the problems (which they must be aware of).

Don't get me wrong, StackExchange have provided a beyond invaluable service, but the arrogance, overzealous moderators and often confusing policies/rules around the kind of questions you can ask/how you can ask them really deters me from participating. My involvement with SO these days is read only, because I don't want to get dragged into all of the politics of the site and the power users who control it.

Seems to me this could be a problem for SO in the future if people like myself are deterred from answering because they don't feel like their contribution will be accepted or will be heavily criticised.