Probably. I know I'm answering fewer questions than ever.

Why? Because these days it feels like the purpose of SO is to exercise our programmers' OCD and categorize, delete, close, edit, rename, retag everything, rather than just providing content. Look at how many posts there are on Meta about how such and such questions should not be answered, how, apparently, unless they are the right questions, we are doing the community a disservice by answering.

SO has already become hostile to newcomers and people asking questions, and I feel like it has gotten to the point where criticizing answers for not following the right etiquette and not having the right secret handshakes, has become more important than the actual content of the answer.

This isn't a new development, and I've voiced my concern about it before.

But unless and until SO refocuses on the core idea of "get some answers for all those programming questions", even if yes, some of them are going to be duplicates, and some of them are going to be very trivial, I don't see it changing. Seasoned/high-rep users will gradually get disenfranchised and become less active.

Ultimately, I see two reasons why people stop answering questions:

good questions are too hard to find (typically because too much low-quality junk is cluttering up the place) actually answering questions does not feel rewarding

In a nutshell, you could say that #1 is about making it easy to write answers, and #2 is about making people want to write answers.

Historically, SO has focused very heavily on #1, which does make a certain amount of sense. If I have to climb a mountain to even find a good question, then I'm probably not going to bother.

But what has been neglected, and this is what's bothering me is #2. You might have worked hard to make it easier to find good questions, but you have done nothing (and even sacrificed some of what used to be there) to motivate me to actually write an answer once a good question has been found.

When questions get closed left and right, this also eliminates the answers we wrote. I can see my time and effort disappearing down the drain because others don't like the questions that I answered.

Other answers (and I believe this may have recently been rectified?) have become community-wikied, solely because I had the audacity to care about them and edited and improved them after posting. Apparently, that is discouraged.

And if you just skim over Meta, by far most of the activity centers around what content should be removed. Which questions should be deleted, which ones should be closed, how should they be closed, what can we do to make it easier to close questions. How do we dissuade people from answering these questions or those? It is quite clear that Meta thinks the biggest value is in removing content, not adding it.

As I said above, it does make sense to try to prune the low-quality content, and I am not saying content should never be deleted or closed.

But there is a complete lack of awareness of the fact that every time you delete or close a piece of content, you are removing something that someone put time and effort into. If you close a high-quality question for being a duplicate, you're still closing something that was high quality. You are still saying "don't do this again". And when you close a question, regardless of its quality, you are also closing all the answers. Answers which may have been high quality, which may have taken a lot of time and effort to write. Answers which could have helped people, and which were worth rep. And to those who wrote an answer that is now no longer visible, the message is "don't bother".

It's been made quite clear over the years that SO does not value high quality answers. Answers are seen as a disposable resource, something that doesn't have to be cultivated or encouraged, because it turns up no matter what, so instead, focus has been on filtering and pruning bad questions, with no concern given to what this does to the answers that are effectively collateral damage.

In short, why should I write an answer? It seems that SO wants me to close questions instead.