Good point. I’d say it’s a completely different experience, which works well if your problem is fairly easy to fix for an expert, but hard to explain/formulate for the user. The experts often have to dig down to the core of the problem, by questioning the user again and again, until they reach the actual problem.

On the other side, if you have a very specific problem (which you know how to articulate) and you’ll need deep domain experience to solve it, Stack Overflow is clearly a better choice.

Finally, more and more users take advantage of actually hiring the expert who helped you.