What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

Without Quora we can’t get masterpieces like this: https://youtu.be/EShUeudtaFg

The Irony here is what Hacker News did to this page. 503 Service Unavailable :D

In any case, business perspective prevailed, subject matter experts stopped sticking around. Personally, I think the (slow but steady over many years) switch from b) to c) is what doomed the site.

There was a few noteworthy company post, especially those after the mass layoffs / private equity takeover on the meta site that acknowledged the problem, so its certainly not a), even when you apply a strict standard about the terms in which to acknowledge the problem (which was well-known long before). Those company statements had some rather clear and well-received community commentary below that essentially questioned whether any of the suggestions on tackling the problem should even be tried. The very-much-not-welcoming onboarding experience, while it had great potential for improvements, was yet serving the sites unique needs quite well. Two weeks of persistence and reading the manual were not much of a detrimental filter.. not to those that would eventually go on to contribute back for many years. And those were the ones that ultimately mattered. Not those one-off solve-my-homework posts that only saw indifferent/annoyed moderation action. That probably still wonder why nobody took their hand and spent their evening guiding them through the steps necessary to make their post useful to anyone other than just the original author.

> StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation

Only in terms of asking new questions, because this was never intended to be the primary use of the site. The entire point of the model is that one person asking a good question could save many others the effort of asking — and answering. But everyone who made an account had permission right off the bat to propose edits to questions and answers, for example.

> making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions.

Rounding it off like this is missing the point, and doesn't demonstrate understanding of or consideration towards the underlying rationale.

> They slowly killed the site in this manner.

It was never supposed to get even remotely as big as it did. It is entirely unreasonable to have ended up with 24 million open, publicly visible questions about programming, when that is over triple the number of Wikipedia articles about literally anything noteworthy.

> knowing I'd have to consider all the ways a bully eager to use their powers might misunderstand me

I can guarantee you that the overwhelming majority of such action is not motivated by "eagerness to use powers", not an attempt at "bullying", and not the result of "misunderstanding" the thrust of the question.

It is a result of misunderstanding what kind of questions the site wants, and why it wants that kind of question.

> I can't imagine asking a question there without having had lurked for longer than a typical Bachelor's + Masters program.

Reading through, for example, https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/433897 and understanding what is written there is literally all that is required.

> Their rules, (I believe unintentionally) give iron-fisted fiefdom rulers a toolbox of justifications to control and alienate under the guise of protecting the quality of the site data.

That isn't what happens. I know many, many people believe it to be what happens, but I know from years of seeing the process on the inside that it's absolutely not what happens in the overwhelming majority of cases.

The "quality of the site data" is a 100% honest motivation and I don't understand why people are unwilling to accept that. I and others have made countless attempts to explain it.

> I honestly don’t even think most of the control freak mods

The people you're referring to are not control freaks, and also are not "moderators". Most curation on the site requires consensus between multiple people who are generally not coordinating.

> Some mod— a hobbyist with far less knowledge and experience, but a serious case of Dunning-Krueger— probably got annoyed that I was getting more votes than them because one day they started nitpicking the hell out of every goddamned word I wrote. I pretty quickly got fed up, and stopped participating about a month after I started.

I can practically guarantee that the person you're referring to was not a moderator. If it was (someone with the diamond icon beside the username, and who appeared on https://stackoverflow.com/users?tab=moderators), you should have posted on the meta site about it. The pattern of behaviour you describe is clearly abusive and against the Code of Conduct (and would have been across all versions thereof), and would absolutely been acted upon.

If an "ordinary" (perhaps with higher rep) user was harassing you like this, that is why they put a "flag" link under every question and answer, and icon beside each comment, to raise a flag for moderator attention. This sort of thing is and always has been taken seriously.