What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

> The rules changed, a lot.

No, they didn't. I joined in late 2010 to post a question, and posted multiple answers within an hour of that. As far as I can research, it has always been like that.

50 reputation is required to comment, except under your own questions (which is meant to facilitate figuring out what's wrong with a problematic question, so that it can be fixed).

Nobody ever got "banned from the site" for asking questions. There are algorithms that implement rate limits on questions and answers, some of which are oppressive (the so-called "Q-ban" limits you to one question per 6 months; and the insiders on meta who are doing all the question closing and downvoting that everyone objects to all hate it and have complained many times). There is in fact no proper facility for banning users available to moderators: they can only "destroy" accounts that were used by spammers or suspend ordinary users for increasing lengths of time (in practice, bans are implemented by suspending for 99999 days, which is about 273 years). These algorithms kick in because of a pattern; I have never been shown evidence of the Q-ban kicking in because of a single question (the details are internal to the company; even actual moderators don't and can't know) and the initial rate limits are honestly pretty gentle (unless you imagine that you're entitled to prompt answers; but you're supposed to get those by searching). Note that self-deleting poorly-received questions is generally believed not to help with this. (The goal was to prevent people from making lazy attempts at asking questions and then disclaiming any interest in fixing them; I think this was a misstep, as people should be lauded for coming to an understanding about how the site works, and for deleting things that aren't actually fixable.)

Important references:

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/164899 ("the complete rate-limiting guide")

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/271542 (rate-limit implementation)

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254262 (Q-ban warning)

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/255583 (Q-ban implementation)

The Pulse #119: Are LLMs making StackOverflow irrelevant? https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-134

The Fall of Stack Overflow https://observablehq.com/@ayhanfuat/the-fall-of-stack-overfl...

Very well put. Except they didn't think they were "picking a forum format". Forums with that style of voting were still kinda rare at the time (Reddit was young at SO's date of creation) and the Q&A formatting was supposed to look intentionally different from a "thread", which is also way (at least in the original design) comments were de-emphasized, and moderation policy held that the large majority of comments could be deleted at any time.

Unfortunately, this design comes across to a lot of people as comments being threaded replies, and the "question" format as privileging the OP (which makes it that much worse when the system forces question closure to happen out in the open). And recent redesigns, by new ownership obsessed with "engagement" and profitability and apparent complete apathy towards the original goals, have thoroughly enshittified the original.

I also have no idea what you mean about

> for example apparently not taking into account that software with identical name can have different versions;

There were always separate tags for various minor versions of Python, for example, and they were commonly incorrectly applied to questions where the version was not relevant.

> and its strict "no remotely duplicate-esque questions ever" policy meant that answers to common questions just got more and more outdated as time went on.

No; answers got outdated because of people not doing what they were supposed to do, which is: post a new answer on the old question. (Assuming that the old answers actually are outdated. It happens all the time that decade-old answers are still perfectly relevant, or even still represent the Right Way to Do It(TM).)

Somehow, people never wanted to do that when it actually mattered, but would constantly post new, repetitive, low-quality answers on popular old questions (often re-combining multiple old answers) even though the solutions hadn't actually become outdated, simply because they were popular questions and they hoped to gain visibility from it (whether from reputation, or because user profile pages had a "number of users reached" metric which literally just sums the view counts of the pages where you have a question or answer, including views that occurred before your post).

That said, there are plenty of cases where an old question got closed as a duplicate of a newer question: either because it went unnoticed before, or because of deliberate action to reverse the direction of closure, with the goal of pointing future viewers to the best possible Q&A. This was explicitly in accordance with policy: see e.g. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/404535 , https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251938 , https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/423085 . As a general rule, policy is "timeless": the timestamp on a post is not relevant to determining the right thing to do with it.