Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

In the early days, onboarding was done fairly actively with a reasonable amount of the community participating in answering and community moderation - shaping it.

That portion of the community - both answering and moderating was key for onboarding.

However, as Stack Overflow got popular, a smaller and smaller percent of the community was actively answering and participating in community moderation - and onboarding of new people became more and more difficult.

Here I lay the responsibility nearly completely at the feet of corporate. The friction for moderation was increased at the same time that it became popular and thus harder for the community to moderate.

Making it easier moderate and help people understand the site meant that either you needed a larger part of the now very large number of people participating on the site or the ease of community moderation needed to be dialed back.

This is also where rudeness became more and more common. There are two parts to this - first rudeness takes no points to get to that level of moderation. It doesn't have any limited pool of votes that you deplete. Secondly, not everything was rude. With the smaller and smaller pool of community moderation people were shorter in their attempts to onboard a person. You couldn't write a paragraph in a comment and spend 10 minutes on one person when spending 1 minute on 10 different people was more likely to help someone. The shortness of responses was interpreted by the person asking was being perceived as rude.

Lastly, StackOverflow was designed as a Q&A site and attempted to minimize some of the things that were seen as failings described in A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205 ) - Clay Shirky was a mentor of Jeff and was on the original Stack Overflow board. It tried (and for a long time succeeded at) handling scale... though when Stack Overflow's ability to handle scale failed, it was the moderation tools and the ability for the people participating in community moderation to help surface the good questions to be answered and have the questions that needed work to be properly answerable in the Q&A format that Stack Overflow was designed around (not in a forum format) that suffered.

Anyway, that is a good question you asked, one that they didn’t figure out. But if there are enough people to ask questions and search for answers, then aren’t there enough people to manage the answers? SO already had serious community effort, it just wasn’t properly focused by the UX options they offer. Obviously you need to crowd-source the decisions that can’t scale to mods, while figuring out the incentive system to reduce gaming. I’m not claiming this is easy, in fact I’m absolutely certain this is not easy to do, but SO brought too little too late to a serious problem that fundamentally limited and reduced the utility of the site over time.

Moderation should have been aimed squarely at making the site friendly, and community should be moderating the content entirely, for exactly the reasons you point out - mods aren’t the experts on the content.

One thing the site could have done is tie questions and answers to specific versions of languages, libraries, tools, or applications. Questions asked where the author wasn’t aware of a version dependency could be later assigned one when a new version changes the correctness of an answer that was right for previous versions. This would make room for new answers to the same question, make room for the same question to be asked again against a new version, and it would be amazing if while searching I could filter out answers that are specific to Python 2, and only see answers that are correct for Python 3, for example.

Some of the answers should be deleted (or just hidden but stay there to be used as defense when someone tries to re-add bad or outdated answers.) The policy of trying to keep all answers no matter how good allowed too much unhelpful noise to accumulate.

If someone doesn't care about contributing to such a repository then they should ask their question elsewhere (this was true even before the rise of LLMs).

StackOverflow itself attempts to explain this in various ways, but obviously not sufficiently as this is an incredibly common misconception.

The problem is that people come and say "this question is incorrectly closed", but the question is correctly closed.

Yes, the complaints are common, here and in many other places. That doesn't make them correct. I have been involved in this process for years and what I see is a constant stream of people expecting the site to be something completely different from what it is (and designed and intended to be). People will ask, with a straight face, "why was my question that says 'What is the best...' in the title, closed as 'opinion-based'?" (it's bad enough that I ended up attempting my own explainer on the meta site). Or "how is my question a duplicate when actually I asked two questions in one and only one of them is a duplicate?" (n.b. the question is required to be focused in the first place, such that it doesn't clearly break down into two separate issues like that)