This topic has been beaten to death, but the defenders of the toxic environment (including the SO founders) have never understood why the environment they promoted killed SO.
It's not because people disliked the rudeness, though that didn't help and was never necessary. It's because the toxicity became the only goal. And the toxicity replaced both accuracy and usefulness.
I wanted to learn web development during the lockdown of 2020. First thing I learned was that SO was completely useless. Everything on there was wrong. Everything was wrong due to incompetent moderation that prevented bad information from being corrected. Everything new marked as a dupe even when the other post was wrong or irrelevant.
That killed SO. It was a decision of the founders and the mods. They took great pride in doing it, too.
The remaining community understands perfectly well why people have left. It's just deemed irrelevant.
Way too many people joined the site, way too quickly, based on a false understanding of the intended premise. Gradually they filtered themselves out as they realized the mistake. Those few who saw value in the actual idea remained.
It was always going to be relatively few people who truly want to participate in something like that. And that's fine. Ideas don't have to be popular to be worthwhile or valid.
Exactly. I dare to say that it was a matter of UX. The experience i got was that you arrived at a SO question from Google and the accepted answer was from years ago and irrelevant at the present time.
They did a quick patch by letting you sort answers by some attribute, but darn, that's low effort product/ux dev. What did those teams do in 10 years??
It's not because people disliked the rudeness, though that didn't help and was never necessary. It's because the toxicity became the only goal. And the toxicity replaced both accuracy and usefulness.
I wanted to learn web development during the lockdown of 2020. First thing I learned was that SO was completely useless. Everything on there was wrong. Everything was wrong due to incompetent moderation that prevented bad information from being corrected. Everything new marked as a dupe even when the other post was wrong or irrelevant.
That killed SO. It was a decision of the founders and the mods. They took great pride in doing it, too.