[mattbrewsbytes]

Their business model conflicts with what would serve users best. It once was a place where I would trust answers, now I have to search multiple times, scroll through many results to find relevant answers.

Having massive amounts of questions gets more surface area for ads but a lot of programming Q&A that is a few years out of date is mostly useless. API's change, things become deprecated or better solutions emerge.

They need to cull massive amounts of content for it to be more helpful but that would likely drop revenue.

[mooreds]

I wasn't able to find a detailed breakdown of their revenue, though https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2020/07/28/stack-ove... indicates that Teams is responsible for 1/3 of it.

Is it the ads you object to?

[mattbrewsbytes]

The ad revenue model requires a lot of SEO friendly pages to be in search indexes. I don't mind ads or that model in general.

A lot of the answers on pages are outdated but they have no incentive to cleanup old content if its going to affect their bottom line because they will have less indexed pages.

This means I get much more noise when trying to find something so I go elsewhere.

[mooreds]

But won't that be self correcting if people bounce away from old (less useful) content? That would negatively affect SEO, I'd think.