[shagie]

"If they want to" runs into issues that as a company, they're measuring their success by engagement.

Adding that barrier to participation would in turn drive down engagement and advertisement impressions.

From the corporate standpoint, doing that (or anything like it) translates into a loss of revenue.

[eitland]

Maybe. Personally I think software engineers are a much more valuable audience than college kids.

Also I think a lot of what happened was rampant deletionism, that I personally can't see any good reason for with todays storage prices.

[shagie]

The issue isn't the storage... but rather the difficulty of using a search to find a good question that has been answered.

Do we need 10,000 questions about how to handle a NullPointerException in Java? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/linked/218384?lq=1

If not, then it is probably appropriate to delete more of them and that may be seen as rude by people who have asked a question about a null pointer exception which gets deleted.

We complain about how Google has gotten worse with search because its harder to find the content that we're after... and at the same time say that we want to keep all that content around on Stack Overflow which in turn makes it harder for people to use it as a "this is where you look to find an already answered question."

[eitland]

Back when the answers were still there and Google still worked I managed to find them just fine.

Many others clearly did too as many of the questions they removed or tried to remove were massively upvoted.