[barrkel]

Thing is, it could only be that way in its early days, when the vanguard of users came to it from word of mouth, from following Joel Spolsky or Coding Horror or their joint podcast. The audience is much bigger now and with the long tail of people, the number willing to put effort into good questions is too low, and on-topicness is a simple quality bar which can improve the signal to noise ratio.

[s_dev]

They had a voting system. By having mods decide what was and what wasn't a 'good' question undermined the whole point of the voting system. Mods should use their powers to filter out hate/spam/trolling/egregiously off topic issues not determine relevance/usefulness. As others have pointed out SO was a site with great answers but awful for asking questions. This is why ChatGPT is eating SO for breakfast.

Even if a question was super similar to one that was previously asked has value in exactly that it might be phrased slightly better and be a closer match to what people were Googling.

[dcow]

Except, I doubt anybody would argue that a lower signal to noise ratio has improved the site. (Plus, has the actual metric even improved and how is it measured?) And, did anybody ever stop to ask whether S:N should even be the champion metric in the first place, at a product level? With a philosophy of “Google is our homepage”, I honestly don’t understand why S:N even matters since search pretty effectively cuts out noise. I guess it makes a mod’s life easier though. The site is less useful today than it’s ever been. The road to hell…

[Dalewyn]

Very broadly, I find the quality/value of a given thing is inversely proportional to how many people are involved.

So with regards to the internet: The 90s and early 00s were great, then the internet became mainstream and it all just became Cable TV 2.0.