[MoreQARespect]

That's a valid goal, but they should have adapted the software to the community instead of trying to adapt the community to the software.

SO's biggest asset was its community and while they treated it with some respect in the beginning they took it for granted and trashed it later.

[ceejayoz]

I think this policy was, in large part, intended to respect the user base, who get exhausted answering the same question over and over.

I do agree they later trashed that relationship with the Monica incident and AI policies.

[PeterStuer]

Sounds like they optimised for a select 1% class of self appointed gatekeepers rather than the broad user base. Classic mistake of nearly every defunct social site.

[ceejayoz]

To a certain extent, you have to. Same reasons Wikipedia has a core clique of editors; they do a lot of the work.

It worked beautifully for quite a while. I don't think anyone anticipated ChatGPT when planning it all out.