[mattmanser]

That's not what we mean when we say that phrase.

They actual had the eternal September problem, which they were always going to hit, but managed to stave it off for a decade or so before it became overwhelming.

From your perspective as a question asker, the community was too strict. From the unpaid volunteers perspective, they were drowning in dupes.

[bjourne]

Eternal September was never a problem for SO, it was an asset. Duplicate questions was never a problem for those asking or answering questions (I did both), only for a relatively small group of loudmouthed moderators. Now they hardly have any dupes to worry about but they also have no content to moderate!

[mandevil]

The reason that duplicates were treated as dangerous was that SO viewed their most important user not as anyone you have mentioned but instead they prized the lurker most- the person who typed their problem into Google and got brought to SO, and never asked or answered a question because they got what they wanted from that one page load. The entire structure of SO was built around this user.

So why does that mean that duplicates are dangerous? Because of updates. When someone answered a question about how to do something in Python (but it was 2008 so it was written in Python2) SO had ways to get a more correct, up-to-date answer to that question written in 2015 (and then again in 2019) and get that upvoted, and moderators could reward that new answer by editing the original etc.

That is why duplicates were a major threat: if the same question is asked and answered thousands of times, no one is going to go do the work to update all of those answers all across the site. Those lurkers are now dependent on the whims of Google as to which of the many answers you get taken to, and whether it has the latest answer or some answer that stopped working years ago.

And that is why they were so hostile to duplicate questions.

[antasvara]

Perfectly said.

To extend this, the eventual problem is that you eventually lose all of your new users, which means you lose the extremely valuable intermediate users (ones that know enough to ask complex questions, but not so much that they can figure out the answer).

[hungryhobbit]

But in trying to solve that problem, they threw the baby out with the bathwater!

They were so fixated on solving that that they failed to realize: training all their power users to grief anyone who didn't behave like a power user off the site was detrimental (to having a site with non-power users). Everyone came for a question and answer site, but when it transformed it into a "question and get downvoted and modded into oblivion" site, everyone left.

AI put the final nail in the coffin, but SO was dead before AI arrived ... from this self-inflicted wound.

[iso1631]

Did they consider removing old questions?

[trumpdong]

Or editing them to say "in Python 2"? There's historical value in a historical knowledge base.

[superjose]

The best was when the duplicated question was ranked higher on Google haha

[selcuka]

It doesn't matter because the duplicate is linked to the original, so most visitors coming from Google would still view the actual answer. It works like a soft HTTP 302 response.

[oh_my_goodness]

"We"?

[kstrauser]

Yes. There's a whole book explaining what enshittification means, and it's not merely "gets worse".

[oh_my_goodness]

Glad to hear about the book. I'll check it out. It would be interesting to read the author's opinions.

Otherwise I don't understand (yet) what point you're making. Who claimed that S.O. "merely got worse?" I see a discussion with many more specifics than that. One commenter in this thread mentioned griefing users. That's a familiar artifact of enshittification. (The white boxes covering up Google Maps, for example. Or the way Quora destroyed its own site in a quest to "improve questions".)