[sackfield]

One thing I wonder, if you look at the comments here it is clear the moderation and the general hostility of the site was a big reason why a lot of people left or didn't engage with it. Yet, I can't recall SO doing anything about this, and its confusing to me why. Was it:

a) They don't acknowledge this was a problem.

b) They are unwilling to tackle this problem.

c) They are unable to tackle this problem.

I'd love to know what the people who run the site (from a business perspective) think about this. It might offer some insight into its cousins that are going down the same path (reddit / wikipedia).

[ggregoire]

Might be a vocal minority. I used to visit SO every day, several times a day, for like 10+ years, got so much value from it and would not have changed anything to the site. "AI Overview" in Google completely killed it tho and I don't really see what they could do about it other than completely change the site into something else. RIP.

[zahlman]

> They don't acknowledge this was a problem.

Most people who came to SO wanted the site to be something it fundamentally wasn't supposed to be; that it in fact specifically existed not to be, to provide an alternative, because the thing that everyone wants (a discussion forum) is actually bad.

When the site was launched, lots of people seemed to agree with Atwood and Spolsky that discussion forums are bad and that they knew better. But in the long run, this still proved to be a minority opinion, by a long shot.

In short, I don't acknowledge that it was a problem because it wasn't. It was expected and okay that lots of people didn't want to engage with the format. The format was not for them. The purpose of the format was to produce an artifact that would benefit them indirectly, for free, by improving Google search results (until Google fucked it up).

But the site (the platform itself, and the people implementing it; not the community) fucked up by failing to recognize that most people really do want a fundamentally unproductive, unfocused social environment (and a help desk!) after all.

More importantly, it fucked up by presenting a UI that misleads people into thinking they could have that experience (post a question and there's space for answers under it; obviously that means that people are answering directly for your benefit and not anyone else! and of course we can go back and forth about this, and they'll help me solve my problem! and there are votes, like Reddit!)

[edelbitter]

In any case, business perspective prevailed, subject matter experts stopped sticking around. Personally, I think the (slow but steady over many years) switch from b) to c) is what doomed the site.

There was a few noteworthy company post, especially those after the mass layoffs / private equity takeover on the meta site that acknowledged the problem, so its certainly not a), even when you apply a strict standard about the terms in which to acknowledge the problem (which was well-known long before). Those company statements had some rather clear and well-received community commentary below that essentially questioned whether any of the suggestions on tackling the problem should even be tried. The very-much-not-welcoming onboarding experience, while it had great potential for improvements, was yet serving the sites unique needs quite well. Two weeks of persistence and reading the manual were not much of a detrimental filter.. not to those that would eventually go on to contribute back for many years. And those were the ones that ultimately mattered. Not those one-off solve-my-homework posts that only saw indifferent/annoyed moderation action. That probably still wonder why nobody took their hand and spent their evening guiding them through the steps necessary to make their post useful to anyone other than just the original author.

[Yizahi]

In my opinion:

a) they choose a certain very specific ideal as a target, but utterly failed to convey that to a majority of site visitors;

b) their picked target and path visually and functionally matched by like 90% with a thing already existing for decades previously and very familiar to a majority of internet users - with a regular forum with sections and treads;

c) they make fundamental errors even inside the scope of their own ideal and vision - like for example apparently not taking into account that software with identical name can have different versions;

d) while they copied forum structure (failure B) they also failed to envision (or did a mistake in that) how the ideal target result would look like a long time in the future;

e) they failed to acknowledge all of the above, reflect on and fix own mistakes, instead they declared those mistakes "a culture" and persisted in deepening them;

Basically they picked a forum format, known at those times to literally everybody on the internet and decided to use it to make something vastly different, while failing both at communicating that intention and also failing at actually adapting UI and tools to better suit their target.

[zahlman]

Very well put. Except they didn't think they were "picking a forum format". Forums with that style of voting were still kinda rare at the time (Reddit was young at SO's date of creation) and the Q&A formatting was supposed to look intentionally different from a "thread", which is also way (at least in the original design) comments were de-emphasized, and moderation policy held that the large majority of comments could be deleted at any time.

Unfortunately, this design comes across to a lot of people as comments being threaded replies, and the "question" format as privileging the OP (which makes it that much worse when the system forces question closure to happen out in the open). And recent redesigns, by new ownership obsessed with "engagement" and profitability and apparent complete apathy towards the original goals, have thoroughly enshittified the original.

I also have no idea what you mean about

> for example apparently not taking into account that software with identical name can have different versions;

There were always separate tags for various minor versions of Python, for example, and they were commonly incorrectly applied to questions where the version was not relevant.