> I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO has had poor moderation from the beginning.

Overwhelmingly, people consider the moderation poor because they expect to be able to come to the site and ask things that are well outside of the site's mission. (It's also common to attribute community actions to "moderators" who in reality have historically done hardly any of it; the site simply didn't scale like that. There have been tens of millions of questions, versus a couple dozen moderators.)

The kinds of questions that people are getting quick, accurate answers for from an LLM are, overwhelmingly, the sort of thing that SO never wanted. Generally because they are specific to the person asking: either that person's issue won't be relevant to other people, or the work hasn't been done to make it recognizable by others.

And then of course you have the duplicates. You would not believe the logic some people put forward to insist that their questions are not duplicate; that they wouldn't be able, in other words, to get a suitable answer (note: the purpose is to answer a question, not solve a problem) from the existing Q&A. It is as though people think they are being insulted when they are immediately given a link to where they can get the necessary answer, by volunteers.

I agree that Reddit played a big role in this. But not just by answering questions; by forming a place where people who objected to the SO content model could congregate.

Insulting other users is and always has been against Stack Overflow Code of Conduct. The large majority of insults, in my experience, come from new users who are upset at being politely asked to follow procedures or told that they aren't actually allowed to use the site the way they're trying to. There have been many duplicate threads on the meta site about why community members (with enough reputation) are permitted to cast close votes on questions without commenting on what is wrong. The consensus: close reasons are usually fairly obvious; there is an established process for people to come to the meta site to ask for more detailed reasoning; and comments aren't anonymous, so it makes oneself a target.

It seems you deny each problem that everyone sees in SO. The fact is SO repulsed people, so there is a gap between your interpretation and reality.

> It is as though people think they are being insulted when they are immediately given a link to where they can get the necessary answer, by volunteers.

This, for example. Question can be marked as duplicate without an answer. In this case yes, it feels insulting because the other is asked in such a weird way, that no-one will find the old when they search for the new (for example after a library change) and marking it as duplicate of an unanswered answer if a guarantee that the next SEO user won’t see it.

> It is as though people think they are being insulted when they are immediately given a link to where they can get the necessary answer, by volunteers.

Multiple times my questions closed as duplicates of question that was answering a different question.

Even when I explicitly linked that QA in my question and described how it differs from mine.