I suspect I'm similar to many users, in that I came to Stack Overflow near the peak, and used it as basically a specialized search engine, without ever asking or answering a question. (I assume this is possible only if you use a widespread stack.) When something better came along, I just moved on. I hadn't directly experienced a sense of community, so I experienced (for example) bureaucratically-closed questions more as a hassle (search again) than as a betrayal.

▲

xeromal 2 hours ago | parent [-]

As someone who came into the industry in college, the problem with SO was simply that it was too hard to ask a question. They were up your ass about minutia that really didn't matter. Good riddance and can't wait to visit the site and see an EOL static page.

▲

cogman10 an hour ago | parent [-]

One of the more annoying things about SO was they'd pretty frequently misclassify new questions.

Sometimes a new question was in fact a duplicate and should be closed as such. But in the quest to close duplicates I pretty frequently had to argue with the reviewer that "No, this isn't a duplicate just because these two questions related to the same library".

SO practically rewarded this sort of over-policing which I think is a big part of why everyone stopped using it.

And people stopping using it meant that when a question did actually make it through the gauntlet, it was likely to go unanswered because everyone who knew anything had left the platform.

	▲	xeromal an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, I had several questions popped for being an "opinion" question whatever that means. lol. Do you remember how power users would edit your question just for the gamification of it. Drove me nuts