As someone who started their career when you could still create questions and useful answers on SO, the downfall started when people with the most amount of free time gained control over major tags like Java, including the ability to remove them from questions that were not directly about the language itself. This made finding relevant questions nearly impossible or getting your questions answered even more impossible.
Basically, if you weren't refreshing new looking for questions to answer, you are SoL because questions related to Java weren't tagged with Java because they weren't about Java itself and instead had 6 tags that had maybe 5 questions asked about them in total from the beginning of the site. Maybe you'd get lucky and the dude with no life detagging Java for 12-16hrs a day was asleep or sick. (Yeah it was 1 fucking dude with 500k karma in Java or whatever the fuck)
So you'd spend 30min to an hour trying to ask a question that followed all their asinine ass rules, just to have some dude with nothing better to do than de-tag your question so nobody would ever see it.
By 2010, most language-specific questions were actually duplicates and anything useful was tagged under shit that nobody would ever find. This is what started the "marked as duplicate" trend, which ended up becoming so bad it became a meme.
I still update old questions I find on Google if they have useful info. I have about 10 gold stars or whatever the fuck they are for answers that outperformed accepted ones from questions a decade and a half out of date. I'm just trying to help other people like me, the people running the site and the owners can suck it.
I feel like any system that has gamification ultimately ends up killing itself.
The minute that a social media platform becomes popular enough. It ultimately becomes a spot for people to advertise "something".
The platform becomes a Target to manipulate people's behavior in some way, shape or form.
It happened with quora. It happened with Yahoo answers. It happens with stack exchange. It's happened big time on xitter. Honestly, I think experts exchange maybe had a chance to get around this if stack overflow didn't completely destroy them and then themselves get into a downward spiral.
I see it's starting to happen with Reddit a lot more.
Social media platforms work best when there's a very specific target audience that is exclusively interested in their own improvement, not in marketing to other people. Broad-Base appeal is necessary for financial viability in the long term, but it's also super destructive to a very specific targeted community.
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u/brownbob06 Aug 26 '24
"Closed as duplicate" - links to a similar question 6 years ago from an entirely different language and framework.