my reputation is 29,459, my last answer October 15, 2021, close enough to be considered the same IMO.

For me, the thing that drove me away, is that you'd spend time on writing good answers, to provider lore, etc, but it was increasingly difficult to find "good" questions to answer. There were increasingly many "homework" questions, and far fewer questions where people _had_ put the effort in.

And, an increasing animosity to the people answering the questions.

The community became toxic, and it wasn't the only the gatekeepers, everyone wanted something for free, and StackOverflow suffered from the "open source burn-out" problem.

Certainly I did.

Whenever I took the time to make a long answer on a question, I saw some mod close the question as a duplicate of an existing one - even though the question could have some minute detail that was different, or perhaps there was some recent change in the landscape that meant an answer in 2020 would be different from one in 2013. But no: aggressive marking as duplicate even though clearly as a _community_ it would be much better to have a more recent discussion, perhaps more alternative answers and just allowing the near-duplicates.

This has very interesting implications for everything in the world, btw. Correctness does not track majority consensus.

Stuff like this is basically what drove me away as well. The top-rated answer was frequently not the answer. It was "an" answer to "a" question, but not the "the" answer to "the" question.

That, and I'd ask a variation of a question and it would get flagged as a duplicate of an already-answered question, except the original question and none of the scored answers contained the answer.

I still left eventually and LLM has nothing to do with it. It’s the “closing as duplicate”, it’s the “provide text explanation not just code”, it’s the “deleted as off topic”.

I can’t tell you how many times I was finding useful info in DELETED answers (I see them as moderator). And the existing “vote for undelete/reopen” procedure does not work.

SO did not die because of LLLMs. It died because it was driven to the ground then sold private equity and about to be sold again (mark my words)

On topic: thanks for this great summary of the issue. I too miss the prime stackoverflow days. Although the availability of LLMs has allowed me to learn new things and generate some code again, the passion and love for programming that was on (the early) stackoverflow, I do miss. Also the times of just buying a book to learn about a new tool or language (jQuery in Action teached me a lot) feels different from just asking Claude Code to fix or explain something.

Even so, at some point I made sure to answer a few questions, to get enough reputation to upvote and occasionally comment. I wanted at least to be able to reward / thank those who had posted answers that I found helpful. Even for 5 or 10 year-old answers, if an answer helped me I'd upvote it.

Now we're all "taking" via AI. We don't know who posted a helpful answer 10 years ago that the AI learned from in order to help us. That saddens me.

But in a way that's just the way of the world. We know to credit Pythagorus and Fourier and a few others whose names are attached to their methods. But for the most part we're all constantly standing on the shoulders of anonymous giants whose names are long lost.

IMO the uselessness of the answers just became more and more apparent, so fewer people contributed, so they rotted further. Good riddance, I say - it had a brief couple years where it was excellent because all information was new enough to be useful, and then it started dying like all stagnant things do.

Stack Exchanges that do not have such a bias for time-sensitive information are still going relatively well AFAICT, e.g. math exchange. The model works fine for some things, just not general tech assistance.

The query in this thread further confirms it, by november 2022 (ChatGPT reveal), usage had already dropped to ~109120 questions/month as compared to peak usage in March 2014 at 207169 questions/month.

The trend continued since but their decline is surely not caused by LLM:s.

Had similar thing happen to my colleague too, in both cases they were pretty deep technical questions

Stopped using that ego bubble blower page shortly after

Oh let me remind you, it was the expertsexchange that was actually useful!

Or my favourite entire IP ranges or whole ISPs blocked because eighteen years ago someone used a sock puppet account from their and there is no recourse because the High Doge has decreed it from their throne in Moderator Palazzo - you can appeal but the lord chief's decision is FINAL, and they're all too busy infighting and empire building to care about such trivia as users anyway

Hello, blast from the past! Feels like a lifetime ago.

I'm so grateful for WHATWG listening to the jquery community though, sizzle.js and the CSS query selector API made building dynamic websites so much easier.

Hearing this story is helpful.

There was a lot of blocking and downvoting of questions which was both a good and bad thing.

If you had an expertise on a certain topic, the questions were often very simple and repetitious (e.g. I knew a decent amount at relational databases), but also you'd get people asking for whole system designs which got a bit ridiculous.

It wasn't great for asking about little known products or libraries etc and I often found no one responded to questions on certain js libraries or BI tools. Which was quite annoying, maybe because it appealed more to certain types of developers.

I guess you served your time and most people don't want to be answering questions every day for ever! There was a guy called Tom Kyte from Oracle who ran a question site for over 20 years - it must have taken a lot of his time, but if you're out there Tom it was very much appreciated!

Culture or no culture LLMs killed SO for good, there's simply no need for it anymore

That happened often enough that I just gave up. I rarely felt the need to ask questions cause I was pretty good at what I did so I quit altogether. For fun, I signed in and noticed about a 2000 uptick in my standing and three "best answer" awards.

For me, I think I left for a few reasons. All of them are some flavor of "the design is user-hostile".

The first reason is the "traps" they put in the moderation review queue process. These always felt like shit, even if you were right. And for some reason they frequently picked questions where you could reasonably pick multiple reasons to close a question... and they'd yell at you for getting it wrong! Really, this needlessly punitive experience is the heart of why SO was so awful, because everything is like that across the whole site. Some of the network sites aren't like that, but it's rare. And there were just so many Meta questions where the upvoted response was "this would be hard to do right, so instead we're going to do it the way we all know is wrong but it's easy."

The second reason is just how awful the onboarding is. The site constantly had problems with people either not posting code or posting screenshots of code. I don't know why they didn't make a beginner form, similar to what you often see on GitHub issue trackers for large projects (i.e., always include this, always include this, include this if it's relevant, etc. and it's in the textarea box when you start a question). Instead they assume that you know how to ask a question, give you a completely blank form, and then aggressively policy anything where you didn't do it right. I think the one thing to come out of that site is that people do not inherently know how to ask questions. [Which, if anybody has been responsible for responding to IT tickets, oh, boy, do they not know how to ask questions or report problems. "I'm getting errors running my report in the Finance application. I need this report soon! Help!" No mention of which report. No mention of what the report parameters were. No mention of which error message. They don't know what the error message means so, obviously, it must not be useful to anybody.]

The third reason is the site finger-pointing. "This doesn't belong here so I'm locking and closing your question," is possibly the most ridiculous thing ever. Why doesn't it move the question to the other site and then make a stub link? More awful, user-hostile experience.

But, I think the final nail in the coffin is just how aggressively awful rpg.stackexchange.com is, which seeks objective, hyperliteral answers to game questions that are, by design, subjective and intentionally meant to be played with interpretation and nuance. The result is a handful of highly active users will nit pick any answer or question they don't like. Really, I think it's the GameFAQs Forum clique problem, to a significant extent. Some people really have nothing better to do except quash the utility of a site they have a small amount of control over, and it largely ruins the whole experience for the majority of other people. And, unlike a subreddit, you can't just go make your own version on the same topic. It doesn't work like that.

Rather than culture, for me it was the moderation body.

There were a bunch of people that were policing the dumbest minutie, and being assholish about that.

I occasionally would get my answers rewritten to have a completely different tone. My tone was not polemical or controversial in any way. It was just my tone. It was me. And somebody was not okay with that. They would edit MY TEXT and potentially put words in my mouth.

That's absolutely unacceptable.

Ten years on and i'm still salty about that, and i cheerish stackoverflow's death every time it gets brought up.

StackOverflow: Rest in piss, you won't be missed.

They exploit the basic human needs and build whole exploiting platforms on it and then kick you out from the nest like a cuckoo does with other bird chicks. The abnormal modding and other shenanigans also killed my interest quite quickly, but in hindsight I have to say, good riddance. People are naive and gullible, and give out decades of experience on a whim, because they think that everyone is as good and benevolent as them. While in reality there are a lot of truly evil and selfish people out there and at the end of the day using their knowledge against the good ones.

And now here we are in the AI madness, where a similar exploitation is happening just at a much bigger scale, using the benevolent and naive ones information against them.

“I noticed $email looked like $('#email')” isn’t exactly an exciting bit of history, even if you spend multiple paragraphs trying to pump yourself up.

Stack Exchange was built on an implicit social contract people contributed their expertise and thousands of hours of unpaid work because they believed they were building a collectively governed knowledge resource. The company owned the platform, but the community created its value.

After time, management became increasingly centralized and disconnected from contributors. Also the policing of questions based on geeky criteria and not what users wanted. The increasingly aggressive policing of questions, closing perfectly reasonable discussions, and incorrectly saying questions are duplicates made the platform unnecessarily hostile to everyone, qmd at least thats why i quit. Quality control gradually became useless gatekeeping.

So there were really more than one problems, corporate management treating contributors as free labor, and established contributors treating their moderation as authority over everyone else, there were bad tools closing questions. The platform had become extremely hard to use for posting questions, finding amswers, moderator work. For me it was useless. Incidentally the closing of “opinion” questions was the worst decision since it was the only thing that could make it distinct from AI produced answers.

For some of the events there is paper here with details https://arxiv.org/html/2512.08884v1

1. It was hard to ask any question. Sometimes it felt if a few characters match it will be closed off as dupe. Besides no thought was given to the fact that same question might change entirely from pov of the answers for a platform or SDK across, say, a decade (?).

2. I also realised reading the documentation (that is if available) and looking though github and people's blogs helped better.

3. But bigger takeway was that due to relative uselessnes (if not downright hostility) of SO I started just breaking down the problem and solving on my own, talk to colleagues, or look for solutions for broken down problems and then I think I used to come across SO in months and that too most of the time when a colleague will refer to something.

This was before LLMs or COVID.

This was single-handedly the work of arrogant self-righteous moderators who would close random useful questions as not useful just to prove they were doing something. A lot of us long timers got annoyed at selective enforcement of rules and never looked back. It's sad because it was actually a fun place to hangout. Too much moderation always kills the vibe.

I enjoyed answering algorithm questions. Unfortunately, every so often, people who weren't into algorithms would show up. And somehow summoned each other. To close good questions.

It was clear that they didn't understand the topic. They couldn't recognize what a good question, or a good answer, was. I wound up going away, coming back every few years, go until my next bad experience, and leave again.

Each time, the population answering those questions was smaller.

I believe that a lot of good people left like I did. Then just didn't come back.

One way that stackoverflow does stand out from the other stackexchange sites is that its half life appears far shorter. On a log scale plot it has a steeper descent than the other stackexchange sites. I'm not sure what to make of that. Another interesting thing is that the math stackexchange initially declines more slowly than the others for a year or two and then decays pretty similarly. You can also see examples in some of the other sites of their decay beginning before chatgpt releases (e.g. drupal). You can also see some sites decaying a decade earlier (e.g. expressionengine). I think those outliers are from their subject being too specific and going out of style.

I got the cross-site data from data.stackexchange.com with this vibe-coded query:

    DECLARE @sql NVARCHAR(MAX) = N'
    SELECT
      site = [$site_name$],
      month = DATEADD(MONTH, DATEDIFF(MONTH, 0, CreationDate), 0),
      questions = COUNT(*)
    FROM PostsWithDeleted
    WHERE PostTypeId = 1
    GROUP BY DATEADD(MONTH, DATEDIFF(MONTH, 0, CreationDate), 0)
    ';

    EXEC dbo.sede_ineachdb
      @SQLCommand = @sql,
      @IncludeMainSites = 1,
      @IncludeMetaSites = 0,
      @IncludeMainMeta = 0;

Asking questions was difficult and any difficulty questions I might ask would not get a response anyway.

Answering questions was a gamble, sometimes you would get rewarded, most of the time you would not.

And, StackExchange has adjusted stale/inactive question deletion scripts as a result of this change: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/419988/we-ve-rework...

AI replaced Google Search in many ways more directly on arrival than those.

SO to me was weak as it had outdated answers to outdated questions (yet related to search queries) that nobody maintained well.. and the community more focused on patronising to push their point of view than being essentially objective in many ways.

that was a total killer to me and I started preferring to come back to books, manuals and researching topics myself than short cuts like SO.. and that research is heavily optimised during AI/LLM era, yes, but that's just one of many nails to SO's coffin.

During this peak popularity period, they were actively trying to stop people from flooding the site with low-quality "do my homework"-style questions.

The declining number of questions is hence not a side-effect or a mistake, but just means that they reach their end-goal. It's actual a measure of success. (Now you can disagree, whether that philosophy was reasonable or sustainable in the first place, but given there choice, this is the logical conclusion and end goal.)

Tangental, but I tried plotting number of questions by month including deleted questions. It shows similar trends to questions by month (so nothing particularly interesting): https://imgur.com/a/NLLB3OK

Query: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/1969...

Maybe it was more consolidation of tech and better docs over time.

I'm fairly certain this early decline came from the fact that many common questions had already been answered, and therefore were available via Google, so hardly anybody asked them again. In the beginning there were just way more unanswered questions.

That’s why it succeeded. It was not a forum, it was something new. Contribute a new question that was well stated and broadly applicable and get a response. You had to earn your answers.

It wasn’t flawless, but it was good and so good it fed all the AI agents with good materials.

It wasn’t a “help me!!!111!” site, it was an exchange.

I put lots of effort into narrowing my questions, eliminating obvious answers by demonstrating the work I put in, and editted all my questions like an email to my boss. I was almost always rewarded with good answers.

Right, their decline is because of the thing that they've been accused of since the very beginning, and not the trillion-dollar technology that replaces them. Brilliant take.

That and [redacted] mods who delete your question “because its a duplicate” but its not, you just assume it is and lock it. Lots of this when .NET Core came out and it drove me up a wall. Wouldnt surprise me if a lot of “hallucination” type answers come from bad Stack Overflow data being interpreted as “fact” in earlier models.

We weren't going to be a huge contract (~100k/yr) but the tone was very much "conform or fuck off". I think the sticking point was that we were offered 1x permanent careers ad in North America and 2 in Oceana, and we wanted 3 in Oceana instead.

I've had a similar experience the couple of times I've asked or attempted to respond to questions (about software I wrote lol) - grammar and framing seemed more important than technical information/a solution.

N=1 anecdata ofc, but I'm not surprised at their demise

You must be new to IT. Software businesses rarely truly die off (unless they're really small one person operations). Even Expertsexchange is still around: https://go.experts-exchange.com/

Uh, no.

StackOverflow is and has long been one of the most hostile places on the web, I’m not denying that. But this unprecedented drop in activity is 100% because of AI. Their product is as obsolete as horse-drawn carriages.

The same thing that happened to perl.

I used SO almost every day until capable LLMs showed up. I don't remember the last time I used it. SO and similar sites are dead, and LLMs killed them.

Same. And DBA.se. I was a top contributor of both for the first few years at least, even got sent some free swag a couple of times, not because I cared about the points and being in the first page of people ordered by them, but because I felt genuinely useful and sometimes I got significant help with one or two of my own problems.

I never really did the social side though, I have problems with distance friendships including online communities (I just don't connect well with people that way) which is one reason that I'm hating tech work more and more these days (being on a remote team is not good for my mental health, while I'm not a huge people person it turns out I absolutely need some in my life, and really in my life not on the other side of a Teams call, even though I go into the office most of the people I work directly with don't most of the time so I'm still effectively remote).

Can't say I formed any connections there though. Just a few negative interactions.

The real life examples and synergies were a plus. I got so much work from that ServerFault presence.

As my career progressed I took on deep problems with complex issues and complex answers. Not much sense in asking as no one ever managed to help me with them. I’d just end up answering my own question a week or a month later perhaps.

And of course the moderation and karma farming - I oh so ‘fondly’ remember the one user that would take your question and run some auto-formatter on it so that it would fit his personal style guide and then get a percentage of the points as your now “co-author.” What fun!

It stayed useful as a reference tool for quite a while, for when I needed to look something up that was fairly common but that I wasn't personally familiar with. But as others have said, the way they handled dupes and supposed opinion-based answers was really poor and meant that the top answers got more and more out of date each year. By the time LLMs came around they were strictly better for those kinds of lookups. Strictly better for now at least, LLMs will themselves get enshittified in the coming years.

Something most people don't know is that Reddit now has a kind of AI partnership with moderators of the larger subreddits. If those mods ban a user from their sub, the AI can suspend or ban a user for "breaking the terms of service." Given the state of Reddit, and the kind of people who moderate the large subreddits, it's creating a fairly violent and polarised community.

Some amount of hope and optimism that was around has definitely dried up or at least moved elsewhere into other smaller communities.

Everything is overly centralized around a particular influencer/podcaster/celebrity/product or whatever nowadays, it's harder to find topic based or open community-based places. The other places still exist, but still difficult to find and keep going.

I do hope the pendulum swings back towards hopeful optimistic culturally rich community vibes in many digital spaces.

Twitter, too for that matter, but for different reasons.

One thing is that there are lots of bots on the site, another is that the site now seems to be specifically designed for bots.

In the past, I had tried to maintain a two accounts setup by policy. My main account (focused on camera, optics and photography etc) got gilded several times, with some posts appearing on their 'Popular' feed. I have used a secondary account(s) on occasions which engages in politics, tech, immigration etc. It has got flagged for contentious debates and I have been Reddit-banned once on one of them (for political criticisms and arguments against right wing; not my finest hour).

Whenever I tried to create a secondary since that incident, it gets banned immediately by their algorithms. It is insanely invasive in how they are able to detect someone. But I am surprised they never touch the gilded one - even if the same device/app was used for registration.

A theory to that feels there is more to than meets the eye in the way they use their filters to ban accounts. They are more lenient to older accounts (having Awards) or the ones which have got recognized in some way (appearing on Main Feed / Popular), but willing to discard the ordinary. Their user management policy is definitely intriguing

When they killed "old.reddit.com" for non-logged-in users I stopped reading it at all. It's completely useless to me now. The "new" UI is garbage and makes me enable JavaScript.

I suppose I was never their target market anyway.

The trick is to delete your browser cache (not just things related to reddit, everything), then wait a week to a month before creating the next account.

Made several polite appeals and requests for clarification, all which went unanswered.

I tried making another account, and you are right, it got banned a few days later. Tried once again after learning how they do persistent bans and found they let me keep posting, but after 3 days my post views always stayed at 1... in others words they didn't "ban" me but my comments were clearly no longer visible to anyone else, and I haven't been back since. What a joke of a company.

My account was banned back around 2021. I had a separate account on mobile, which got subsequently banned for 'evading a ban'. Have been unable to create an account since then, even on entirely new machines, different OS, renewed IP. Whatever tracking techniques they use are downright scary.

The worst part is that all of this started because a mod in a right-leaning sub silenced my account, then decided to turn it into a permanent ban for no reason.

Nowadays, I'd still like to visit r/programming for a change, and share some of my work, but otherwise it's such a cesspool of AI-generated content and bots that the appeal has almost entirely faded.

Meanwhile bots are running rampant and I can't scroll through the site for 10 minutes without seeing an obvious bot post or comment. Dead internet is real.

But what's really clear for anything newsworthy or controversial or political is just how much Reddit is botted and brigaded and how easy that is. And Reddit seems totally unwilling to tackle this at all. But you can get something to r/news or even r/all frontpage with even a few hundred accounts.

One example that comes to mind of Reddit enabling this kind of thing is the feature they added where if you click a user they can hide their history. You can still find it, particularly in the LLM era (but it doesn't even require you go to that far), but most people don't go looking because of that extra effort. It's a shame because the botting becomes really obvious.

I honestly think all social media (including Reddit) needs to be required to make public what country an account is posting from, particularly when it comes to politics or anything controversial. My thesis is that you would see just how botted these areas are, how so many accounts with big followings are overseas and likely bots.

You might be tempted to say "they'll just use a VPN". This is a solvable problem however because VPN IP ranges can and will be identified and should invoke more scrutiny. For example, streamers use this kind of thing to find people evading geogating. But also you can't hide latency. Issue someone a challenge and there's only so fast they can respond.

And can confirm, they are suspiciously good at detecting sock accounts.

You purge some Nazis, then run out of Nazis to purge, but you've got a good purge system going...

Sure you can. (But it is a significant problem that they start at the bottom of the score-based answer sort and don’t get attention.)

I am not going to miss Stack Overflow. "Question already asked" for some hyper specific question where this is the first google result. "Not enough status" to do x/y/z (sorry, can't answer that unanswered question!), out of date answers, wrong answers being accepted as right, a right answer left high and dry.

If the community could have tweaked that system, we absolutely would have. The site owners never gave us that access, and it got much worse after getting bought by Prosus.

But yes, on a Q&A site you absolutely should be prevented from asking certain questions. The fact that they're facially "on topic" does not save them, just like how there are guidelines to post on HN that go beyond "make sure it has something to do with technology". Because it is not the purpose of a site like SO to answer your question just because you asked it. The purpose is to have good Q&A that everyone can refer to in order to learn something. The root of the "hostility" is in the selfishness of those who won't consider the perspective of everyone else who's going to see the question later. Which, you know, is the exact problem with the traditional discussion forums that SO was created explicitly to provide an alternative to.

Assuming that there's still SWE jobs, when you attend an interview, the AI interviewer from the same AI company may just reject you because you asked which IDE to use just a week ago and it thinks you're not fit for the job.

I have to explain that, yes, I'm looking at other options, but I'm also exploring this option and need to answer this specific question.

People try to use "X Y problem" to feel superior somehow.

The way I remember it is that the questions that would be closed were either copy-pastes of homework tasks, vague descriptions of some overarching goal ("how do I implement this?"), walls of code ("why does this crash?"), or obvious duplicates.

Wouldn't acceptance of those things make the site pretty much unusable?

StackOverflow, Reddit, Lemmy, Matrix, IRC (esp. Freenode/Libera), Mastodon, Bluesky, Lobsters, Phoronix, GNOME Forums, Discord, Twitter, LKML, ... over time I quit all of them because of just how unbelievably abusive, dogmatic and out of touch people were.

Even on HN I have had to block dozens of different accounts due to breathtaking entitlement, self-righteousness and arrogance.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19712903/reverse-content...

> 4) It creates incentives to game the system, which creates yet-more exhaust data for training anti-fraud AI systems

I'm struggling to think of how this [gaming] presents any kind of net benefit, and I'm likewise struggling on how to mitigate it. How do you envision this working?

I don't particularly care for e-points and that sort of things, but SO had whole entire way of telling you you are wrong why did you even dare answering, then creating "classes" of user (I apparently made MORE ranking points after I stopped using it than before ? Giving me more moderation power), then seeing "your" answers being edited left and right by people who add a comma or whatever

The whole joy for me was in answering people. It's just fun, I think many hackers get it, bad questions notwithstanding. But as some point they made that ... Less fun, for a lack of a better description. So I just stopped answering.

I love it for what it brought and the great times I had on it for years, but I've stopped actively using it (as opposed to just finding the answer through a google search) for a while and it was way before the rise of LLMs.

How many times have you found a random forum post solving your problem? How many countless people has that post likely helped?

Now every single person facing the same problem will regenerate from scratch the entire thought process and result. What a waste.

There needs to be some way to close the feedback loop from the work that LLMs do.

You prompt it to fix the mistakes it made and that goes into the new training data

But... I also came across some real jacka*es. Those were on my questions, but also reading the responses from other peoples questions.

It seems like their rules sometimes biased towards older questions/answers which in fast changing areas that's the wrong way round.

In my niche, we also had an absolute dictator of a moderator who was a condescending jerk online. Open belittling of people asking questions, connecting new questions to those which had been asked years ago in a different part of the stack and then closing the question, etc. Real tin pot tyrant nonsense, and frankly, a bully.

There was a day where I saw they had been denied a role they interviewed for since they posted about it. I already knew they were in my city. It was a role I had advertised and was the chair for. Im still not sure exactly which candidate, but have my suspicions. In any case, bullet dodged.

There was never any restriction on posting answers unless you had explicitly and repeatedly violated policy. Posting questions and answers was a default privilege extended to everyone at account creation.

It did require a small amount of reputation (50 points) to comment on posts that were not your own.

But none of {questions, answers, comments} are "reply posts". That's just not at all how the site worked. It also comes across that you imagine that "helping others" on Stack Overflow entails writing something (either a comment or an answer) that addresses what the OP is asking. That, too, is not how the site worked. A Q&A site like Stack Overflow works by producing reference material in Q&A format.

The point is that other people can search it later, and get direct answers without having to parse through someone else's comment discussion, walking a beginner through debugging steps just to get the necessary information to understand the question, etc.

edit - fixed .com to .org

2. Have you seen https://meta.stackoverflow.com ? It is the exact thing you believe they "needed". As for "layers", the tiny group of people with diamond symbols next to their names (the actual moderators) did in fact have authority over others.

3. As demonstrated by the posts there, the large majority of "toxicity" came from the people who refused to accept the site's standards, and the large majority of question closures were clearly correct.

4. To me, the word "asshole" suggests a sense of entitlement. This was most clearly demonstrated by those who felt entitled to get people on the Internet to volunteer to solve their problems for free, without heed to whether the resulting Q&A could be of benefit to others. That is not how the site worked, or how it was designed to work.

> Nothing's quite as demoralizing as

I can tell you from years and years of experience that this is just not what happened in the common case. Of course, there were a few incidents where someone slipped up, which is why there was a meta site to discuss these things. And in the cases where someone had a point about a wrong duplicate closure on meta, that was well received and the problem got fixed.

But we also got a constant stream of people complaining about the equivalent of:

Q. How do I iterate over a tuple?

A. [closed as a duplicate of "how do I iterate over a list?"]

and it became clear that the OP was not even willing to try the code provided, which would work for their situation.

There were cases where people refused to recognize a duplicate of what was clearly the same question, because a different code sample was provided with different variable names or something.

There were people whose argument essentially boiled down to "you shouldn't close duplicates as duplicates ever, because that's how I think it should work". IOW, a complete refusal to engage with the site's policy or the clearly established, stated reasons behind it (and the many years of history needed to refine that policy).

> but even I gave up trying to ask a question.

I think it's quite easy to ask a question that meets standards; it just requires skills (basic debugging / communicating a clear unambiguous specification) that don't necessarily align with the people who are most likely to want to ask questions generally (beginners).

If there's a specific question you wanted to ask but felt unable to, post it here and I'll be happy to explain where it might have been lacking.