But let me address the "toxic" moderation. They needed something like appeals courts. SO should have installed a layers above the community mods that could review and rebuke the decisions of the "lower" mods to steer things.
Oops, all assholes.
[–] zahlman 10 hours ago
[–] Rapzid 1 hour ago
"XY problem" meme where "insufferable, pedantic forum culture where posters refuse to answer the actual question" is a thing for a reason.
Plus the closing out of questions because that were "already asked" but not really, or the answers were ancient and out-of-date but it was impossible to boost the correct, modern answer high enough to compete with the 500pt bogus answer..
The problem wasn't the people asking questions, it was STACK OVERFLOW getting people on the internet to answer questions for free and completely failing to establish and enforce community standards and culture.
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.