Comment by executivevice
14 hours ago
S/o's somewhat cumbersome scheme to aquire comment points to be able to answer was a awkward kludge in the principal problem of open contribution sites, namely that human slop and gamified tactics tend to kill the site. It probably was effective enough to keep things working for a long time but it could not recruit new users (not just readers) as fast as it needed to. It doesn't seem like the points based system really helped as many devs find jobs as it would have taken for the site to become a recruiting tool. It probably would have had to shift and evolve in several keys ways to survive
It’s moderation policies, or maybe just moderators themselves that killed it, this was apparent before AI, but there was no alternative… until suddenly there was.
This. I left SO before AI because moderators were terrible.
SO collapsed twice - first when everyone stopped contributing, and then AI stopped anyone even reading.
> aquire comment points to be able to answer
I thought it was the opposite, you need answer points in order to comment (which resulted in people using answers as comments because they had no other option).
The rules changed, a lot.
You created an account one day and the only things you could do were commenting and asking questions; you created it some other day and the only things you could do were asking and answering questions; some other day the only thing you could do was asking questions.
Any day you signed up, asking any question first was a sure way to be downvoted bellow the threshold that would ban you from the site.