Comment by cataphract

Yes, yes, the usual narrative. They were not welcoming.

I mostly participated in the site around the 2009-2012 and reached a bit under 100k of reputation and these were the dynamics of website:

  * Most questions were low effort crap
  * Users were mostly divided between only asking questions and only answering questions
  * The reputation system favored: 1) easy questions (understood by a larger audience -> more people upvoting), 2) fast answers (before the question dropped from the front page; also answers with more votes got more visibility).

So, contrary to the usual narrative, the incentives and most activity was directed to answering newbie questions. That made up most of the volume, and it was what the reputation system rewarded. Even if a question got closed as a duplicated, by that time there usually were already answers to most easy questions. And deletion could only happen after some time (two days IIRC).

The experts answering questions only stayed on the website because, sometimes, accidentally or not, someone asked interesting questions. Careful answers to difficult questions were definitely not rewarded through the reputation system.

The problem with StackOverflow, relative to, say, Reddit, is this format is not conducive to community-building. You need to have unscripted, off-topic, interactions with other people, and StackOverflow heavily penalized that kind of content. This only came later, with StackOverflow chat, and it was actually relatively successful.