Comment by shagie

https://blog.codinghorror.com/farewell-stack-exchange/

Jeff had stepped away in 2012.

While there was some lingering activity in 2013 and 2014, it was way down from when he was part of the company. https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/1/jeff-atwood?tab=answe...

I would suggest this marked a change from an "Atwoodian" philosophy of curation to a "Sploskian" philosophy.

From https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/

    It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of *good* programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.

(emphasis in original)

to

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-lau...

    What kind of questions are appropriate? Well, thanks to the tagging system, we can be rather broad with that. As long as questions are appropriately tagged, I think it’s okay to be off topic as long as what you’re asking about is of interest to people who make software. But it does have to be a question. Stack Overflow isn’t a good place for imponderables, or public service announcements, or vague complaints, or storytelling.

With the change in direction that all questions were acceptable ( https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/04/23/strange-and-madden... see also https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/timeline and note revision 1 and the action on September 17, 2011 )... I believe it was then that the shift to reducing the curation actions that people can take.

https://stackoverflow.blog/2013/06/25/the-war-of-the-closes/ was the start of it - a year after Jeff left.

I believe that Joel was responsible for the direction of Stack Overflow from 2012 to 2019... including the "direction" of those policies of 2013 and 2014. The "every question can be fixed" and "every answer should remain if it was an attempt to answer the question" stem from his philosophy.

However, (again, I believe) that is what ultimately contaminated Google's search and you were more likely to hit a duplicate ( https://stackoverflow.com/questions/linked/218384?lq=1 ) than the correct answer because of the lack of culling of duplicates and the golden dup hammer making that the path of least resistance for closing a question if it was slightly related.