I think StackOverflow has always suffered from a deep tension over the fundamental purpose of the website. I was a very heavy user and contributor to the sibling site SuperUser years ago, and connections from that era are the reason I still have the "Jeff Atwood GPU" on a shelf in my closet (I bought it off him in like 2009!). I sometimes think about framing it as a lark. I really liked StackExchange early on, but I think it was very much a victim of its own success in that huge user counts highlighted the basic problem with the Q&A website concept. StackOverflow seems to have hit the same problem even harder.

Here's the contradiction: is StackOverflow a place where you ask a question to get an answer, or a repository of information?

There's a huge desire among a lot of social-adjacent products to be A Repository of Information right now. I'm sure we all remember Slack marketing's insistence that having conversations in Slack ("Discord for Business") somehow becomes documentation because you can search for things. I'm sure we've also discovered that that's utter bullshit in practice, but the "zero effort repository of knowledge" thing clearly sells‚ and now we see posts complaining about people approaching Discord ("Slack for Business") this way.

StackOverflow might actually be the first prominent version? At least an early one. I think before StackOverflow the same kinds of conversations were around "enterprise knowledge bases" which were very much curated and written to an audience of people who want reference material. But those kinds of KBs were a lot of work to keep up, tended to require dedicated technical writers, etc. The most prominent public resources for programming, websites like W3Schools, were known for terrible quality. The equivalent books were expensive. So StackOverflow came along with this promise that a gamified, social Q&A experience, like Yahoo Answers if it was better organized, could become a knowledgebase in a Wiki-like way.

And, well, the experiment failed. The thing is, Q&A users (especially on the Q side) have radically different behaviors and expectations than Wiki editors. People coming to a Q&A site want to ask a question and get an answer. This will naturally lead to the same question getting asked over and over again, anyone who ever used a PHPbb community with a Q&A subforum knows this. It's not so bad on a forum where threads are understood to be somewhat ephemeral and community approaches to the issue varied by topic and community, perhaps better handling some of the nuance around the problem of repeat questions. But StackExchange isn't a forum, it's a resource, and that means the "questions" are supposed to be evergreen, curated references.

Sometime in the very late '00s or very early '10s, StackExchange headquarters settled on their answer: aggressive removal of duplicate and low-value questions. They introduced a new moderation tool that gamified closing questions, sending moderators through a whirlwind queue of allow/destroy decisions that seemed designed to minimize original thought and maximize wrote application of the restrictive policy---with a bias in the direction of "if in doubt, close the question."

From that point it felt like it really became the culture of the websites that the best way to maintain a high-quality information resource is to close as many questions as possible. A good decision from the perspective of creating a curated reference website? Probably so. A good decision from the perspective of running a Q&A website? absolutely not! StackExchange communities became this remarkable phenomenon, Q&A websites that were openly hostile to people asking questions.

I think the contradiction was apparent by 2010, but these things can run on momentum for a very long time. Hell, look at Quora, which has made basically the same mistakes but often in the other direction and is still a fairly major website today despite being just extremely weird and frankly right on par with Yahoo Answers for quality.

Atwood went on to found Discourse, which is extremely popular as a community support/Q&A forum for open source projects but seems to have most of the same problems as SE, just at a smaller scale. But now that it's community specific, you have to make an account on each individual Discourse, and you bet every one of them is going to send you a weekly summary email. Thanks, just what I always wanted.

My employer recently sprung for StackOverflow for Teams, their private offering for businesses. I think everyone's noticed that it hasn't really taken off internally... and I think it's pretty obvious why. No one knows what it's for exactly. If you want to ask a question and get an answer, you post in a team's Slack channel. If you want to record some curated, best-practice information for people to look up later, you put it in the documentation. StackOverflow falls into this uncomfortable in-between that's ostensibly "more curated than Slack, less curated than the docs," and I'm not sure anyone really wanted that? And frankly, it's just another piece of evidence that "It's Searchable" is not a replacement for any information organization at all, just an excuse to keep not hiring anyone to maintain documentation.