> SO moderators don't even read your questions anymore before closing them for a random reason
Note that most of these are just regular people with close-to-vote powers, not elected or appointed moderators with special powers.
I think one major problem is that there is an entire class of people who rarely or never ask or answer questions, or even comment, and all they do is "moderate" the site by closing questions. Literally all they do. Some of these have extremely specific and narrow views on how the site "should" be. I absolutely hate it: who the hell are you? You're not even using the core function of the site. Fuck off trying to tell me how I "ought" to be using it. I don't want to gatekeep who is or isn't "part of the community", but people gatekeeping how the site can be used without actually using the site is just absolutely toxic.
There are a number of other issues as well. I can go on for a long time. But to be honest I no longer care: the site has been taken over by nihilistic capitalists who care not one iota about any aspect of the site other than the ability to earn a buck (previously it was a commercial enterprise as well, sure, but it wasn't 100% about earning a buck and many in leadership positions genuinely cared about "doing right by our community" as well). And that is probably just as much of a reason for the decline of Stack Overflow as anything else.
My specific work community has a Slack with a few thousand people and a few active hundred people. We've come to the conclusion that slacks 90day retention message policy is a good thing. It allows new and old to reask and reiscussion topics.
SO should do something similar. Throw out all the mods, all the questions and start fresh every X number of years. No idea if it will work but tossing out the current mods to bring in new ones would change the flow.
So that's the other extreme end, and that would get repetitive for the people answering questions. Because in spite of the overzealousness of marking questions as duplicate from some people, some questions really do get asked over and over and over again.
Also: Stack Overflow is intended to be a long-term useful repository of question and answers. You enter "how do I frob a baz in foo?" in $search_engine, and the idea is you'll end up on Stack Overflow which answers that exact question. I have sometimes ended up on some of my own answers from years ago like this.
It would be for sure an interesting experiments. Repetitive? No not necessarily. The refresh would happen could periodicaly, but the core functionally wouldn't change.
The old answers can no longer be used as the basis for duplicates, a new one must be created ( that brings a slew of problems, such as sniping for getting magic points).
But the refresh of PEOPLE (mods) is where its needed the most.
What is wrong with duplicate questions though? If the response - yes but my use case is a tad different and its not covered by the linked solution, then dialogue should flow not restricted
funny how their original prime directive was to fix expert sex change, and they were so successful they caused experts-exchange to (somewhat) improve their game, and at the same time needed to enshitify SO to hit VC-fueled objectives that had nothing to do with building the best place for developers to ask questions and get durable answers.
Note that most of these are just regular people with close-to-vote powers, not elected or appointed moderators with special powers.
I think one major problem is that there is an entire class of people who rarely or never ask or answer questions, or even comment, and all they do is "moderate" the site by closing questions. Literally all they do. Some of these have extremely specific and narrow views on how the site "should" be. I absolutely hate it: who the hell are you? You're not even using the core function of the site. Fuck off trying to tell me how I "ought" to be using it. I don't want to gatekeep who is or isn't "part of the community", but people gatekeeping how the site can be used without actually using the site is just absolutely toxic.
There are a number of other issues as well. I can go on for a long time. But to be honest I no longer care: the site has been taken over by nihilistic capitalists who care not one iota about any aspect of the site other than the ability to earn a buck (previously it was a commercial enterprise as well, sure, but it wasn't 100% about earning a buck and many in leadership positions genuinely cared about "doing right by our community" as well). And that is probably just as much of a reason for the decline of Stack Overflow as anything else.