The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)
People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile. People have just forgotten that the lack of that carefully curated environment created the complete mess that was all the forums we used to have before.<p>Sure, it's not ideal - SO could do better in terms of helping people understand the site's goals and enforcing the  rules in a less hostile way, but they are working on that (a lot of the more hostile rule enforcement tropes are banned and filtered against), and it's a hard problem.<p>SO isn't dying any time soon, and the content is still good. If you want to kill it, please go ahead and solve the issue of explaining to users how to contribute quality content and getting them to take that in instantly.<p>I used to contribute a lot, which tapered off as I had other things filling my time. Towards the end though, the help vampires were getting to me, and I understand why people are harsh towards new users in some situations, it's an easy trap to fall into. Trying to fix that problem by stopping the curation of the content is insane, however. That's a fast route to going from some people being turned away to having no decent content.