It has its ups and downs and back when I added a shit ton of responses I always tried to keep being friendly and helpful. But even back then there were dicks on the platform, and not too little of them. At some point, it shifted and the dicks started to overwhelm everything.

Yes it was, I couldn't post a question that didn't get downvoted and/or ridiculed for how stupid I was for asking the question in the first place.

Then I was always told my question isn't broad enough to even bother asking, so I might as well not ask.

I got told to kill myself and quit programming for asking a beginner question as a kid. Didn't even get my question answered.

When I first used it, it wasn’t so bad. Yeah, some people were egotistical about things but I could usually get a reasonable answer, and when I answered something before anyone else I would get an upvote or two.

Later, every time I asked a question (that I had spent a day or two researching and searching for an answer), within a few minutes my question would be marked as duplicate by someone with a jillion points, and the question that was pointed to as the dupe would have literally nothing to do with my question at all. Like, I would ask a question about clang internals and get duped as a question about the Windows networking stack.

And when I answered a question, with a complete well reasoned response with an example, it would get downvoted into oblivion while a poor answer from someone else with those jillion points would get a hundred upvotes.

EDIT: And I know AI bad, but I can ask Claude the exact same question and get an answer with the exact file, line references and a decent explanation in a minute or two.

It was more that the owners had a very different idea of the site to what most people wanted to use it for, they wanted to create something akin to Wikipedia of code while most people wanted their programming questions answered. I definitely think a lot of the community had an attitude problem, but the wider problem is more that the users and owners were talking about totally different sites for the most part.

I don’t think their ideal was ever realistic to be honest, the main problem I had with SO was less the reflexive rudeness and power-tripping and more that the community seemed a bit delusional about the basic passage of time and the evolution of industry practice. You’d often see a comically obsolete answer as the canonically accepted one, and if you had a question about something even tangentially related to that canonical answer some smarmy little goblin would come along to close it as a duplicate. It wasn’t very good at what it purported to be, much less what most users thought it was for.