da_chicken

It wasn't a problem in the early 2010s because the moderator migration feature to actually move questions was more readily available then. They just deprecated it's use because of concerns about dumping poor quality questions as the size and number of sites grew. So unless the question is already extremely high quality -- which essentially zero questions ever are -- they just exclusively close them.

So it comes back to not doing anything to make asking higher quality questions important. The site is designed to be an open field filled with land mines.

Exactly. The site's success was, in part, due to gamification. However, for some reason, the game they picked to mimic was Minesweeper.

I've got a similar story and similar rep, although I only have about a dozen answers posted after 2021. I haven't ever told anyone how much I answered questions there, either. I wasn't there for the points, I was there for the puzzles. I think I've gotten like another 3k rep since I stopped going there. It looks like I finally lost my "Top 2%" status, or else they got rid of that for everyone.

For me, I think I left for a few reasons. All of them are some flavor of "the design is user-hostile".

The first reason is the "traps" they put in the moderation review queue process. These always felt like shit, even if you were right. And for some reason they frequently picked questions where you could reasonably pick multiple reasons to close a question... and they'd yell at you for getting it wrong! Really, this needlessly punitive experience is the heart of why SO was so awful, because everything is like that across the whole site. Some of the network sites aren't like that, but it's rare. And there were just so many Meta questions where the upvoted response was "this would be hard to do right, so instead we're going to do it the way we all know is wrong but it's easy."

The second reason is just how awful the onboarding is. The site constantly had problems with people either not posting code or posting screenshots of code. I don't know why they didn't make a beginner form, similar to what you often see on GitHub issue trackers for large projects (i.e., always include this, always include this, include this if it's relevant, etc. and it's in the textarea box when you start a question). Instead they assume that you know how to ask a question, give you a completely blank form, and then aggressively policy anything where you didn't do it right. I think the one thing to come out of that site is that people do not inherently know how to ask questions. [Which, if anybody has been responsible for responding to IT tickets, oh, boy, do they not know how to ask questions or report problems. "I'm getting errors running my report in the Finance application. I need this report soon! Help!" No mention of which report. No mention of what the report parameters were. No mention of which error message. They don't know what the error message means so, obviously, it must not be useful to anybody.]

The third reason is the site finger-pointing. "This doesn't belong here so I'm locking and closing your question," is possibly the most ridiculous thing ever. Why doesn't it move the question to the other site and then make a stub link? More awful, user-hostile experience.

But, I think the final nail in the coffin is just how aggressively awful rpg.stackexchange.com is, which seeks objective, hyperliteral answers to game questions that are, by design, subjective and intentionally meant to be played with interpretation and nuance. The result is a handful of highly active users will nit pick any answer or question they don't like. Really, I think it's the GameFAQs Forum clique problem, to a significant extent. Some people really have nothing better to do except quash the utility of a site they have a small amount of control over, and it largely ruins the whole experience for the majority of other people. And, unlike a subreddit, you can't just go make your own version on the same topic. It doesn't work like that.

Especially when it's the corporate plagiarism machine owned by the amoral billionaire class that is profiting wildly off the well-paid legislature's shocking sudden disinterest in protecting the rights and privacy of the people after the capture of the first, second, and third branches alongside the fourth estate.

People are tired of exploding costs, loss of privacy, intrusive technology, pervasive advertising, malignant anti-intellectualism, endless rent-seeking products, and fascist leadership. Adding economic crisis from job loss is a fast track to violence.

I use AI and see it's value and even I'm furious about how it's going.

That's because good design is very hard to identify, while almost everyone can immediately identify a bad design.

Sure, but the 16-bit program that was still being used the most had to be setup.exe or install.exe. For many years it was common to distribute all software packages with a 16-bit installer because it's (slightly) smaller and it's never doing anything that would require 32-bit processing.

So, now, it's not unusual to find software from as late as 2005 that is actually 32-bit software, but it's in a 16-bit installer.

Indeed, it might be the only 16-bit application I've wanted to run other than Castle of the Winds and Scorched Earth.

Exactly.

Security fixes for actively exploited vulnerabilities demand an emergency response. The risk of introducing new, unknown flaws is less than risk of having an active known exploited vulnerability.

However, absent the risk of a KEV, that changes the equation. Now the risks of code changes causing breaking changes plus the risk of supply chain attacks is greater than the risk of having to put some thought and time in to manage your software library versions.

It's not like AI created this distinction, either. Neither did CI/CD. This is standard systems administration -- literally ISO/IEC 20000 ITSM. It's exactly why, traditionally, new features are often limited to major versions. It's why binary compatibility was a huge issue with RHES 20 years ago, and why distros pin versions and backport security and selective bug fixes. A developer that doesn't know this is telling on themselves why they shouldn't have write access to production. Stability matters a lot because we like to get paychecks.

Honestly, I haven't found browser history to be useful anymore. Not in 6 or 7 years. Too many sites are SPAs with server-side state, breaking the back button, breaking multiple open tabs in the same application, or breaking both.

That is true, but by that logic EA ought to have stopped being a completely awful around 15 years ago. It's especially egregious when you consider why Electronic Arts was founded. Activision's origin and reputation when they were bought out are similarly dark.

The analogy would be more easier to swallow if it wasn't always used as a mask for enshittification.

I thought breaking every so often was already the dominant feature of GitHub actions.

I would say in the 2010s I shopped with Amazon for the logistics. In the 2020s their logistics have been crap. Packages are slow, frequently late, and rarely packaged well enough for the items to arrive undamaged without luck. The overwhelming amount of drop shipped trash means the site is useless, too.

I've gone back to local stores. They're less convenient, but the prices are better and the quality is MUCH better. Amazon is for commodity name brand stuff that's harder to find.

No, Chrome was way faster than Firefox. You were not wrong. It grew right alongside HTML5, and Chrome put a lot of effort into V8. Firefox was definitely better than IE or Safari, but Chrome could do everything that Firefox did without the memory usage that Firefox had. It's funny how memory usage is now abysmal on Chrome, too.