I used to contribute to Stack Overflow (from around 2014-2017). I did it because it was fun — answering questions was like solving programming puzzles, and mode

I used to contribute to Stack Overflow (from around 2014-2017). I did it because it was fun — answering questions was like solving programming puzzles, and moderation tasks were rewarding as well. Eventually, I joined a couple teams of users (called SOBotics and Charcoal [1]) where we wrote bots that used the Stack Exchange API to automate moderation tasks. This was an awesome hobby, and my teammates were a group of really awesome people I considered friends. At that time, even though I knew SO was a for-profit corporation, it really didn’t feel like one. Nearly all of the staff (including the CEO) were regular users (often since long before they were hired) who were well-respected and made great decisions, and a lot of them hung out on Meta and in chat and were a lot of fun to interact with. (That’s why Shog9 and Robert Catarino’s firing is such a big deal: they were among the few remaining staff members who were from this era and still had this level of trust, respect, and friendship with the community). My participation tapered off in 2018 because I became busy with school, but I still dropped by every now and then, and I kept up with Meta. Around this time was when the company started deteriorating — at first, we started to notice that they had pretty much stalled on improving moderator tooling (leading to serious growing pains and a lot of the “unfriendliness”). Then, they started making a series of bad decisions [2] which hinted that the company no longer understood or cared about their community. For the most part, everyone wrote these off as just mistakes or unfortunate business decisions, but our patience wore thin after repeated violations. The firing of Monica Cellio was the straw that broke the camel’s back — we realized SO was no longer the lightweight, friendly company it used to be, and a lot of high-profile users left as a result [3]. I haven’t looked much into non-profit alternatives, but a bunch of high-profile users have launched a project called Codidact [4]. We’ll see if it takes off — that’s a pretty lofty goal, but they are some pretty impressive people. I don’t plan to go back to SO, but I might join the Codidact project — after all, I was ok SO because of the community, not the corporation. [0]: https://sobotics.org/ https://sobotics.org/ [1]: https://charcoal-se.org https://charcoal-se.org [2]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/331513/258777 https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/331513/258777 [3]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/333965/258777 https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/333965/258777 [4]: https://codidact.org/ https://codidact.org/