The moderation culture is why I stopped engaging with stackoverflow and software.stackexchange. I noticed two problems. The first is marking so many interestin

The moderation culture is why I stopped engaging with stackoverflow and software.stackexchange. I noticed two problems. The first is marking so many interesting questions and answers as off-topic or opinion-based, which vastly reduced the scope of interesting content, and discouraged daily visiting to learn instead of just using the site as a reference through google. Relying on google to feed you users is a fool's gambit. Websites need to create recurring visitors, and they do that by providing something that engages. Stackoverflow and software.SE's moderation policies made it far less engaging as they grew more heavy-handed. This left the sites open to changes in google's algorithm affecting their traffic. The second major problem is duplicate policing and a lack of staleness policies. By not allowing the same question to be asked again it meant that the content of the network has grown gradually more and more stale. Even my own old answers are now often wrong because they are simply outdated. Stackoverflow is filled with questions in the style "what is the right way to use technology X to do Y", and the right answer to that changes every 2 or 3 years, when technology X gets an update or when new insights in how to best do Y are formed. I tried updating a few here and there, when I saw people engaging with wrong answers, but overall the blame is on stackoverflow and its moderators for not working out a more effective mechanism to get rid of stale answers and letting new users answer old questions with answers that have a shot at rising to the top. This also means that as top-voted answers grow more and more stale there is a tipping point where google no longer sees the site as a useful resource and starts lowering it in the ranking, and this is what seems has happened.