This piece is strange. SO’s organizing principle was _always_ on a collision course with stagnation. Plane goes up. Plane goes down. The author rides right ove

This piece is strange. SO’s organizing principle was _always_ on a collision course with stagnation. Plane goes up. Plane goes down. The author rides right over or just thinks you can group Usenet with what came after—forums. Forums were everywhere. They were single threads, and they were always going off the rails, off-topic, changing between what the OP asked and what the final best answer became. And along came SO. Klaatu came out of the spaceship and said you will do the work, you will make questions and we will provide answers—and no Duplicated Questions. If you’re policing in this way, at some future point you will have less participation. Plane goes up. Plane goes down. The only way for this not to occur, system wide, is if there are new and better technologies which are growing rapidly. That was always happening at SO, with or without AI