SO was a governance disaster. It was the infighting it was the strike, it was bad auto moderation tools. And the Stack Exchange strike wasn't really about AI. AI was just the final trigger after years of management undermining the community that made the platform valuable.

Stack Exchange was built on an implicit social contract people contributed their expertise and thousands of hours of unpaid work because they believed they were building a collectively governed knowledge resource. The company owned the platform, but the community created its value.

After time, management became increasingly centralized and disconnected from contributors. Also the policing of questions based on geeky criteria and not what users wanted. The increasingly aggressive policing of questions, closing perfectly reasonable discussions, and incorrectly saying questions are duplicates made the platform unnecessarily hostile to everyone, qmd at least thats why i quit. Quality control gradually became useless gatekeeping.

So there were really more than one problems, corporate management treating contributors as free labor, and established contributors treating their moderation as authority over everyone else, there were bad tools closing questions. The platform had become extremely hard to use for posting questions, finding amswers, moderator work. For me it was useless. Incidentally the closing of “opinion” questions was the worst decision since it was the only thing that could make it distinct from AI produced answers.

For some of the events there is paper here with details https://arxiv.org/html/2512.08884v1