I don't understand this at all. In its heyday, I found it working really well. The questions that would be closed were either copy-pastes of homework tasks, vague descriptions of some overarching goal ("how do I implement this?"), walls of code ("why does this crash?"), or obvious duplicates.

I think it's good that the site got rid of those quickly. Sure there'd be some snarky high-rep users around, but they'd mostly listen to facts or at least be drowned out by more useful contributions.

LLMs are most commonly blamed, but the drop started way before those became popular. I'm confident that its horrid moderation drove people away long before AI had a chance to. Nothing's quite as demoralizing as:

Q: Why does adding two Python objects fails although their classes are compatible?

A: [closed as a duplicate of "Why do people say JavaScript is weakly typed?"]

I'm a reasonably bright person, with scads of StackOverflow fake-karma-Internet-points, but even I gave up trying to ask a question. There just aren't enough hours in the day to fight with hermits seeking the Ultimate Question and downvoting everything else.

That was that for that site.

Yeah, no shit nobody uses Motif for new development, but if you haven't guessed, I was working on a legacy enterprise system.

Just rubbed me the wrong way and still kinda annoys me to this day. Not everyone is dicking around for fun or works at startups where you can light other people's money on fire. Some of us have paying clients, I'm not using Motif because I want to.

Pages bloated like myspace make me reluctant to click the search result and I wont browse around if a website doesn't load instantly. Search some exotic kind of bad. That they haven't implemented an LLM is quite untechnological.

It should have an LLM assist with constructing the questions and it should have answers from all providers willing to donate tokens. Upvotes should generate wonderful data on how to construct an answer.

Others like SciFi & Fantasy and Worldbuilding have kept relevance.

Unfortunately, these more niche sites relied on StackOverflow to drive referral traffic, so the whole platform is declining.