Maybe?

I tend to think that they treated people shitty because they had no solution to questions that had already been answered, besides closing the question and marking it as duplicate. That the behavior of treating people like shit was a symptom, not the disease.

SO was incredible. I remember it very fondly circa 2011 thru 2013 while it was still growing and all the questions every thought of hadn’t been asked yet.

Obviously as time went on, the challenge of organizing and managing questions once a huge base of knowledge had accumulated, proved to be a much more difficult. I don’t think they ever solved that, and ended up rewarding toxic behavior.

It’s a shame.