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.
Your link does nothing to establish the "why". It just shows that some recent questions were downvoted. Which is a completely different issue from question closure, and there's nothing to say it isn't deserved.
> Nothing's quite as demoralizing as
I can tell you from years and years of experience that this is just not what happened in the common case. Of course, there were a few incidents where someone slipped up, which is why there was a meta site to discuss these things. And in the cases where someone had a point about a wrong duplicate closure on meta, that was well received and the problem got fixed.
But we also got a constant stream of people complaining about the equivalent of:
Q. How do I iterate over a tuple?
A. [closed as a duplicate of "how do I iterate over a list?"]
and it became clear that the OP was not even willing to try the code provided, which would work for their situation.
There were cases where people refused to recognize a duplicate of what was clearly the same question, because a different code sample was provided with different variable names or something.
There were people whose argument essentially boiled down to "you shouldn't close duplicates as duplicates ever, because that's how I think it should work". IOW, a complete refusal to engage with the site's policy or the clearly established, stated reasons behind it (and the many years of history needed to refine that policy).
> but even I gave up trying to ask a question.
I think it's quite easy to ask a question that meets standards; it just requires skills (basic debugging / communicating a clear unambiguous specification) that don't necessarily align with the people who are most likely to want to ask questions generally (beginners).
If there's a specific question you wanted to ask but felt unable to, post it here and I'll be happy to explain where it might have been lacking.
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.