SO failed to use a structured approach to validating new questions. Users could have been asked to justify how their question is different from each of the top five closest older questions, also whenever a challenge arises, and generally given the benefit of the doubt. Instead, users met with hostile downvotes whenever posting a question even if it was an original one.

This may be hard to appreciate now, but AI is soon going to begin to struggle with self-training, leading to worse outputs and even a model collapse. For this reason, SO still is more important than ever as a source of original training material.