This is the thing. The vast majority of (sane) users likely get on just fine without complaint. It's usually a noisy minority of folks who vocalise their grievances, especially when the rules of the site won't fit their world view of how they think the site should work.

I've been a user on the site (and once upon a time a diamond mod) since the closed beta (userid < 500). Sure I've had my ups and downs and haven't always agreed with the way some things work. But at the end of the day I still think SO and the SE network is hugely useful for getting answers to questions on stuff I'm pottering about with.

It is more an issue of who people think the site is for.

There's two big camps, those who feel that SO is for everyone, and those who think they're creating a reference encyclopedia. The encyclopedia crowd won the war, and those of us who just wanted SO as a place anyone and everyone could go and ask a question without getting bludgeoned to death by high karma users have moved on.

This has resulted in a lot of questions going unasked and SO is gradually getting stale, and a general toxic element gaining more and more power within the community. It used to be that you had to take part in SO to understand how unhealthy it was, now that is leaking onto Google results.

"No question is silly" on SO is "All questions are silly."

I always wonder if people that complain about SO being nasty missed out on the shitshow that was programming forums before the current era. I recall some monumental flamewars back in the day on various sites I used to frequent.

Oh yeah, definitely. Especially on Usenet. You'd get flamed for asking a "stupid" question. You'd get flamed for using a "stupid" technology. You'd get flamed for doing things the way you did them, even if they worked just fine. I recall it mostly being constant flaming and hazing.

But at least on Usenet you had the chance to ask 'stupid’ questions, and repeatedly, compared to having them close as off-topic or belonging on obscure-niche.stackoverflow.com