The actual answer was always at the bottom if you scrolled down far enough. Lot of dark patterns on that site.

I personally disagree with tdeck, Joel and Jeff deserve a lot of kudos, as an oldie myself SO was an absolute game changer for programmers.

I think it used to be, but IIRC some time after Stack Overflow became popular they started actually gating it. Probably because there were people researching questions posed on SO and answering them from info on EE.

If so, that was a catch-22 for them. Either leave them available and watch the only thing making your site useful be rapidly transcribed onto a different and now more popular site (whether by people playing into the gamification or scraping as used to be the norm doesn't make a difference here), or close it off and allow their more use hostile experience to force them into irrelevance. That's a tough place to be. By the time it became an obvious problem SO was probably too far ahead to catch even if they pivoted immediately, as I'm not sure anyone ever really felt any loyalty to EE with it's poor usability bordering on UX hostility.

I remember listening to the podcast where they announced Stack Overflow, and cited exactly the problem of walled communities like Experts Exchange as who they wanted to drive out of business.

Stack Overflow ain't perfect, but it's amazing to see how impactful it's been. Especially the unix/superuser stack exchange sites for having useful tips that would be a pain to find elsewhere.