It's so sad to see how a project that once set out to NOT be like the other popular QA sites of that time could still end up so horribly similar. How a group of good people, with best intentions could still end up with a site in a state like this. The way to hell is paved with good intentions, I guess.

> How a group of good people, with best intentions could still end up with a site in a state like this.

Almost any for-profit platform is doomed to become a dumpster, in the end. After Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, the original founders, sold it to Prosus 2 years ago it has been free falling.

The original founders checked out long before the acquisition, and it's only gotten worse since then. Just the way these things go.

Compared to Experts Exchange or Quora, Stack Exchange is still miles better. You never need to pay to see answers, or register, or have tons of annoying popups, etc.

It's data is licensed under creative commons, and last I looked into it, you could easily download the entire stackoverflow dump. There was a torrent and it was about 50GB or something.

https://github.com/answerdev/answer#readme is Apache 2 licensed, the sibling comment pointed out that the existing S.O. data is open licensed, but your premise has the same problem every "I'm going to take my ball and go play in the other yard" does: the network effect is very, very real