The site was a consensus of what Jeff and Joel and their associated blogging communities who started posting on Stack Overflow wanted. There was some tension between those two communities about what should be there, but that's where it started.

In the early days, onboarding was done fairly actively with a reasonable amount of the community participating in answering and community moderation - shaping it.

That portion of the community - both answering and moderating was key for onboarding.

However, as Stack Overflow got popular, a smaller and smaller percent of the community was actively answering and participating in community moderation - and onboarding of new people became more and more difficult.

Here I lay the responsibility nearly completely at the feet of corporate. The friction for moderation was increased at the same time that it became popular and thus harder for the community to moderate.

Making it easier moderate and help people understand the site meant that either you needed a larger part of the now very large number of people participating on the site or the ease of community moderation needed to be dialed back.

This is also where rudeness became more and more common. There are two parts to this - first rudeness takes no points to get to that level of moderation. It doesn't have any limited pool of votes that you deplete. Secondly, not everything was rude. With the smaller and smaller pool of community moderation people were shorter in their attempts to onboard a person. You couldn't write a paragraph in a comment and spend 10 minutes on one person when spending 1 minute on 10 different people was more likely to help someone. The shortness of responses was interpreted by the person asking was being perceived as rude.

Lastly, StackOverflow was designed as a Q&A site and attempted to minimize some of the things that were seen as failings described in A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205 ) - Clay Shirky was a mentor of Jeff and was on the original Stack Overflow board. It tried (and for a long time succeeded at) handling scale... though when Stack Overflow's ability to handle scale failed, it was the moderation tools and the ability for the people participating in community moderation to help surface the good questions to be answered and have the questions that needed work to be properly answerable in the Q&A format that Stack Overflow was designed around (not in a forum format) that suffered.