People were willing to put up with SO in the before times, nobody was excited to ask a question, it was a dreadful experience. It was their UX that doomed them immediately. Reddit and HN are still here after all.

I personally left SO because I felt moderation had become toxic, and that was before AI. And I was relatively active, like in the top 5%.

How eager people are to find something better IS a factor in the decline of websites/businesses. Not just that there is something better that exists.

See the decline of the graph even before the spring of ’22?