>StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions

This is significantly under selling it.

Stack overflow was like most of the forums in the late 90s in the early 2000s: hostile to anybody who wasn’t “l33t” hence the beginning of all the bullshit “l33tcode” mess.

I started writing software in 1996 as a 12 year-old and the sheer hostility that you would get from forums or even just reaching out to individual developers was absolutely unbelievable

I remember distinctly, I specifically reached out to Seth Robinson, as a 13-year-old kid who liked the dink smallwood game and was interested in building video game level editors.

His response to me was something like: “My rate for consulting is $800 a week.”

At no point in my 30+ years of being in software has software ever felt inclusive

I mean consider the hacker news is widely considered to be one of the most hostile communities on the Internet to new people, and had that reputation since day one