> That’s why it succeeded.

The moderation style in the latter years was very different than at the beginning.

It was always heavily moderated, but after some point it felt like there were more layers of moderation and rules and cultural expectations added every year.

Moderation went from being a background cleanup operation that quietly kept the site in line to being the primary thing I expected to see when following a StackOverflow link from Google. In the later years it felt like every other StackOverflow search result was going to be the question I had followed by a moderator shutting it down for some reason before anyone could answer.

The moderation wore me out and I wasn’t even posting questions, just trying to find answers!