Re: “The Pulse #134: Stack overflow is almost dead”

Lawrence D'Oliveiro writes:

On Wed, 21 May 2025 07:40:31 -0400, Sam wrote:
>

It's not the LLM or AI that made Stackoverflow jump the shark. They
simply failed to achieve sufficient mind share to be able to withstand
the natural factors that work to collapse every social media platform
that employs content moderation.

>
I was answering question and gaining points on there for a while, until I
realized that the points themselves didn’t mean anything (beyond conveying
some kind of status on the site itself). I kind of lost interest after
that.
>
I think my account is still there, and my answers are still accumulating
points ...

There's a very telling footnote in one of the FAQs over there. I don't have  the direct link because, well, I couldn't care less, but the FAQ entry wrote  about a cryptic reason for a loss of reputation points that says something  like "Account Closed". The explanation is that someone in ancient times  upvoted you, but their account was closed so the karma is being taken back  due to the reversed upvote, as if it never happened.
And here's the telling footnote, that went something like "Ummmm… if closing  an account would cause too much disruption we have a special procedure to  close accounts without reversing the upvotes".
Now, why would they have to go through the hassle of implementing a process  that gets rid of high karma accounts, without backing out the rep change…
Keep in mind that high karma accounts are also more likely to have a large  number of upvotes of others, too.