You hear about the people who complain but not the hundreds of thousands who search for something, get a StackOverflow result, read it and leave happily.

They don't care. They have a dogmatic belief that they're right.

SO has been in decline for many years now; there's not much they could do to stop it now. Even if they could, it's hard to say whether that would be a net good for SO; part of what drove people to it in the first place was its steadfast dedication to maintaining a curated knowledge base, even with the impact that would have on long-term community health.

There's plenty they could do. Nobody knows what it is, but it exists. And maintaining a curated knowledge base never had very much to do with what brought people to the site, but they still don't seem to get that.

Could be conflicts of interest involved too. For a while it seemed someone was getting paid at least a little to close every Israel question on politics.se.

It’s no longer relevant. It doesn’t really matter what they do. The site is going to die. It was an artifact of a different time.

They should have kicked out every mod years ago.

Recently on reddit /r/art the mods collectively quit because people were making fun of them for gatekeeping someone. Everyone made fun of them more. Stack overflow are reddit mods gone extreme, they believe their job is to stop all activity on their boards apparently.