If you know where to look, some of that cast of characters is still going strong on a forum of a similar design to this day. It's a bit crazy.
Stack Overflow came right out of Joel's complaints about Experts Exchange and is probably the best example of being with the right people at the right time with the right idea.
Uh, where...?
But what happened was that Joel freaked a bit out over some of the drama on the Business of Software forums and shuttered them, in spite of them being very popular and having a huge community - another one of those weird decisions. In an alternate timeline, they would have been HN.
I think BOS eventually died a natural death.
-it was getting less and less popular
-the software that ran it was getting creaky
Also I suppose it was marketing for FogBugz. When Trello and StackOverflow took off, it wasn't really needed anymore.
Joel was a brilliant writer. I miss his insight.
I think it's successor peaked in popularity way after that but started to drop off as there was no obvious way to get new users. The old method of people checking their HTTP logs for referrers to see who was linking to their content and then joining the conversation stopped being a thing.