It was useful and not the wild west as long as a very small group of intelligent and highly motivated individuals moderated it. First and foremost Jeff Atwood used to do a lot of moderation himself - not unlike dang on HN.

When that stopped, the site (and to some degree its growing number of sister sites) continued on its ballistic curve, slowly but continuously descending into the abyss.

My primary take away is that we have not found a way to scale moderation. SO was doomed anyway, LLMs have just sped up that process.

I disagree. It was useful because the UI was (and is!) great. Easy to use markdown input, lists of answers sorted by votes, very limited ads, etc. The gamification was also well done.

Compared to anything before it (endless phpBB forums, expertsexchange, etc.) it was just light years ahead.

Even today compared the SO UI with Quora. It's still 10x better.

I have definitely noticed a large drop in responses on SO. I am old enough to have seen the death of these platforms. First to go was usenet when AOL and its ilk became a thing and every channel turned into spam.