This post, to me, is about the rise of ChatGPT — but I do think over-moderation is a huge problem.
I had a hard moment on the gamedev stackexchange where I was stuck trying to learn how to do something in OpenGL. A moderator immediately closed my question as a duplicate because there was a similar question about OpenGL ES, which is a (related but) different API. I tried to plead my case, but was shut down.
Shortly after that, I gave up on the game I'd been working on for a couple years. The mod's decision contributed to that.
I felt stuck by a wall between me and answers to some of my game programming questions. Over-moderation is more than an inconvenience. It can destroy the ability of users to get things done.
The graphs in the post show the traffic decline starting around May 2022, months before ChatGPT was available. I'd wager the cause is a change in Google's algorithm. Most of the time I end up on Stack Overflow, it's because I've typed a question into a search engine.
Anecdotally it seems like Google is favoring spam sites that have crawled answers from SO