One of the reasons that Quora today is absolutely unusable is that it no longer is a curated discussion between internet users and knowledgeable people, but AI spamming the site with swarms of low-quality questions, and AI answering those questions with swarms of low-quality answers. I think it's likely that Stack Overflow will end up following a similar pattern.
Quora was already absolutely unusable back before GPT-2. It became unusable as soon as people realized that all they had to do was self-identify as an expert to get taken seriously on there, so people started developing whole lifestyles around building up their Quora profiles. From that point on the actually knowledgeable people weren't interested in contributing because there was no way to distinguish themselves from the people who were faking expertise. AI may have been the final nail in the coffin, but Quora was dead long ago.
Stack Overflow managed to avoid that particular hazard by placing less emphasis on real-world identity and expertise, but it also has been in a long-term decline for many other reasons. The fact that they made such a vocal stance against AI and then pivoted so dramatically is just one example of how much they've struggled to find direction lately.
Just a point of clarification, the user moderator base (its power users) took a strong stance against AI, and the company, chasing every possible dollar, overruled them.
Short term profits over user preference is what happened here
I know this wasn’t really your point, but it’s worth noting that Quora being low quality spam is not the problem. It’s why the hell Google surfaces Quora so prominently given that the results are pure shit and require registration to even see all the shit.
Is there any reasonable explanation for how they’re ranked so high? Like, how can even googlers tolerate it?
Just a guess, but I think when they started losing the spam wars they put in some kind of handcrafted whitelist ranking boost, either directly based on brand/site, or link proximity to known good sites, etc. And maybe they don't update that list too often. You can find some info about an ML update Google called "Vince" that sounds a lot like that.
Poor maintenance of a probably thousands long whitelist of "brand quality" seed sites? When the only measure they really care about is ad revenue, and bad organic results might mean more ad clicks? It's not really that outlandish, just plain complacency from a company with an overwhelming market share lead in search. That's how Google started in the first place...capitalizing on complacency/stagnation on the then leaders in search.
Assuming you mean people working at Google, the answer is probably that profit/promotions outweight personal use. More clicks, more back-buttons, more search adjustments, more advertising revenue.
Quora and SO are rather different communities. In Quora's best days, there were celebrities or quasi-celebrities making interesting posts, just like on Twitter or Google Plus in top times. Also Quora used to have very active and talented Community Managers / Top Writers. Marc Bodnick used to do tons of curation but left a while ago to create his own social network(s).
In contrast, SO has never been so "celebrity"-driven and the content has a rather different audience. I think it's understandable that the major contributors don't like how their content is being used, similar to the Reddit revolt.
What might "replace" SO is some AI-assisted way to establish a handbook and FAQ for any new technology. That could be a chatbot as well as some effective method for feeding that bot content.
And then SO-the-community, i.e. people who want to talk to each other, will probably branch off into some other forum or network.
One of the reasons that Quora today is absolutely unusable is that it no longer is a curated discussion between internet users and knowledgeable people, but AI spamming the site with swarms of low-quality questions, and AI answering those questions with swarms of low-quality answers. I think it's likely that Stack Overflow will end up following a similar pattern.