I was also a heavy user of SO for many years. At the end, I noticed things started to get really weird. I would ask a carefully researched question, get multiple answers, and get zero upvotes on the question. The Win32 community got so weird that people would only post comments under your question, but zero answers would be posted.

Maybe we will look back at mid-life SO (its golden period) as something like bulletin boards in the 1990s. Once the Internet arrived, BBSes were wiped out.