> StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation
Only in terms of asking new questions, because this was never intended to be the primary use of the site. The entire point of the model is that one person asking a good question could save many others the effort of asking — and answering. But everyone who made an account had permission right off the bat to propose edits to questions and answers, for example.
> making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions.
Rounding it off like this is missing the point, and doesn't demonstrate understanding of or consideration towards the underlying rationale.
> They slowly killed the site in this manner.
It was never supposed to get even remotely as big as it did. It is entirely unreasonable to have ended up with 24 million open, publicly visible questions about programming, when that is over triple the number of Wikipedia articles about literally anything noteworthy.
> knowing I'd have to consider all the ways a bully eager to use their powers might misunderstand me
I can guarantee you that the overwhelming majority of such action is not motivated by "eagerness to use powers", not an attempt at "bullying", and not the result of "misunderstanding" the thrust of the question.
It is a result of misunderstanding what kind of questions the site wants, and why it wants that kind of question.
> I can't imagine asking a question there without having had lurked for longer than a typical Bachelor's + Masters program.
Reading through, for example, https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/433897 and understanding what is written there is literally all that is required.
I disagree. Stack Overflow was made to succeed, not fail ... originally.
Then the founders left, and meta basically chronicles the echo chamber of mistakes made. It's not the intent: that was to help coders code. Meta was dominated by people who lost the intent, and wanted to build a library.
Atwood and Spolsky were quite explicit, on multiple occasions, about what they wanted the site to be. That vision was not compatible with having a site with millions of users and millions of questions, because the masses simply aren't interested in the kind of interaction that the vision required. They may not have understood this at the time. But it's clear that the early community attempted a lot of gatekeeping, much of it misguided in the details (you want lots of questions that address beginner-level problems, because most people in a field are beginners at any given time for any given field, so that's what's most useful) but directionally correct (most of the time, you don't want the question that a beginner asks, because the beginner is not adept at asking useful questions and lacks the perspective needed for a proper Q that allows for presenting a useful A).
The intent was very much to build a library. It's literally on the tour page at the top:
> Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed, high-quality answers to every question about programming.
That is not something inserted by people on the meta site. We literally did not have access to make that kind of change. Believe me, there are so many other things we would have fixed if it had been made possible.
Most of the important policy was established around 2013 or 2014 and those are the dates of the most important posts on meta that get brought up again and again (and used as duplicate targets, and cited in arguments). That was also right around when site activity was peaking. Atwood and Spolsky didn't leave until the acquisition in 2019.