I don’t entirely agree that more and better documentation removes bugs, problems, questions, concerns, or cuts too much into a 50% drop in site usage. Having documentation is just another tool in the toolbelt, to be used alongside community forums.
Discovery process for myself and many of my coworkers has always been; Look up obscure errors, problems, etc. to get an idea of what I’m dealing with, and then off to the documentation.
Rather than cultivate a friendly and open community, they decided to be hostile and closed. I am not surprised by this at all, but I am surprised with how long the decline has taken. I have a number of bad/silly experiences on stackoverflow that have never been replicated on any other platform.
Your two examples of the causes, “back taxes” and “grandma has two wills” would be solved still in the case of Blockchain. I’m no die hard fan of crypto currency. However if taxes were verifiable on chain, wills were verifiable and unique globally, then there would be no second will.
Say what you will about Blockchain being one big slow database, it is still one big slow database of huge magnitude, that enforces global uniqueness. Again I’m not entirely sold on the premise but look at how our taxes are done, social security numbers, identities. All these problems stem from a lack of a decentralized authority. If some random credit agency says bill down the street is me, we have no concrete and secure means of verifying uniqueness.
Personally, i have been saying for years that identity should be tied to asymmetric encryption. Definitely do not need Blockchain exclusively to solve these problems, but it’s better than what we have now.
I know people drive sales of digital media because of convince, hell I have bought a few movies digitally myself for this reason. However with the videogame industry you are truly right. You are dropping 60/70 bucks so that Microsoft, Bethesda, or whoever, can just yank these games from their platform for no reason. You are then left with nothing, maybe a backwards compatibility release on the next platform, but guess what, your buying that shit again.
It is truly baffling the lack of foresight, with clear examples of this issue such as Nintendo’s shops closing, and psn manipulating of backwards compatibility hardware over the years of PS3.
Saddens me greatly.
If the goal of beehaw is that the user base remain ever small, then by all means jump ship and move on, I can respect that and I wish you all the best. However unless your good faith “rockstars” are planning on building you a platform, you will likely find out that the grass is not always greener on the other side, and that migrations bring additional tensions and work.