> Most complaints, even very good ones, are uninteresting reading.
Many people have valid complaints about StackOverflow's community building, feedback system, moderation, how it prioritises questions and answers, behaviour of people on the site. These are fine interesting discussions about how useful it is, how effectively it works, how a better site might work, how it feels to participate, and can make for interesting reading. Many other people's complaint is that they went to stackoverflow, didn't follow the site rules, the people using stackoverflow approximately upheld the site rules, and now the poster acts in a way that shows they feel personally slighted by the fact that a site exists which rejected them. This not only makes for uninteresting reading, it's also an unfair attack on stackoverflow which ought to be allowed to exist with any legal rules it likes, without being slighted for simply having rules of some sort of other.
> That's obviously wrong.
If what you suggest I'm saying is "obviously wrong", then come on, you can do better than that, "respond to the strongest plausible interpretation".
> Did you honestly think I was saying it was mandatory? Come on, you can do better than that. "respond to the strongest plausible interpretation"
You made up some things you "have to do" and then complained that you don't want to have to do those things to hack the site to let you do what you want. Objecting to that whole premise is my point. "You think it's mandatory" is the strong interpretation, the weak one is that you're deliberately building a strawman of things you "have to do" which don't actually exist. 1) you don't need to hack or farm, you can genuinely participate. 2) you don't need to post niche questions or hunt popular questions, you can deal with normal questions. 3) If you do this, you won't be able to jump quickly to the thing you want. This is not a problem with the site, this is part of its design, if you dislike that design then we're back to "the site is not mandatory" and if you want to be so great you don't have to go through the normal processes then we're back to "how should the site know that you're not a total spambot if you won't go through the procedure they've setup which involves community feedback on the things you do (which paying money would not involve)?