The Stack Overflow Age

Rules/purity oriented folks (what you call "The Pedant Police") do make it harder to use . . . for askers and a little bit for answerers. But they make it a lot easier to use for people who want to find already-written answers to their questions. As Jeff says in TFA, that's the tradeoff they want to make:

> Most importantly, we realized that each question is asked by one person but the answers are seen by thousands of people who found it through a search. So we decided to optimize everything to be useful for the thousands, not the individual. We literally have 1000 visitors for every person who asks a question. That’s why we sort the answers by votes. It’s also why we optimize for questions and answers that will be helpful to other people, later.

From a "lurker" perspective who often stumbles on SO after a web search it's really a great resource.

On the other hand I never actually contributed anything to the website... because it won't let me. One day I stumbled upon a question regarding some problem I had, the accepted answer had a C code snippet that contained an error. I thought I'd be a good netizen and decided to create an account to submit a correction. It turns out that it wouldn't let me make an edit that was less than 6 character long (why? It was just a one character typo). So I decided to add a comment pointing it out, hoping that somebody would be able to fix it for me. You can't comment without a certain reputation threshold.

So basically if I get it right if you have a new account you can only ask questions or answer them. Except if like me you only end up on SO from your search engine and generally end up on already-answered questions (or questions you don't know the answer to since you're looking for them) then there's nothing for you to do. I'm sure they must have done a lot of testing to end up with this system but it basically means that I'll probably never contribute anything to their website.

Did you? I always just scrolled past the fold.

> discussing

SO is not for discussion!

I cannot help but read "beginners" in a derogatory tone. Or at the very least a way to hand-wave away the unhealthy atmosphere that has formed at SO.

It is definitely a problem for people with low SO Reputation since others can come along and edit their posts completely changing the context and meaning, and seem more brave to bully low rep users (e.g. delete/dup their posts).

I have fairly high SO Rep from way-back-when, and all I seem to use that for is undoing others abusive mod actions (like de-dupping something that points to a completely different programming language or framework). But it isn't a community I care to take part in much these days, too toxic.

Back in my day SO existed exactly to help beginners. Now they want to be "the Wikipedia of programming questions." So be it, but none of us have to stick around to help form their little out of date empire of desert.