Any social organization needs to carefully consider their inclusion-exclusion curve with intentionality. I think a lot of people might balk at the word "inclusivity" today, but StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in t…
> but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in this manner. i got stung by exactly this. i saw some of my early questions rewritten because some idiot mod that had not touched grass in a while thought that some words were better suited for stackoverflow. and don't get me wrong: i'm not talking about profanity, n-word or racial slurs, deroga…
> i saw some of my early questions rewritten because some idiot mod that had not touched grass in a while thought that some words were better suited for stackoverflow.
You came to a place where the terms and conditions state explicitly (https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public#lice...) that you license your answer to the community with a Creative Commons CC-BY license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/), and then got upset that someone from the community exercised those rights. Then you (almost certainly) incorrectly described that person as a "mod". Every user of Stack Overflow is entitled to propose edits, and everyone with at least 2000 reputation (about 150,000 accounts, versus 25 currently active moderators and only a handful of retired ones) can make those edits unilaterally.
> dumb example: i like to end my posts with something like
And you ignored that it's explicitly site policy (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2950 ; https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/403176; https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/288160 ; https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260776 ; many others) to remove this exact sort of thing, exactly because posting a question on Stack Overflow is not "a conversation between you and whoever answers". The site, in fact, explicitly started so that people could get answers without having a conversation, by creating an actually searchable resource.
And you didn't even consider that there might be an underlying goal of producing a relatively uniform (at least: direct, but professional) style, because third parties might want to read that. When you ask a question, you can probably only usefully get answered once; the most successful questions get millions of views.
When third parties find a Q&A with a search engine, language like that is wasting their time, and in fact is actually exclusionary. It gives the impression of walking in on someone else's private communication, when in fact the entire point of the exercise is to produce a question that someone else could equally well have asked. (The purpose is so that the other person can read the question, verify they're in the right place, read the answers and be answered instantaneously.)