> 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.
I'm no Jon Skeet, but I've had an account since 2009, I answered a question early on that's had well over 1000 upvotes, which I think is 10k of reputation for that answer alone.
Yet I certainly couldn't ask a question without suffering the same. That terrible experience wasn't reserved for newbies. I learned to stop contributing pretty quickly, well before AI.
Now that's a name I haven't heard about in a long time. haha
The barriers are far more understanding the very counterintuitive set of rules and expectations of the site than they were accumulating the points (though I don't think the decidedly odd set of things that require a certain reputation to do help at all).
Would you be willing to show questions you attempted to ask? I'd be happy to help explain how policy works/worked there.
Out of 10 times I asked for this, somebody replied with a link once. Most people do understand that they have violated the rules, they just don't agree with the rules.
I love the implication that thousands of people, from a broad spectrum, who all had the same negative experiences with what was obviously a serious endemic problem with the site, all just needed to understand the policy better. That was clearly the issue.
If thousands of Americans travelled to a tiny country where cars drive on the left, and all tried to drive on the right as they do at home, would that make the country in the wrong? Would it be a "serious endemic problem" with the country?
We know how it works. That's why we all eventually gave up on helping people there (years before I knew what an LLM was.)