>If you're out there-- how does it feel to know that what you meant as a efficient course-correction for newcomers was instead a social shaming that cut so deep that the message you wrote is still burned verbatim into their memory after all these years?
I've never been a IRC mod for a channel of anywhere near that significance.
But as someone who has put in considerable effort for the last few years trying to explain basic fundamental ideas about what Stack Overflow is and how it's supposed to work to people (including to people whose accounts are 15+ years old but who insist on continuing to treat the Q&A like a discussion forum)...
... I'm kinda envious.
Being presented with a text entry box, and the implied contract that what you type there will be broadcast to a wide audience, is not supposed to imply a right to reject the community's telos and substitute your own. Gatekeeping of this sort is important; otherwise you end up with the Wikipedia page for "Dog" being flooded with people trying to get free veterinary consultation. Communities are allowed to have goals and purposes that aren't obvious and which don't match the apparent design, and certainly they aren't required to have goals which encompass everything possible with the sites software.
There are countless places on the Internet that work like a discussion forum where you can post a question, or a request for help, or just a general state of confusion, about a problem where you're just completely lost; and where you can expect to have a back-and-forth multi-way conversation with others to try and diagnose things or come to a state of understanding; and where nobody cares if your real concern ever surfaces in the form of an explicit, coherent question; and where there's no expectation that any of this dialogue should ever be useful to anyone else.
Stack Overflow is not that, explicitly and by design; and that came about specifically so that people who do have some clue and want to find an answer to an actual question, can do so without having to pick through a dialogue of the sort described above, following an arbitrarily long chain of posts of questionable relevance (that might well end in "never mind, I fixed it" with no explanation).
But in order to become a repository of such questions, people presented with the question submission form... need to be restricted to asking such questions.
I've never been a IRC mod for a channel of anywhere near that significance. But as someone who has put in considerable effort for the last few years trying to explain basic fundamental ideas about what Stack Overflow is and how it's supposed to work to people (including to people whose accounts are 15+ years old but who insist on continuing to treat the Q&A like a discussion forum)...
... I'm kinda envious.
Being presented with a text entry box, and the implied contract that what you type there will be broadcast to a wide audience, is not supposed to imply a right to reject the community's telos and substitute your own. Gatekeeping of this sort is important; otherwise you end up with the Wikipedia page for "Dog" being flooded with people trying to get free veterinary consultation. Communities are allowed to have goals and purposes that aren't obvious and which don't match the apparent design, and certainly they aren't required to have goals which encompass everything possible with the sites software.
There are countless places on the Internet that work like a discussion forum where you can post a question, or a request for help, or just a general state of confusion, about a problem where you're just completely lost; and where you can expect to have a back-and-forth multi-way conversation with others to try and diagnose things or come to a state of understanding; and where nobody cares if your real concern ever surfaces in the form of an explicit, coherent question; and where there's no expectation that any of this dialogue should ever be useful to anyone else.
Stack Overflow is not that, explicitly and by design; and that came about specifically so that people who do have some clue and want to find an answer to an actual question, can do so without having to pick through a dialogue of the sort described above, following an arbitrarily long chain of posts of questionable relevance (that might well end in "never mind, I fixed it" with no explanation).
But in order to become a repository of such questions, people presented with the question submission form... need to be restricted to asking such questions.