Comment by cs02rm0
1 day ago
> 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.
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.