Comment by kstrauser
7 hours ago
I reverted nearly every single edit to my answers other than obvious typos. If I’d have meant something other than what I said, I’d have said it. You want to see your own words on the page? Write an answer of your own.
Lordy, that use to piss me off most fiercely. I don’t want someone else’s words attributed to me.
It is taken very seriously in Stack Overflow editing policy that edits are not supposed to go against the author's apparent intent. But it does involve removing a lot of things that you might want the answer to say, but don't meet the guidelines for what answers are supposed to contain.
When you join the site, you agree to Terms and Conditions that, among other things, grant a Creative Commons license to the community over your contributions, which gives them the right to make those edits.
The site is explicitly not trying to accommodate people who want to say things in a specific way because it's their way of saying it. The site is explicitly trying to accommodate people who want to collaborate to produce a polished, coherent work of reference. If that isn't you, unironically, that's what tech blogs are for.
People with the attitude you demonstrate here are consistently among the worst-behaved and hardest-to-deal-with participants on the meta site, because of a stubborn refusal to accept a core principle of the site.
(Yes, the reputation system was an unfathomably bad design choice in light of the site's goals. In retrospect I genuinely don't understand how it survived past 2011 or so with tweaks as minor as it got.)
That's ridiculous and you're wrong. I grant them a CC license to my content to fold, spindle and mutilate it for their own purposes, but not to leave my name attached to the folded, spindled, mutilated version.
My answer has my name on it. It's right there saying "kstrauser said these words". If I didn't say them, I don't want the site lying and saying that I did. I don't mind if someone fixes an obvious typo, or updates a URL that had bitrotted. That's fine. They're what I obvious intended to say. But I've had people add extra sentences or paragraphs, and oh hell no.
That was never a core principle of the site, at least not when I joined it before you. If it'd been an expressed core principle that people could edit my words, attributed to me, so that my user account ends up saying things I never said, I never would have signed up and not many other people would have, either.
But the points system was fundamentally inextricable from the site’s operation, and the officiousness and arrogance it rewarded meant it could never be as good as anybody hoped it would be. The people making the content decisions were often misguided, and vastly less qualified than the authors they meddled with… but were rewarded for their actions all the same.
Found the SO mod…