Comment by zahlman

> the people who wrote the mini-faq etc. claim it's because the people who built the site are wrong, as is every other non-personally-invested user of the site.

Yes.

Because it's clear that the people who built the site were wrong, based trying to reconcile the design of the site with what the people who built it said they wanted to happen.

It's obvious, for example, that the reputation system, as implemented, could never give the results that it existed to give (roughly: restrict privileges to those who best understood how to exercise them; encourage regular participation from those whose content would help the site achieve its goal while discouraging lower-quality content that buries the gold needles in a bigger haystack). Here's a discussion from 2023 where a huge amount of clear problems were exhibited (including many by myself), with clear reasoning based in the agreed-upon goals, which led to approximately no action:

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356/

There were countless efforts over the years to try to explain what was wrong and counterproductive about the site design, which fell on increasingly deaf and even antagonistic ears. As far as I can tell, this was simply the result of profit motive. Maintaining quality standards (and gatekeeping people who expect a different experience) is bad for "engagement" (view counts), and therefore for ad revenue.