The "I'm angry at the moderators enforcing 'keep off the grass' because I want to be on the grass and I'm special so the rules shouldn't apply to me" effect?
StackOverflow advertises itself as a place for precise questions and answers, and explicitly not for open ended questions and answers. It tells people who sign up not to post open ended questions and answers, and encourages participants to flag same, and moderators to close same. To then be bitter and rude because that happened exactly as the prophesies told you it would, is unreasonable.
These moderators act as angry old men booing people out of their lawn. People who were having innocent and wholesome fun, and overall improving the neighborhood.
It's the same kind of guys who call the police on kids selling lemonade.
It's the same kind of guys who call the police on festival goers trampling their land, ruining nice things, and using "you must be fun at parties" as if it was some kind of justification.
You can't go to a vegetarian cook-out and start cooking burgers because "I want burgers" and then mock the hosts for being unhappy at you. Well you can, but you're the jerk in that situation. You can't go to Wikipedia and start posting questions and answers and saying "I wish it was StackOverflow you angry OLD MAN horrible moderators".
> "People who were having innocent and wholesome fun, and overall improving the neighborhood."
Misusing someone else's site, in a way the creators and existing users don't want it used, in a way you agreed not to use it when you signed up, is not "improving the neighborhood".
> Misusing someone else's site, in a way the creators and existing users don't want it used, in a way you agreed not to use it when you signed up, is not "improving the neighborhood".
No one cares about "the creators", and MOST ESPECIALLY NOT what Jeff Atwood thinks about their questions, answers and comments on stackexchange sites. Atwood is gone anyway, he cashed-out and moved on.
The existing users are many and varied (I am one) but for whatever reason the gamification attracts a high level of zeal from certain personalities that tend towards petty authoritarianism and persnickety behaviors. As useful as these sites are (at least up to now), this is a serious problem.
Seriously, though, respond to the point - would you be happy with people turning Wikipedia into AskReddit where every page was "what's the sexiest sex you ever sexed?" and all the page content was memes about narwhals, bacon, broken arms, and poop knives? I wouldn't be happy with that. Most open ended questions are vague and bad. Most answers to them are bad. The existence of a few good ones does not justify "all sites should become Quora". Open ended questions are very easy to write, have no clear criterion for "answer is useful" and if they were just allowed, they would drown out everything else on the stackoverflows while being a bad interface - witness the Meta overflows which are really really poor attempts to have a chat forum in the QA interface, tons and tons of comments all over, people replying to other people with answers which get voted out of order.
You can tell because you don't want to go to Quora or Reddit for your open ended questions; allowing unfettered open ended questions generally makes sites become overrun with low quality memes which drives the more hardcore users away. You recognise somehting about high quality at StackOverflow which is why you want to go there, but then you want to bring the low quality stuff with you. And when that's ruined StackOverflow you'll chase the next site which has narrowly scoped content and demand to ruin that too. Stop.
> "No one cares about "the creators", and MOST ESPECIALLY NOT what Jeff Atwood thinks about their questions, answers and comments on stackexchange sites. Atwood is gone anyway, he cashed-out and moved on."
OK, not the creators, the /owners/. Y'know, "my house, my rules", that kind of owner.
That's a good question. It should have a name.
We've seen it around for a long time on stackoverflow and all stackexchange-sites. I bet there's a very long German word for this kind of behavior?
It's a combination of extreme persnicketiness mixed with smug arrogance and some amount of glee in punching-down.