2. But yeah, I think of SO as not really being setup like a bulletin board - I think of it as closer to a wiki, where it isn’t designed for people to talk to each other, but instead to generate hopefully the most useful questions and answers.
3. Maybe other people editing out pleasantries/signature is actually a good thing as others will then see your question as higher quality?
Yes.
Erasing the personal touch out of someone’s writings is erasing them.
Ironically, erasing that kind of stuff is likely very good good for training large language models.
> Erasing the personal touch out of someone’s writings is erasing them.
Yeah, as I mentioned in the grandparent comment, I think the site was better thought of as a wiki of questions/answers than a forum. Including things like pleasantries/signatures on a wiki-adjacent site probably is not the right use for that kind of site. (Personally, I was incredibly frustrated by SO but for a very different reason - edits to questions or answers, etc. that fixed typos, pointing out that an answer's linked app had been dead for 5 years, etc. were often rejected.)
It pissed off znpy so bad that many years later they still recall on HN how irritated that made them! Now you could argue that letting znpy's pleasantries stay would have cumulatively pissed off more people in the long wrong. But I very seriously doubt it would.
This is different from closing your question and depriving you of an answer or making you feel dumb. It's just teaching you how to communicate professionally.
Stack Overflow is the actual document being worked on, not the discussion thereof. (That's why there's a separate meta.stackoverflow.com domain.) And analogously to the Git commit history, your name is automatically stamped onto your posts, along with a link to your site profile, in a box at the bottom of the post.
Stackoverflow was not the K&R.
Stack Overflow was created specifically to avoid conversation. Hence the treatment of comments, and the fact the posts on the page consist of one question and everything else being a candidate answer (and not part of a help-desk or troubleshooting process). It was created by people expressing a common frustration with discussion forums, where you scan ungodly long threads without even knowing whether an answer got posted, have to ignore back-and-forths that are completely irrelevant to you as a knowledge-seeker, and perhaps ultimately end up at a "never mind, solved it" post with no elaboration.
> i saw some of my early questions rewritten because some idiot mod that had not touched grass in a while thought that some words were better suited for stackoverflow.
You came to a place where the terms and conditions state explicitly (https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public#lice...) that you license your answer to the community with a Creative Commons CC-BY license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/), and then got upset that someone from the community exercised those rights. Then you (almost certainly) incorrectly described that person as a "mod". Every user of Stack Overflow is entitled to propose edits, and everyone with at least 2000 reputation (about 150,000 accounts, versus 25 currently active moderators and only a handful of retired ones) can make those edits unilaterally.
> dumb example: i like to end my posts with something like
And you ignored that it's explicitly site policy (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2950 ; https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/403176; https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/288160 ; https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260776 ; many others) to remove this exact sort of thing, exactly because posting a question on Stack Overflow is not "a conversation between you and whoever answers". The site, in fact, explicitly started so that people could get answers without having a conversation, by creating an actually searchable resource.
And you didn't even consider that there might be an underlying goal of producing a relatively uniform (at least: direct, but professional) style, because third parties might want to read that. When you ask a question, you can probably only usefully get answered once; the most successful questions get millions of views.
When third parties find a Q&A with a search engine, language like that is wasting their time, and in fact is actually exclusionary. It gives the impression of walking in on someone else's private communication, when in fact the entire point of the exercise is to produce a question that someone else could equally well have asked. (The purpose is so that the other person can read the question, verify they're in the right place, read the answers and be answered instantaneously.)
i got stung by exactly this.
i saw some of my early questions rewritten because some idiot mod that had not touched grass in a while thought that some words were better suited for stackoverflow.
and don't get me wrong: i'm not talking about profanity, n-word or racial slurs, derogatory terms or other controversial words. it was quite literally stylistic and tone changing.
dumb example: i like to end my posts with something like
which in my opinion is just common courtesy in a conversation between me and whoever will be kind to answer my questions. it's harmless and not controversial. and yet, some mods edited that out and left some irrelevant wording on that. my guess is they were farming points on the site.I'm so glad stackoverflow died and I don't miss it at all.