You're not required to be polite, but you may be downvoted.

shrug yep. I'm saying more that there can be an atmosphere of required politeness.

I mean, look; the OP asked a really good, terse question and got downvoted presumably because it was 'rude.' That's just silly.

I'm curious how the GP's question can be construed as "good" when there exists a blog post that explicitly addresses it. This indicates the GP didn't do even cursory research to determine the answer for themselves. In other words, the GP was lazy, expecting to be hand-fed, and was down-voted as a result.

Ah! If he was downvoted for asking an easily google-able question then that's reasonable and end of discussion.

The discussion here started because of the statement that he was probably downvoted because "how is this different from X?" is interpreted as "This is stupid, we already have X."