Rather than culture, for me it was the moderation body.
There were a bunch of people that were policing the dumbest minutie, and being assholish about that.
I occasionally would get my answers rewritten to have a completely different tone. My tone was not polemical or controversial in any way. It was just my tone. It was me. And somebody was not okay with that. They would edit MY TEXT and potentially put words in my mouth.
That's absolutely unacceptable.
Ten years on and i'm still salty about that, and i cheerish stackoverflow's death every time it gets brought up.
StackOverflow: Rest in piss, you won't be missed.
[–] jodrellblank 15 hours ago
[–] kstrauser 14 hours ago
> I think goats are sexy.
> - jodrellblank
Even if the site allowed it, or even encouraged it in certain small circles, you would not be OK with this. Or if you would, surely you could appreciate that other people absolutely would not be.
Sometimes people edited my SO answers in ways that were factually incorrect. A colleague or would-be employer might see that wrong answer attributed to me and suspect that I'm incompetent. That is not acceptable. Again, it doesn't matter if the license permits it. Morals and ethics do not.
This is different from, say, forking my software project and releasing an altered version. People would prominently see that you're publishing the changed version under your own name. That's fine. You having the ability to go in and change my own published code, without my permission, so that people see my name on your work, is morally and ethically wrong (and a major security risk). No rule or guideline on SO can override that principle.
It isn't your text. All content is submitted under a Creative Commons license[1][2] which lets StackOverflow 'adapt remix transform' as long as they give credit (username) and indicate if changes were made (edit history). StackOverflow is particularly sucsceptible to this "I imagine the site is something else and I'm making myself mad and blaming them". I don't know why because it's never been a discussion forum which changed, or a personal blog, it's always been a Wikipedia style public edit site. It's like people assume all websites with a textbox and a submit button are required to be the same website and behave the same way.
The first podcast[3] with Spolsky and Atwood from April 2008 has them talking about the site they are designing, and they mention editing other people's answers:
"""Spolsky: Our longer term goal, if we’re successful, is that you're trying to figure out how to do something in Python like how to merge two arrays in Python and you go to Google and you type "merge two arrays python" and submit that, and our goal is to be the number one hit that comes up with a really good edited answer to that question that some individual has contributed and maybe other individuals have edited."""
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing
[2] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20110827210055/https://stackover...