Note how you have the check "thanks, I will keep these tips in mind when asking" before being able to proceed. This has been shown for years and isn't a new thing.
Maybe some things should be clearer; as I mentioned in another comment[1] I think Stack Overflow lacks a clear vision, but people are certainly given more information beyond the tagline.
> I wish people would stop propagating this lie that gatekeepers are necessary for "high quality". It's a lie propagated by gatekeepers to defend themselves.
Don't brand people are "liars" because they have a different view of things.
I agree with parent to your comment. It's not a different view if they've branded themselves with the first words of their site.
To defend this as "different views" when their brand clearly suggest otherwise is, I believe, a bit disingenous. To the parent commenter's point, the community friction and aggressive closure of "seeming" but poorly identified duplicates are compounded by often poor searchability on the site itself. So the issue really is the gatekeeping that occurs by moderators who are operating against the vision the site itself communicate (Ed: regardless of how consistently or inconsistently the vision is current or historically communicated).
> To defend this as "different views" when their brand clearly suggest otherwise is, I believe, a bit disingenous.
So what do you expect? A "tagparagraph" to describe all nuances? You're all fixating on this tagline to an unreasonable degree.
As I said, plenty of people have been VERY clear about all of this right from the start, over ten years ago, and you get a full page before you can ask a question which describes all of it. Again, the communication could be a bit better, but it's not "disingenuous"; that's just a nonsense accusation; almost everyone on the site actually contributing answers subscribes to this view to some degree (there are some nuance with this).
Not wanting to answer low-quality questions or being roped in to being an unpaid programming tutor answering the same beginner questions over and over again is not "gatekeeping".
I dunno, what do you want them to say? It’s like Wikipedia billing itself as the encyclopedia anybody can edit. The 0.3% of people who try to contribute content discover there are rules pretty quickly. The 99.7% who consume get the info they want.
Wikipedia doesn't place itself as an either/or. Defenders of the gatekeeping behavior present SO as only one way, whereas SO presents itself differently.
I currently have 41 reputation on SO. 1 silver badge and 5 bronze badges. Almost all of which I recently earned by answering an obscure Vim configuration question.
And here's the thing: I've been on the site for 12 years and 4 months.
Of course, that means that I mostly use SO as read-only. I've found that it just isn't worth it to use it any other way. Since a lot of other users share my attitude, it seems like a terrible way for SO to operate and attempt to create engagement.
Note how you have the check "thanks, I will keep these tips in mind when asking" before being able to proceed. This has been shown for years and isn't a new thing.
Maybe some things should be clearer; as I mentioned in another comment[1] I think Stack Overflow lacks a clear vision, but people are certainly given more information beyond the tagline.
You can take any tagline to its extreme.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34887632
> I wish people would stop propagating this lie that gatekeepers are necessary for "high quality". It's a lie propagated by gatekeepers to defend themselves.
Don't brand people are "liars" because they have a different view of things.