One of the biggest problems, if not the biggest, for people in tech (especially new CS students, etc) is knowing how to ask the right questions. There's several

One of the biggest problems, if not the biggest, for people in tech (especially new CS students, etc) is knowing how to ask the right questions. There's several 'layers' of tech-speak that people learn (or not) to adopt, and many ways of asking essentially the same question. These practices of gatekeeping, being opaque, and failing to practice patience and interactive dialogue on SO are extremely frustrating, and cause the system to fail to support some of the people that most stand to benefit from the community. It creates an attitude of elitism, and while I see how these attitudes can be self-serving for the karma elites, and help create a perception of the community being concise and clean. But it leaves many people falling through the cracks, and when questions aren't answered within 3-5 replies, the threads are often locked, deleted, and otherwise 'swept under the carpet'. For this reason, I don't contribute to SO at all anymore. If it comes up as a result in a Google search when I need help with something, I'll use the info made available, but otherwise I'm intentionally just a leech because I don't feel it's worth navigating all the negative aspects in order to contribute. Edit: I do hope that the changes and attitude they've outlined in the OP blog post do help resolve a lot of what I've just described, and I do intend to re-evaluate my opinion after enough time has passed for real changes to manifest.