This is more nuanced. And StackOverflow as a website themselves are part to blame. They cannot seem to make up their mind if they are there to help the people w

This is more nuanced. And StackOverflow as a website themselves are part to blame. They cannot seem to make up their mind if they are there to help the people who ask questions, or if their task is to construct a database of problem-answer pairs for future reference, like a type of programming encyclopedia. For the longest time everyone on the site believed it to be the "database" model. And helping individual users with their questions is not part of it. Under this framework answerers who downvote are simply doing what they are expected to do - weeding out poor entries from the encyclopedia. And the person who asks a question has no right to expect an answer, as stated in their 2011 blog entry: > We believe asking questions on our site is a privilege, not a right. [1] However recently they seem to be moving away from that model and only time will tell what it morphs in to. [1] https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-...