Well, sort of. The "jerks" thing is true in part, but I think the majority of that feel comes from a disconnect between what people want Stack Overflow to be. M

Well, sort of. The "jerks" thing is true in part, but I think the majority of that feel comes from a disconnect between what people want Stack Overflow to be. Many of the contributors (and the founder) want it to be Wikipedia, a place to enter search terms and find your specific problem and its solution, documented exactly once. But many novices get used to finding answers on Stack Overflow, and they quite reasonably see a bunch of questions and answers and decide it's a place to ask for help, which it a thing that looks similar on the surface but is quite different. And so you get a lot of well-meaning answers/moderators closing the majority of what comes in as repetitive noise, because from their perspective it is, and so the majority of people who ask (quite reasonable) questions, especially novice questions, have a terrible experience initially engaging. But yes, ALSO jerks are there.