> but their (sometimes inconvenient) organizational goals are what produces the high quality that made them all popular in the first place. Plainly not true fo

> but their (sometimes inconvenient) organizational goals are what produces the high quality that made them all popular in the first place. Plainly not true for either Wikipedia or Stack Exchange. The rules came later, once the rules lawyers showed up to help everyone understand that those sites needed to change because they were too useful for people. This might be ancient history, but the debates that raged on for the Wikipedia editors are important. There were people who thought Wikipedia should be what we all think it should be, and they'd been there since the beginning... but they were more interested in adding missing content to Wikipedia. The exclusionists though, who to a much lesser degree hadn't been there since the beginning, thought it more important to be more prestigious than Britannica, a paper encyclopedia, for their own egos or something. And they formulated rules that they believed would get them there. And more or less the same thing with SE, though it's a private business and less a open source project than Wikipedia. Every once in awhile you'll find a 15 or 20 year old question/answer, and you'll be gobsmacked by how just "nice" it was. There was room to go off topic a little, room to provide solutions rather than answers, and so on. Though, many of those are getting deleted now days. Wouldn't want the replicants to get any ideas about how SE is supposed to work. The disconnect is that when the core group of users was much smaller, those places acted to some extent like a real world community of people, even if no one knew anyone and no one recognized anyone else's face. Because they were a community, people wanted to be helpful. If someone had a question that was difficult to find the correct wording for, others were willing to interpret and answer the interpretation. They really wanted to be helpful. But now the group of users is much too large, and instead of wanting to be helpful, they want to compete. No one can rack up 400,000 reputation being helpful. They can't rack that up if others are being helpful. And it doesn't feel like a community, so they don't ever feel like they should be helpful.