> making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants

I used to look for questions to answer on my morning coffee. Then two things happened:

1. Rep chasers that rushed to answer anything with a copy/pasta from manuals (or at best semi related tutorials) showed up so there was no point or time in typing a complex answer.

2. Those long time users started downmodding "teach the man how to fish" answers and favoring "here's stuff ready to copy/paste" answers.

This was long before LLMs.

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suzzer99 2 hours ago | parent [-]

At least 50% of the time on SO, the best answer is 3rd or worse, and I'm always thinking, "Why is this not the top answer?"

	▲	nottorp 40 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Because the person who asked the question has accepted the first answer that looked decent enough and moved on. Usually the most superficial, not that it's always a bad thing. Oh, also on SO there's this kind of exchange: Q: "I want to do X because of this and that - or because I simply fucking want to". A: You should never do X, do Y or Z instead.
	▲	puchatek 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I might even find an upside in that if it wasn't for the fact that this stolen crowd sourced knowledge will be used to make some billionaires even richer.