I figured it out shortly after i posted this. At least, I'm pretty sure I figured out the whole thing.

will check it out, thx

I'm not really seeing your complaint.

See part about posting to SO. I think you might mean to say you don't care about my point or that you don't post to SO so it doesn't affect you. I see your methodology, and it's been discussed in this about avoiding SO or replacing it.

Ohhhh, I'm not sure how I stay going sometimes. It does make me feel good to expose and take down openly corrupt and incorrect people who are causing problems.

It's fully their intent to try, and make themselves appear as godly programmers by shaming others and locking them out completely; which I don't even know why they think will work since every user coming in is thinking what you're thinking and yeah... obviously the response isn't helpful.

Yeah, and they try their damnedest to stop you from doing even the most basic stuff.

it's primarily aimed at finding solutions to obscure problems rather than stuff you can easily find via SO or Google search.

I wasn't disputing this, and I did happen to specify in my OP that there are high rep users posting easy to answer questions. And they were very clearly getting away with doing this (and I presumed that meant it was appropriate) because they had a TON of them. And as you said, they answers were easily found in like the freaking android changelog ffs. They were questions that were so easily answered by using common sense to find the document that has always been the source for that sort of thing. This user was posting this stuff because they knew someone might simply google the question they used as the title for their post and so they'd get rep for traffic and upvotes for the post.

I can only imagine what people do to real life institutions.

It gets corrupted just the same. I'm doing some stuff with the city council and they're breaking rules that are easily read and understood by any joe shmo off the street and they pretend they're coming to some sort of incomprehensible solution in their behind-the-scenes discussions and simply authoritatively dictate things to people. It's actually really wrecking the city I live in right now. Shockingly though, the state has intervened and told them what they're doing is illegal (on many occasions, and that's just what I know about), and one of their dirties deals has landed them under a corruption investigation by the state.

karma grubbing

It is exactly that... check out this comment thread in this post.

Yep, and we know the story with SO.

As a side note, it's the same reason it's so irritating that google is censoring search results right now. Sure, they'll say google is a company and they can do whatever they want with their product, but when it gains that much influence over people's lives they better damn well believe the users of the service (everyone) have a say it what happens with it. There are families and people with serious careers using the service, their livelihood is at stake. Also, Eric Schmidt has been using google as his personal political influence device... he deserves to burn.

It is unreasonable to ask someone to plunge through the archives of a web site for 12 hours in the vain hope of finding some question that's already been asked. Always has been. It kind of defeats the purpose of asking the question when they could beat their head against the wall for 12 hours while trying to read official documentation and/or textbooks and probably have about the same odds of "getting it."

Omg, so much this. I've been repeating this shit to professors and people on SO for years and they sit there and pretend I'm some sort of mentally retarded person whom they hate for proposing such a thing. I'm going to publicly rip my professors at the university I graduated from a giant new asshole. And then I'm going to rub salt in the skin tears.

Anyways, yeah, if they're trying to "improve" their site they're doing a bad job of it, and I have expressed to them multiple times that there is something wrong with the site. You should have seen that shitstorm. The posts got like 25-30+ downvotes, they must have been sharing the link with their high rep buddies that they know IRL because the flames were massive, the fuckers started doxxing me (this is all on the very first post I made on meta), they went and deleted one of my accounts.. I mean, I think they honestly believe they're doing all this stuff and think people are bowing down to them and submitting without realizing their fuckery. If I didn't know they were completely wrong before, I did then with all that backlash... there IS NO WAY the nail wasn't hit right on the head. Love watching wrong-doers squirm, I'll tell you that.

Also, I have seen the useful posts marked duplicate before or whatever other tag they would like to insult the poster with. Problem is: when it gets marked that people can't post, so I think the answer was given before a rep-whore mod got a chance to intercept the points/block someone from gaining rep. I mean, it's definitely all about rep it's like lemon11 said, it's gamified; and some users have gained an unfair advantage and would like to pretend their number one on the highscore board (that people can see and observe their almighty godliness as world's best programmer - or whatever it is they believe others will believe by looking at that).

If that's part of what they're doing then that's really dumb. It's like buying a game, starting it up, and the game is illogically, inconsistently and arbitrarily difficult with impasses as the developers see fit. And if you come up with an original way to play the game (a new question) they block you, then can publish their own version as if they did it first or any other action after the player has been silenced and censored from speaking on the site...

That's all bad, and it's why I don't use the site anymore. If there are 2 sites in the search results I click the non-SO link.

That's not what I'm talking about when I say it's gamed. At all. I'm not even talking about usage of the site in that way. And by that way I mean what was written in the link you sent me

Gamification is the use of game design techniques and mechanics to solve problems and engage audiences. […] Gamification works by … taking advantage of humans' psychological predisposition to engage in gaming. The technique can encourage people to perform chores that they ordinarily consider boring, such as completing surveys, shopping, or reading web sites.

I'm talking about the gaming of obtaining rep on the site. And blocking competition from even using the "game" this is the site.

I know right?? But stackoverflow careers is a thing so there must be something to it.

I'm unsure if this means anything, but one of the bosses at my job was very interested in seeing that article when I was talking about it. He never said why. I should ask him.