Feels Like Im Reading A Conversation About Stack Overflow - Tumblr Posts

> If the metaphorical village becomes a gated community with no new blood the community will die as it's inhabitants die (or in this case stop logging into reddit). this is a better death than rotting into a meme cesspit

I think to a degree you've both missed the point here. It's not about driving away either new users or experienced experts, it's about maintaining the communities mission. I come from Stack Exchange and we talk a lot about building a resource rather than building a community (although of course there is a community around maintaining the resource, that's a side-effect, not the main goal).

If there aren't enough protections against repetitive new-user questions / interactions, the resource you're building will become useless. It will become hard to find interesting content, making it equally useless for newbies and for experts. In an ideal world, new users would be able to get answers via FAQ or by searching around and finding previous instances of it -- stack overflow tries to solve this with duplicate closure (where every duplicate ends up as a "signpost" to the canonical post, adding more "signposts" with every duplicate).

But the root of the problem is that new users can't figure out how to (or if you're more cynical, can't be arsed to) figure out how to search. This is why the largest "community" on Stack Overflow doesn't actually consist of askers or answerers -- it's the curators, those who re-tag posts, who edit to fix up formatting issues, who vote & comment directing new users to resources about how to use the site, and yes, those who close questions that aren't a good fit or are duplicates. Is it a perfect system? No. But it's the best one that I've seen.

having to break down and actually make a reddit post asking about something is just

hey r/waterbottles! i've been wondering how everyone likes to clean their bottles. i personally use a bottle brush, but i've heard good things about cleaning tablets too. anybody have other methods they swear by?

AUTOMOD: your post has been deleted because you're so fuckinggg stupid. in the future, please refer to our faq before posting your incoherent ramblings, and make sure to check out our style guide regarding the proper terms for jugs/canteens. cunt.