This sounds very arrogant to me. What makes you think you can distinguish in an instant, whether someone posted crap on purpose not willing to read any advice on asking? Maybe these people don't know it better. Many people can't read/speak/write English fluently. Those people tend to read only text that seems important for them. Unintentionally. They have a question and want an answer for that as fast and as profound as possible. This is why they're on SEStack Exchange after all. If they wanted a dumb answer or they wanted to wait for few weeks for an answer, they would visit any forum or yahoo answersYahoo Answers or such.
Let's take your 'question': When is Stack Overflow going to stop demonizing the quality-concerned users who have made the site a success? (cautionCaution: personal statements without confirming arguments ahead.)
The question title alone makes me think, you see yourself as a kind of elitist who stands alone (or with a few others) against a neverending flood of newbies who actively and repeatedly try to decrease the overall quality of SOStack Overflow by asking dumb questions on purpose.
On many occasions newbies get told that not they personally get downvoted, but rather their questions and answers and they should keep this in mind when feeling offended. This applies here, too. Jay doesn't demonize the community as a whole, every single responsible user in it or even you in personal, but some users who are not able to express themselves in certain situations without seeming hostile to the recipients of their message. You should not take it personal.
After using stackexchangeStack Exchange as a trustable source of answers to any kinds of questions for years, I finally asked a question. In the comments of the question I was told, what I want to achieve is not possible. Then the question was marked as a duplicate of another question, which I strongly disagreed with. I made my point clear and requested for removing the duplicate 'stigma' and reopening the question. I got the following rude comment (I don't know the exact wording anymore):
Then, a few weeks later, I asked a question on softwareengineeringSoftware Engineering about Enterprise Architectenterprise architect & code generation just to receive a bunch of downvotes with none of the downvoters seeming to care leaving a comment on why they downvoted. After writing a comment asking for reasons, I finally received a friendly comment stating that This is off-topic for Software Engineering, questions about help getting specific code working should be posted on Stack Overflow.
I didn't know that. Not because I'm lazy and didn't read the tour or the asking advice, but because it is stated nowhere on the site when compiling a question. Not even on the landing page of a stackexchangeStack Exchange site there is an explanation of what the scope of this specific page is - in detail. *
ImhoIMHO this is what Jays blog post was about.
*: I think I've seen that it's possible to move questions between sites to a stackexchangeStack Exchange site that it fits in. This would have been a much better approach to me than just downvoting the question without leaving any comment on the reasons.
tl;drTLDR: The blog post does not seem demonizing to me. Don't take it personal. Two examples of what can go wrong when dealing with newbies.
- The whole discussion may be heavily biased due to the nature of humans. We like to criticize fast and often if something doesn't meet our expectation (like I did here). Rarely we praise something that works as expected. So SOStack Overflow and SEStack Exchange in general receive more criticism by newbies than praisings.
- I don't know why Jay mixes up newbies to the site with minorities implying that every user already active on the page must be a middle-aged white caucasianCaucasian man and every newbie must be a member of any minority. ImhoIMHO this is a statement leading to many acts of justification and self-defense.
- Please do not see my answer as an universal condemnation of SEStack Exchange and its very experienced and valuable users. SEStack Exchange is an awesome platform. My answer is also not meant as a rant on you in personal.
Thank you all for contributing to this platform, making the internetInternet more a source of valuable information bit by bit, day by day. Love you all <3