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> At that point I wasn't even able to comment on the reply

That's the root cause of the problem. Once that's fixed, I think commenting is better than editing the answer.

As a mod I often can't know - having no time to verify - whether an edit such as yours actually fixes some bug or not. It has nothing to do with being hostile.

I agree that you should be able to simply leave a comment (new users used to have the right to comment once, if that's no longer the case, I find it quite stupid) that points something out, while keeping it clear who states what.

Then if your fix is helpful, the comment gets upvoted, and everybody's happy.

The author of the answer will typically acknowledge it by editing their answer, or risk getting downvotes otherwise (since now it's apparent that the answer isn't fully correct).

> For instance I found a browser bug in the code submitted on a stack overflow answer [1] and I edited it and it got rejected because it wasn't in the spirit of what the original author intended or something like that.

It occurred several times that moderators rejected valid or helpful edits to some of my answers for the same "spirit" reason. However I still got notifications and edited my answer accordingly so the effort of the original contributors was not wasted (but they did not get any credit / karma for it).

I ran into the same problem myself recently. Only in my case the original poster didn't agree with the edit either, since the wording was "obvious to him". He recommended i propose an edit and let mods decide (failed twice already, same reason as for you), or write my own answer (question was locked).

It led me to try and find the mission statement of SO and it only says it wants to be the biggest resource of questions and answers. No word about quality.

I suspect they only care about answer amount as that helps their google rank, and quality doesn't.

They actually give you 101 points on every new site if you're a proven user, which lets you comment.

How many points do you need to be a proven user then?

200