The most recent was someone who went in and removed use of the word “you” as an attempt to “depersonalize” the answer. There was some kind of recognizable idea behind the edits, but the user’s changes mostly just damaged the readability and made the answers more convoluted.
The editor argued with me and linked to a meta post—which they wrote! This was a multi-page essay which explains, in depth, the rationale for these awful edits.
The user argued that “you” is not used in good, professional documentation. This is, as far as I can tell, completely false and within seconds of pulling up various samples of good documentation I was able to find dozens of examples of “you”.
Another user, years ago, would start fights and argue with anyone, saying that “standard C” only referred to the current C standard, and any previous editions of C were no longer “standard”. The user would insist upon removing the C tag from any question about C90, for example.
The more you answer or ask questions, the more likely it is that you get into conflict with one of these horrible, horrible users.
If the user repeats these edits, just flag for mod attention. Edit wars can be stopped easily by diamond moderators.
So you usually won't see a direct response when you flag something except that your flag is declared valid and the problem is resolved in some way.
The SO mods also handle thousands of flags per day, so they're even less chatty than mods on smaller sites might be.
I honestly don't see the point in throwing yourself at edits to grind out rep. Grinding out rep by answering questions may be slow work but at least you're directly helping someone who had a problem.
People bickering over answers on decade old questions sounds exactly like the sort of community SO is trying to foster.
And for more than a decade they've been closing all attempts to ask the question again as a duplicate of that 2011 question. Relitigating the answers to the original 2011 question is the only way to achieve the goal of that 2011 question being authoritative.
SO's ideals are great but everything about it is broken in practice.
SO explicitly allows same person posting question and immediately answer it himself. This is weird if you see it as a forum, but this make sense if this is seens as FAQ.
Likewise for their comments.
> Reputation is entirely optional
> The three most important activities on Stack Overflow are Asking, Answering and Editing - none of which require any reputation at all!
Looking at what reputation brings, the highest one that matters to me is downvoting questions, which requires 125. My reputation is over 400, and I didn't have to deal with any trauma to get there.
Sure, if you want to do more things (edit wikis, etc) you need a higher reputation, but 99% of SO users don't care for anything above 125. Put another way: Most of them will not benefit if you do have the high reputation.
At a certain level, this is a complaint out of a desire to gamify points.