Lordy, that use to piss me off most fiercely. I don’t want someone else’s words attributed to me.
When you join the site, you agree to Terms and Conditions that, among other things, grant a Creative Commons license to the community over your contributions, which gives them the right to make those edits.
The site is explicitly not trying to accommodate people who want to say things in a specific way because it's their way of saying it. The site is explicitly trying to accommodate people who want to collaborate to produce a polished, coherent work of reference. If that isn't you, unironically, that's what tech blogs are for.
People with the attitude you demonstrate here are consistently among the worst-behaved and hardest-to-deal-with participants on the meta site, because of a stubborn refusal to accept a core principle of the site.
(Yes, the reputation system was an unfathomably bad design choice in light of the site's goals. In retrospect I genuinely don't understand how it survived past 2011 or so with tweaks as minor as it got.)
My answer has my name on it. It's right there saying "kstrauser said these words". If I didn't say them, I don't want the site lying and saying that I did. I don't mind if someone fixes an obvious typo, or updates a URL that had bitrotted. That's fine. They're what I obvious intended to say. But I've had people add extra sentences or paragraphs, and oh hell no.
That was never a core principle of the site, at least not when I joined it before you. If it'd been an expressed core principle that people could edit my words, attributed to me, so that my user account ends up saying things I never said, I never would have signed up and not many other people would have, either.
The choice of license is made clear at https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public#lice..., and the consequences elaborated at https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/347758/creative-com... . The license itself is at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ . It is one of the BY licenses, so the site is legally required to leave your name on the work. The interface explicitly marks both the original author and the most recent editor on the main facing page; and it offers the ability to click in and see the entire editing history.
> But I've had people add extra sentences or paragraphs, and oh hell no.
This is overwhelmingly done in good faith, and it's explicitly policy not to change your meaning. In fact, there are many posts on meta where people complained about attempting a good-faith edit and having been judged as falling afoul of that for no reason. See e.g. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/349950 .) But it's also explicitly policy that they can "edit your words, attributed to you" (see e.g. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/403176 ). The people who make these changes, generally, sincerely believe that they are either saying things you intended to say, or at least adding information that you would have added if you'd come back to keep things up to date. There has been a ton of discussion trying to clarify and/or figure out where the line is: see e.g. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/search?q=%5Bediting%5D+intent... .
If you saw someone change something that fell afoul of this, there was a meta site where you could raise the objection. But we were constantly inundated with people who thought it was wrong that we took "thank you in advance, my_username" off the end of the their questions or similar (see e.g. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260776 ), as if they thought they had a right to that.
Most edits I saw to answers on stack overflow were crap though, the system was regularly abused
That stubborn refusal was because it was a terrible idea, and one of the reasons why the site died
Er... yes.jpg ?
You seem to be under the impression that I'm trying to defend all the site's design choices. I'm not. I'm trying to defend a community that did the best it could with what they were given, after all sorts of requests were repeatedly ignored or denied (or preemptively judged unreasonable and not even made) and then new ownership came in and tried to force an unending torrent of even worse ideas on us, even undoing the few things we actually liked about the design.
> The people making the content decisions were often misguided, and vastly less qualified than the authors they meddled with… but were rewarded for their actions all the same.
Again, qualification in the subject matter is entirely orthogonal to understanding of what the site is trying to accomplish, what the policies are, and how those policies were designed to align with the objectives.
That was the part we did have control over. But we were making a good faith effort to carry forward the oral tradition of Atwood and Spolsky's vision.
Wikipedia is often brought into comparisons with SO either as something close or as something vastly different. But it doesn't matter atm. What I want to highlight is that SO allowed on it's site to essentially go to the Talks page of Wiki page and allow editing of all user comments to change their words in retrospect, and also allowing to go to the edit history allow edit that history too. This is what SO did, no wonder there are almost no humans who would approve this (after explicitly explained to them, SO is mostly banking of user's lack of full picture knowledge and ignorance).
It's really annoying to see people insist that they should be the ones who get to decide how Stack Overflow either did, or should have, worked, when they can't even be bothered to understand who the mods were.