I have around 2k points, not something to brag about, but probably more than most stackoverflow users. And I know what I am talking about given over a decade of experience in various tech stacks.

But it requires 3,000 points to be able to cast a vote to reopen a question, many of which incorrectly marked as duplicate.

I said to myself, let it die.

It's also was a bit frustrating for me to answer. There was time when I wanted to contribute, but questions that I could answer were very primitive and there were so many people eager to post their answer that it demotivated me and I quickly stopped doing that. Honestly there are too many users and most of them know enough to answer these questions. So participating as "answerer" wasn't fun for me.

> To my understanding, I asked totally legit questions, but their asking policy is so strict, it's super hard to follow.

I think https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476 is pretty straightforward. If you can show a question of yours that was closed, I'll be happy to try to explain why.

25k here, stopped posting cause you'd spend 10m on a reply to a question just to have the question closed on you by some mod trying to make everything neat.

Maybe it was a culture clash but I came from newsgroups where the issue was is that someone needed help. However SO had the idea that the person who needed help wasn't as important as the normalisation of the dataset.

I sometimes wonder how much time I could have saved for those whose questions got closed before I could answer them. But yeah, that and the swearing culture clash were issues I struggled with, and ultimately meant I stopped contributing.