> But the points system was fundamentally inextricable from the site’s operation, and the officiousness and arrogance it rewarded meant it could never be as good as anybody hoped it would be.

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.