Yeah maybe SO should have this kind of warning when you’re writing your problem or question, or maybe it does already (it’s been a long time I posted a question myself).

In any case, it is an interesting case about a tricky social problem to solve. I used to listen to the SO podcast many years ago, and they always had multiple problems to deal with. One of them was to show the experts good questions, because beginner questions really turn off the experienced people and too much of that would drive them off the website, and at the same time beginners don’t have the habit of searching duplicates etc. so it’s common to spam the website with duplicate.

At some point they also restricted questions about opinions, because they lead to never ending threads with no objective answers. I’m sure they had a reason for that based on SO history, so the baggage if restrictions start increasing for newcomers to understand the rules. It’s tricky to balance the needs of power users and casual users because they’re often conflicting.