About Stack Exchange
TL;DR: If your main purpose of visiting Stack Exchange is knowledge exchange and you do not want to experience disturbance and disappointment on this platform, come to this platform ONLY for knowledge exchange and nothing else.
If I had to visit just one place on the web, Stack Exchange (SE) would certainly be my only choice. Why? The answer has nothing to do with the SE platform’s facilities and functionality. What drives me to this platform is in fact the knowledge exchange and repository (the “main” part of SE) resulting from many people’s contribution to SE over more than a decade.
On the other hand, the “meta” part of SE has a whole different story. By “meta” I mean the set of any activity on SE except the knowledge exchange, including moderation, policies, norms, post voting, closure, deletion, editing, etc.. Not making this writing tedious, I will not provide details and evidence. However, I want to share my many years’ experience with SE so that those whose main concern is only to exchange knowledge will unlikely encounter disturbing situations during their activity on SE (Although the following points are based upon interaction with two specific SE communities, Math Stack Exchange and Meta Stack Exchange, their application can be extended to other SE communities due to the essential common features SE communities have validating these points):
1. Freedom of speech is not a granted right to SE users.
Human communities usually endorse some principles to enhance their reputation; however, in practice such principles are, in fact, nothing more than decorations for communities. SE and the freedom of speech principle are no exception.
SE has many decorative principles, but I emphasize only this one because it would highly influence users’ attitudes. Many genuine people whose main concern is knowledge exchange likely have novel ideas and/or criticisms about existing SE rules (norms, guidelines, or whatever called). When they see deceptive written guidelines endorsing the freedom of speech, they would tend to express their opposing viewpoints, which would highly irritate SE community governors (By “SE community governors” I mean moderators and experienced users heavily involved in meta activities). Ultimately such genuine people would have wasted a considerable amount of their time and energy and should expect SE punishments such as being called “troll” and suspension.
2. Do not care about meta actions on posts.
Many SE users, especially newcomers, usually complain on meta sites when they receive seemingly unreasonable downvotes or closure/deletion votes on their posts; they are then usually blamed by SE community governors. To see how votes are casted by SE users, let me quote a heavily upvoted comment on a meta site from a very experienced user:
Questions are illigiitmately upvoted for reasons unrelated to the quality of a question. A very poor post answered by 5 separate users may very well get five upvotes. Friends upvote friends, admire certain users, etc.
Posts are often judged by their authors, rather than their content. Meta actions on SE should be considered only as play for many users. As a rule of thumb, SE users do anything they can do, rather than they should do. For example, a post may receive a closure vote only because the voter has the privilege of casting closure votes, without any justification.
3. Stay away from meta sites as far as possible.
Unfortunately, meta sites are misrepresented as a place to discuss opinions on how main sites should work. Let me describe shortly how meta sites really work. A meta site is ruled by oligarchy; that is, the governors of an SE community come there to impose their favorite norms upon the community. Even, proposing a perfect idea to a community on a meta site would not imply a reasonable reaction to the idea. To clarify this, let me give a hypothetical example. Suppose that your meta idea is perfect so that all community users agree with it, except a major part of the community governors, such as the moderators. Then your idea would certainly be rejected, and insisting on such an idea would entail some consequences mentioned in the first point (Even, more harsh actions from community governors might happen to you, such as downvoting your posts on other SE networks; this explains why I have hidden the networks to which I belong from my public profile).
However, if you need some meta support, it is highly recommended to find solutions to your inquiries in SE chat rooms; there are many people there to meet your needs.
4. Stay away from moderators as far as possible.
Again, please forget decorative meta guidelines you have read, including moderation on SE. In practice, moderators are omnipotent members of a community whose actions are endorsed by the SE community managers without being questioned at all. For example, one of the easiest actions they can do is to suspend any user for, say, one year without any justification. For example, if a moderator wants to suspend you for one year only because he/she dislikes you, you can do nothing (There exist real evidence for this assertion).
If you are in a situation needing some moderator intervention, it is highly recommended to leave and forget your issue as if it did not exist at all.
5. Stay away from the SE community managers as far as possible.
SE, like other companies, is in fact a for-profit company which tries to establish policies on their main product, the Q&A platform, to increase its reputation and popularity so that it can profit more from its products. Expecting some principles, such as justice, freedom of speech, and so on, from this company would entail nothing for one more than tension and conflict, without any achievement.
Appealing moderation decisions to the SE community managers would bring about at best nothing more than waste of time and energy, and at worst prospective suspensions for more than the earth’s age (that is, you would have to endure a remaining SE suspension after the end of life on the earth), because the community managers will not take actions which may threaten the reputation of their company, and objection to a moderator decision may cause tension within and outside of the community, so the most clever solution for such a situation would seem to victimize a few unimportant users.
6. Obligatory norms of a community can be very different from the written guidelines.
I remember when I argued that some norms of the community obviously contradicted the written guidelines of SE, a moderator replied that every community has its own norms. In my early time of membership in SE, it was very bizarre to me why there should be two sets of rules, SE guidelines and the community norms, contradicting each other and neither of them is edited in favor of the other to remove apparent contradictions. This perplexing issue finally turned to be resolved for me. In fact, SE itself does not believe in norms established by the oligarchy of a community which contradict its written guidelines, so it does not allow community governors to edit them, because the SE community managers are smart enough to know that such bad norms would harm the popularity of its Q&A platform. However, they prefer not to express their disagreement not to create tension within communities which might defame the company.
It should also be noted that existing written norms created by community governors may not be effective as they are too old. It is recommended to inquire about effective norms from experienced users in SE chat rooms.
7. SE is not the only means of knowledge exchange.
It is not improbable at all, in spite of following all the points mentioned above, to encounter SE restriction such as site suspension or post ban for any irrational reason (For example, a moderator may have a bad day in his/her personal life and so want to vent his/her feeling on an unlucky user by suspending the user for, say, one year). It should be noted because of irrational behavior from some community governors, many users prefer to exchange knowledge in SE chat rooms. Moreover, there are many alternative platforms nowadays having many well-made facilities for knowledge exchange together with many active knowledgeable users.
It is worth stating that one can gain required knowledge, just as a visitor to SE communities and not necessarily as a SE user. By a good search on the SE Q&A platform and browsing a huge number of articles on the web, one should seldom feel a need to post questions on the SE platform.