I remember John Skeet saying he would sometimes post a half finished answer just so he could get their first and deter other users then polish it later.
A Jon Skeet encounter made me quit Stack Overflow, never to look back. I asked a question, Jon Skeet came along with an answer that did not answer my question. But his non-answer got 200 upvotes.
I went to meta to talk about how the reputation system is broken if that could happen. Skeet came along and accused me of changing my question, and a bunch of SO fanboys mocked me and told me if I want more reputation I had to try harder.
That's when I knew SO had irreparably changed for the worse.
Oh I had some negative encounter with Jon Skeet as well. For a person that has so much notoriety seemed he was quite defensive about me pointing out his "non-answer" he gave to someone else.
My situation was that I noticed that person asking was on a very basic level and he gave answer that was not correct in context of experience or what was actually asked. Even though technically correct.
Every time I've asked a question on Stack Overflow, I include in the question what I've tried and hasn't worked, or that I'm specifically looking to do what I described and I'm not looking for a link to The XY Problem. It always gets edited out immediately so someone can post an unhelpful solution and get upvotes.
Yeah, see that's frustrating. The point isn't his answer. The point is that his non-answer got him upvotes from his fans, and that when I tried to address this broken reputation system in meta, people aggressively missed the point exactly like you did.
It's just weird how often a discussion on something on SO ends up with someone complaining about overzealous downvoting or closing of their perfectly reasonable question, but no one can ever actually post a link to it.
To me that says they're not telling the whole truth about their own behavior.
I went to meta to talk about how the reputation system is broken if that could happen. Skeet came along and accused me of changing my question, and a bunch of SO fanboys mocked me and told me if I want more reputation I had to try harder.
That's when I knew SO had irreparably changed for the worse.