[no-name-here]

1. Even if the pleasantries/signature were edited out of your question, is that so bad?

2. But yeah, I think of SO as not really being set up like a bulletin board - I think of it as closer to a wiki of questions and their answers.

3. Maybe other people editing out pleasantries/signature is actually a good thing as others will then see your question as higher quality?

[bjourne]

> 1. Even if the pleasantries/signature were edited out of your question, is that so bad?

It pissed off znpy so bad that many years later they still recall on HN how irritated that made them! Now you could argue that letting znpy's pleasantries stay would have cumulatively pissed off more people in the long wrong. But I very seriously doubt it would.

[znpy]

> Even if the pleasantries/signature were edited out of your question, is that so bad?

Yes.

Erasing the personal touch out of someone’s writings is erasing them.

Ironically, erasing that kind of stuff is likely very good good for training large language models.

[no-name-here]

>> Even if the pleasantries/signature were edited out of your question, is that so bad?

> Erasing the personal touch out of someone’s writings is erasing them.

Yeah, as I mentioned in the grandparent comment, I think the site was better thought of as a wiki of questions/answers than a forum. Including things like pleasantries/signatures on a wiki-adjacent site probably is not the right use for that kind of site. (Personally, I was incredibly frustrated by SO but for a very different reason - edits to questions or answers, etc. that fixed typos, pointing out that an answer's linked app had been down for years, etc. were often rejected.)