People feel intimidated on SO, specially if they have low self-stem. This is a real problem but not because veterans there are bad people - after all they are helping strangers on the Internet for free. I'm one of them[1].
Moderators there tend to be borderline autistic people obsessed with some subjects. Yes, we sound like jerks and some people there can be really infuriating but it is not personal: we are just obcessive people with very low social skills. These OCD traits are both our weakeness and our superpower, why we do such a great work maintaining top quality questions and answers while sometimes sounding needlessly rude.
Being on the spectrum is not an excuse to be a jerk but many people will take "you are being pedantic" as a cumpliment because their brain is wired differently. Most of them will be more careful if you tell them they are hurting people even if they can't understand why.
Moderators there tend to be borderline autistic people obsessed with some subjects. Yes, we sound like jerks and some people there can be really infuriating but it is not personal: we are just obcessive people with very low social skills. These OCD traits are both our weakeness and our superpower, why we do such a great work maintaining top quality questions and answers while sometimes sounding needlessly rude.
Being on the spectrum is not an excuse to be a jerk but many people will take "you are being pedantic" as a cumpliment because their brain is wired differently. Most of them will be more careful if you tell them they are hurting people even if they can't understand why.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/users/444036/paulo-scardine?tab=pr...