That's what a lot of them are doing, something else with their valuable time. They're just letting Stack Overflow know why on their way out.
The problem is perhaps the extent to which people invest time and effort into other people's private corporations. The Wikimedia Foundation, for all of its flaws, actually does try to listen to its users and build a public good. But when you play around in a corporate sandbox where you are just a commodity to be sold to advertisers, you don't have any rights.
I think it's a flaw in human nature really -- we expect to be recognized and given status for building community and providing value. But when you do that for a for-profit company like Stack Overflow or my own experience with TV Tropes wiki, you may find out one day that your value is only in your imagination, and you can be shut out of your community. This is not how it happened in tribal societies, or in small cities, but the information age has enabled even more detachment from empathy than the industrial age did. Now you can take away someone's community from them on their holy day from a chair a thousand miles away.
The problem is perhaps the extent to which people invest time and effort into other people's private corporations. The Wikimedia Foundation, for all of its flaws, actually does try to listen to its users and build a public good. But when you play around in a corporate sandbox where you are just a commodity to be sold to advertisers, you don't have any rights.
I think it's a flaw in human nature really -- we expect to be recognized and given status for building community and providing value. But when you do that for a for-profit company like Stack Overflow or my own experience with TV Tropes wiki, you may find out one day that your value is only in your imagination, and you can be shut out of your community. This is not how it happened in tribal societies, or in small cities, but the information age has enabled even more detachment from empathy than the industrial age did. Now you can take away someone's community from them on their holy day from a chair a thousand miles away.