On the contrary, you are the one who deserves praise and gratitude. We are merely engaged in the ordinary business of "being a community" (which, at the moment, happens to include taking a stand for sovereignty). You, on the other hand, have taken the apparently extraordinary (if only they were ordinary) steps of caring about the existence of the community, seeking to determine and understand its norms and policies, and trying to keep them in mind while actively contributing content.
I won't deny that many of us do extraordinary things, ranging from the spectacular to the mundane (please do not treat this list as either exhaustive, nor authoritatively ordered: this is just my first impression), such as
- Continuing to participate actively long after the site has run out of privileges to award, even for years on end
- Asking and answering literally thousands of questions, accumulating even millions of reputation
- Making, in some cases, literally hundreds of thousands of edits, fixing grammatical errors and formatting, removing noise, etc.
- Handling flags and removing untold masses of useless comments, duplicate answers, spam, ChatGPT content etc. while also being yelled at from all directions and taking it all in stride
- Producing top-quality, essay-length answers on the most important topics, collating otherwise hard-to-find information and explaining it clearly
- Going out of the way to track down countless low-quality duplicates of FAQs and close them as duplicates of a canonical
- Collaborating to identify the best versions of the most important questions, close other candidates, polish canonical questions and answers even further, add useful related links, and re-route all the other questions to the best possible source of information
(I could even, I humbly suggest, be accused of doing some of those extraordinary things myself.)
But everyone who does these things was in your position once, and does them in large part because of that prior experience.
Coincidentally, part of a Stack Overflow Meta answer grabbed my attention today:
I know this comes as a shock to the company and to the web at large, but getting into a community ought to be hard.
I agree completely. A community is not simply a group of people permitted to coexist in a space. A community, fundamentally, is composed of those who understand, appreciate, and resonate with that community's fundamental, shared goals - in the case of Stack Exchange sites, the goal of building a high-quality Q&A library reflecting the expertise of the site's users.
In other words, it's made up of the people who "get it". At Stack Exchange, everyone is welcome to participate; but only those who actually put in the work to participate, and to understand the expectations set for participants, can truly be said to be participating. Everyone else is at best a tourist or client - the people for whose sake the library exists; the people whose imagined satisfaction is at the root of community members' intrinsic motivation.
So, thank you for caring, and for your support.
I have marked this answer as Community wiki because it only seems fitting.
