Yeah SO is going the way of Wikipedia wrt rule nazi, trigger happy editors, it's very frustrating. Especially since many of those 'editors' have gotten much of their brownie points from farming them through answering 'soft' questions with popular answers, asking beginner-level but popular questions etc. When you look at the profiles of those voting for closing in cases like the one you cite, you very often see that their domain knowledge is very limited.

I've been sort of active on the site since the very beginning which has led me to have a few thousand points there. To my big frustration, a large part of them come from two answers: one in which I recommended the K&R for learning C, and another how to use the @ operator in PHP to suppress warning messages. I'm a bit disheartened every time I get yet another vote for those answers.

Anyway, what I was going to say was that I get the impression that when I ask or answer a question from that account (with several thousand points and active for 5 years), I'm treated differently than people on new accounts with few points, even when their question is worded exactly the same way I'd do it. It feels like bullying by low-quality users who through grinding stumbled upon editing powers. It certainly (mostly) stopped me from contributing a year or 2 ago; not even so much for the morality of it, but more the overall idea that a site run by the distinctly mediocre (even if there are a few very high quality contributors) just doesn't give me great confidence in the quality of what is on there.

Of course this is a widely documented phenomenon with any UGC (hey there's a buzzword we haven't heard since 2009!) site after it hits a certain critical mass, we just have to look at the very site we're reading now...