Why were my edits rejected?

Question

On this post, my edit was rejected for reasons that are not clear to me, because they don't match reality.

I added a couple sentences in the same vein as what the OP was talking about to make things less ambiguous, and explained that in the reason for the edit. I was able to find 2 relevant discussions based on the OP's referral, and then, copied and pasted relevant portions from the Reddit articles, instead of simply linking to them, which way back in the day, used to be SE ettiquette.

What. In. The. World.

It's stuff like this, and the downvotes and hate in the question itself, why I don't come to the SE's very much. I had hoped my last absence would have improved the sites. It seems that you guys have went down the wrong rabbit hole.

I've managed to find the answer to my question, which was in part due to the person who answered it, but given the information black hole surrounding this, I must surmise that there's an army of reputation cleaners, trolls, and shills at work trying to scrub the internet of any mention of this information. Which is quite saddening and supports Dead Internet Theory.

Answer 1

Edits should not change answers by that much. Your edit adds significantly more content than is in the entire original answer. That would make the post more your expression than the original author's, which is not OK when their name is on the post. You should instead post a new answer with the information you found.

There's no conspiracy here to suppress this information. It would stay just fine in a separate answer.

Answer 2

To add to murgatroid's answer (without editing theirs and making it mine, which, you know, is somewhat egoistic):

• This policy of answer (and question) edits is very old, and established all over the Stack Exchange network.
  With a reputation system it is necessary that contributions remain personal, and - more importantly - most people don't like to see something they put effort into be molded into something completely different.

• Maybe deleted comments give a different picture, but is see no sign of "hate" on your question.
  As a matter of fact, the first comment that came across as hostile was yours (hence I left a comment).

• The downvotes to your questions are likely there because to those voters it was obvious your post is off-topic.
  I personally am not a fan of (exclusively) downvoting off-topic questions, especially when I see some effort went into it. I think it's more constructive to leave a comment explaining what is wrong with it, but every user is a different human being and every one of us has bad moments (or days) when you can't be bothered to begin with.
  Especially since situations like this are very common, and often it is simply because the users posting content don't have the courtesy of going through the rules of the website they participate on, even if they are the ones asking for help.

And here is yet another case of a new user, not having gone through a basic investigation of what this site is about (despite an abundance of links and invitations), receiving constructive (and, admittedly, non-constructive) critique that is misconstrued as being rejective, and finding their way to the Meta page to complain about how experienced users, who put their free time and effort into keeping a public and free source of often verified information neat, organized, and well-oiled for a majority of random faceless other users, in all actuality form "an army of reputation cleaners, trolls, and shills ".

Do you see the irony here?

Answer 3

On the question: What is the mechanism behind Microsoft’s enforcement of server bans in Minecraft? — I think it's actually on-topic and should not have been closed. It's not a "Why did the developer design it that way?" off-topic question, but a "How does [an aspect of the game] work?" question, which should be perfectly on-topic. (I've edited it to tweak the wording to be more like the latter on-topic type of question while still keeping the original intent.)

On the edit: I agree with the edit reviewers that your edit "deviates from the original intent of the post. Even edits that must make drastic changes should strive to preserve the goals of the post's owner." Your edit is exactly as the rejection reason states. You are adding too much, deviating significantly from the original answer.

Your edit should be an answer of its own. Stack Exchange has always explicitly encouraged users to answer their own questions.

Can I answer my own question?

Yes! Stack Exchange has always explicitly encouraged users to answer their own questions. If you have a question that you already know the answer to, and you would like to document that knowledge in public so that others (including yourself) can find it later, it's perfectly okay to ask and answer your own question on a Stack Exchange site.