When I visit someone else's house, I do my best to adhere to any rules or customs they may have. I usually stay quiet, listen, and attempt to understand their ways.

Stack Exchange is not really any different than visiting a stranger's home. SE has its own set of rules and customs. It takes effort to sit back, listen, and understand them without questioning them. Just accepting them for what they are without any judgment.

Stack Exchange has high standards for what it considers to be an acceptable question as well as an acceptable answer. These standards are quite different than nearly all other forums that came before it. It was their site and they created the rules. It's our job to play their game.

If I don't like the rules of the game that they've laid out, then I can play a different game. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands of other forums where you can ask questions and get answers with less standards and barriers to entry than Stack Exchange.

One of the reasons SE emerged as the leading Q&A site is that they imposed these strict set of rules. They provided a very structured way to both ask a question (minimally sufficient reproducible example) and to produce an answer. Another goal was to limit discussion.

Packaging all these ideas together along with points and badges lead to its tremendous success. Getting answers to programming questions before SE wasn't nearly as easy. But their gamification with explicit rules worked better than that came before it.

If the first Q&A volunteers from SE did not adhere to these rules of the game and if they were not strictly enforced, then it wouldn't exist today. It exists precisely because these rules exist and were adhered to.

As a human being who uses emotional-based reasoning, it can hurt whenever an interaction on SE is met without the expected conclusion. When someone posts a question on SE, the expectation is that it is answered. Getting a question downvoted or closed does hurt, but it's very likely that these actions are just the rules of the game playing itself out.

This really isn't different than playing Monopoly and landing on the 'Go to Jail' square. It doesn't help meeting your goal for the game and can sting in that moment. Eliminating the Go to Jail square from Monopoly fundamentally changes the game. You can imagine more 'negative' rules from Monopoly being eliminated such that the game wouldn't even resemble itself anymore. And if such a game were invented, it likely would never have been successful. If I don't like Monopoly's rules, I can play another game.

SE is successful because there are a strict set of rules that restrict the set of content that can be posted. It is these rules that have lead to its success.

This doesn't absolve SE from criticism just like it doesn't absolve Monopoly from criticism. You are free to dislike any of its set of rules. But at the end of the day, you still have to play by the rules or find a different site.

This also doesn't absolve any of the people moderating, asking or answering questions, or commenting. It's possible to break the rules or code of conduct. SE has guidelines for this as well. As humans, there is going to be some failure to maintain civilized discussion. But, enforcing a rule correctly as a moderator that someone else might perceive as negative (going to jail) is just part of the SE game.