Despite using the same platform, the sites in the Stack Exchange family have different personalities. On Stack Overflow, people go out of their way to be friendly and helpful—to the point that FGITW is a frequent topic of meta-discussion.
Around here, fast guns seem to be due to itchy trigger fingers. Given the medium, a teaching university would be a much better model.
I'd like to think that what emerges will be a friendly community. In the first week of the beta, however, things may feel slightly different!
From what I've seen, the community has been aggressive about downvoting and closing topics in the beta in an effort to keep questions well-scoped and at an appropriate level to attract experts. "Advanced graduate student" is a helpful term that's been suggested before to describe the appropriate level of discourse we're looking for. I'd generally agree with this approach.
If we're aiming to attract experts, it's important to be somewhat strict about it in the early phases. So far, TCS seems to be somewhat vulnerable to spillover from questions that are more readily answered by a Google search.
FGITW is perhaps a little different here, since good answers often require more extensive thought than those on StackOverflow -- it's much easier to recognize something as off-topic than it is to come up with a solid answer to a good question, which may be why folks have been quick to downvote and close questions.
