I was never a big fan of SO's community. Like others have stated, you'll find a lot of arrogant people on there. I found Excperts-Exchange to have much friendlier people, and the info there is just as good as SO, you may just need a little more time to find it.
Sorry to hear about your experience. That hasn't happened to me but it obviously a community has grown toxic over the years. I find myself never posting on it because of the down votes I usually get. Most of the questions I ask know are in slack channels. Usually I get a response in minutes with no sass , no pun intended, behind the response. Hashnode is a pretty great alternative as well :)
Stack Exchange is known to be very particular and impatient. I've recommended to people that they ignore the rudeness from that community however being banned for minor reasons is completely inappropriate. I was banned from a specific SE community for 30 days once.
No big deal, you can still browse SO. But can't you just make new account on another email ? Or maybe it's temporary ban.
You didn't lose a good community. I find the community full of rude offensive people so I myself stopped using it as I was more often told what an idiot I am rather than helping with my problem.
If I have a clue about the topic I ask, I can just go to Google or sometimes here for a discussion mostly on opinions. If I have no clue at all and trying to learn a new area I would previously have gone to SO, but I don't need to be told by someone with a few years experience who feel powerfull behind the screen, that I'm a noob because I don't know this exact thing he knows.
Even at my previous work a senior system administrator (30+ years) was told he must be a "kid wannabe".
Although this has never happened to me, one of my friends was banned few years back. But I don't think you are at loss. You can still go there and find solutions to different questions. I am on Stack Overflow, but I never ask questions - just go there while googling for solutions.
What you can do is, start being active on GitHub and build projects. This way, when you apply for a new job, you will have something to showcase.
I've been warned with it because one of my questions received some down votes. So I don't really post questions there anymore. It felt like most people would down vote just on slightly off formatting which I didn't like, felt like the community cared more about points than helping people. I also don't really post questions anymore because well, I look at the spec and figure it out. Besides you can still look for similar questions on SO as well as looking through hundreds of other potential sites for help :)
Unfortunately, that is SO now a days (as well as many of their other properties) - their not very receptive to beginner questions.
While HashNode is a new(ish) community, there are many pros here also (me, personally, because I don't like what SO has turned into).
A good question consists of:
Every pro will expect you to try something first. We're not here to do your homework; we're not here to build your site for you. But if your legitimately stuck on a problem, we'll be glad to help.
(I obviously do not speak on behalf of HN - their intentions of the site may be different)
Notmy Name
Oh good god, everyone here is saying SO is mean to inexperienced people. We're not, we just can't stand BAD questions:
Please just google and try something before you ask and tell us what you tried so we don't have to.