I have a couple of issues with the linked blog's "... recap of milestones we hit last quarter, ..." point of
Lowered barriers to comment and vote: Historically, basic actions like commenting and voting were gated by reputation. Unfortunately, gaining reputation ain’t easy—you must first ask or answer and then wait to rack up the points. Rep gates were practical at one point in time to combat spam and bad actors but today, they work against our effort to create a more open and inclusive platform—one where new community members can jump in and contribute value right away.
First, although it's often a slower and more tedious method than asking or answering, one can also first gain reputation by suggesting edits (e.g., just 7 successful ones on a site permits a member to then participate in meta, create wiki posts, post more links, answer protected questions, vote up and flag posts).
Second, the last sentence implies reputation gates no longer work at all to "combat spam and bad actors". However, I believe what it actually means to state is they are still useful, but there are now other means also being used to help deal with those issues, such as the Anti-spam capabilities, which is also explained in the last point in the section there.
I realize these blog posts, due to trying to keep them relatively short and succinct, quite often cannot be complete and fully accurate with everything they describe. Nonetheless, I believe that those two issues I discussed above can be handled without adding very much text, with that change then making the point description reasonably more accurate.
