So who owns what?

This is a very good discussion. This is how we approach this, but we need to become better at expressing this more explicitly and clearly.

You own the copyright to your work, and the full capacity to modify and remove it at any time. It's a shame to us when a great post turns into a 404 response, but that's how it is. We try to provide tooling and conventions that give you a reasonable amount of content ownership. These are things like the ability to provide a canonical URL to your own site. Depending on peoples' individual concerns, they may or may not feel the need to make use of this sort of stuff.

We've entered into a partnership where you don't get full control over some decisions like styles, fonts, image sizes, etc. This is mostly out of practicality and user experience. Additionally, contributions on the site must abide by our code of conduct. Violating that policy may affect your future rights to contribute content for distribution.

You own your content and have the right to take it down or modify it. We're looking to make any grey area in our implicit distribution partnership more clear. We'll be making it a point to clarify positions in our terms of use.

Does that help?

In plain language, I want whatever I post to be mine. (Retaining all rights to use it later.) But I posted it to share, so other people sharing links, quoting some of the content, or using the code contained within should be unencumbered. Personally, I don't even care if I am attributed for code usage.

The reason I'm asking is that I'd like to know the rules. Especially regarding content that might take me a long time to create or contain ideas that I wan to monetise later.

@ben - Your post is excellent. Thank you for clarifying.