I opened a meta thread about it, and a helpful high rep user reopened it, only for a bunch of even higher rep users to come in and ruthlessly shut everything down, including deleting the answer I submitted. I've never seen a community so hostile toward someone trying to add value.

Maybe I really was in the wrong here for trying to reopen that question; you can read the whole thread and judge for yourself: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/405099/reopen-c-arg...

However, I have been discouraged from using the site in recent years due to too many disagreements over closing and downvoting questions when actually just getting a little bit more clarification from the person asking the question would have helped a lot more.

I've answered over 1,000 questions, ranging from very simple beginner level to some things that took a good deal of research or debugging to answer. I've seen my fair share of poor questions. If a question is completely off topic, then sure, I click the "close" button immediately.

However, if it's on topic, and about some identifiable issue, but not specific enough, too poorly worded, or doesn't include a code sample, or the like, then I post a comment requesting clarification, and listing how they can improve their question. In some cases, they actually work with me, improve the question, and then I or someone else can answer it. In some cases, they just ignore my comments or continue with requests to just give them the code or the like, in which at that point I find it worth a downvote or close vote.

But a lot of the times, I've seen perfectly good questions that were just a little confusingly worded, however I was able to tease out what they were getting at, I've done some research to find the answer, and come back, only to find the questions closed. Now I have an answer for the question, but can't actually post it. If I vote to reopen, sometimes even after editing it to clarify or getting the OP to edit it, it will generally languish with one or two reopen votes. Sometimes I'll then post on meta to complain about this behavior; people being way to quick to close. This will frequently lead to enough people clicking through to reopen it, but also a torrent of complaints about how the question really is bad and how we shouldn't let this kind of stuff on the site because it's destroying the community.

The thing is, bad questions don't destroy the community. If they're bad questions, they'll generally fall off the front page and get forgotten about. They don't really cause much in the way of problems; they're just a few extra bits. But this hostile behavior does destroy the community. It pushes beginners away, who may ask better questions later once they get a bit more of a handle on what they're doing. And it pushed people like me away; people who are there to help, and willing to do so even for beginners.

I think that Stack Overflow is a very different thing than MathOverflow. Professional programmers sometimes run into thing that they need to do that they are complete beginners at; you may have years of experience writing Java, but then you wind up needing to integrate with and write a plugin for something written in Ruby, and you really have very little experience with it and so don't know where to look. Due to the huge numbers of different languages, APIs, platforms, and so on, rapid pace of change, and shortage of qualified people with the exact relevant experience, almost everyone is a beginner at something they are doing at some point in their career.

Furthermore, some people just don't know how to ask good questions online. It's a skill that takes some time to learn. If you're asking a question to someone in person, they may already have more context about what you're doing, or will be able to more easily ask you questions to clarify and sit down with you to work through it, while asking good questions online can involve a certain amount of preparation in advance to narrow the issue down to a self contained, reproducible test case, to phrase the question appropriately, and so on.

So while I agree that complete junk should be closed and delete, and people who just post "plz gimmeh teh codez" should be discouraged, I am really frustrated by the way people extend that to things that are just beginner questions, poorly worded questions from people who aren't good at asking questions online or aren't good at English, or the like.

Why do you think that? I guess I'm a member of that community and really don't care how people reach SO. The site is also saturated to some extent now... There's a good chance that your question's already been asked, so I don't expect the site will get many new active users really. Maybe with some new languages/frameworks becoming popular - but if you're writing C for example, you're very unlikely to get actively involved in SO at all. It's still a good reference place for C.

> the community dislikes questions that are answered in documentation or elsewhere on the internet

"the community" is not an uniform blob. On one hand side it's tiring - if someone didn't bother to do a single obvious search, why should I spend time writing the answer. On the other, if you do answer that, the are rules about including actual answer and not just linking to a document which may disappear in the future.

> the question has been locked for being unconstructive, off-topic, (wrongly) a duplicate, whatever

You can vote to reopen. Or if you can't, you can flag for moderator attention and say why it should be reopened.

The problem I encounter most often, the community tends to closevote hard questions instead of answering them.

E.g. I recently asked a question on SO, for Linux C API to monitor WiFi signal strength for the connected network.

10 minutes later it got a vote to close “migrate to superuser”. I immediately updated the question explaining that I only interested in C API. An hour later it got closed as offtopic. I flagged to mod, nothing happened. It gathered a few votes to reopen but not enough to reopen. And now it’s just deleted by “Community” saying “RemoveAbandonedClosed”.

No one wants that question closed, but at the same time only a handful of people actively prune it every now and then. Right now it's open, but if it starts generating crap answers yet again, we might close it. And then silently re-open it when no one's looking, hoping that the next troll that visits the site won't notice.

However, keep in mind closed doesn't mean dead, we have lots of great (but closed) questions (http://programmers.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&q=...), if at some point a question becomes incredibly troublesome, closing it is the easy - and reversible - fix. Killing crap answers, rewording the question to be a bit more specific, etc, is a very slow process, but it happens.

When I asked the person why it was closed, I was informed it was too broad and not a 'good fit' for SO. Of course it was broad, beginners don't know what they don't know. I then looked up this persons history to the first questions that they had asked themselves. I was not at all surprised to see that they were all very similar types of questions to the one that was just closed.

I pointed this out and how their questions had gotten 50+ upvotes and multiple answers which then led them to help others and become a mod vs this poor person that will never bother using SO again. His response? SO has changed, it's not for beginners anymore.

Reopening usually never happens. Discussions in the comment section is totally useless and wasted time.

Discussions on Meta also just repeat that your question is not for SO.

Unfortunately, there's no way to vote against closing a question. All you can do is vote to reopen it after it's closed.

Their community management tools are awful and the philosophy they and the moderators abide to is that questions/answers must be closed as soon as possible.

For example: take one question such as "how to do X in Y". The answer today is "not possible". it is accepted. done. Tomorrow it is "now you use Y.abc" and that old question will never be updated because the person who asked is not interested anymore, or worse, it might even be locked. This is a very common pattern. There's also thousands of the "A: copy and past this, which i do not understand either" which completely kills any knowledgeable discussion.

For the last few months I've been in the habit of searching for algorithm questions, and answering them for fun. And then http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11314077/algorithm-for-ex... came along. It was the most fun algorithm question that I had seen in the last week. I put a fair amount of effort into rewriting a response I learned a nice trick from into a response that programmers with no theoretical background should be able to understand. But 4 moderators decided that it should be closed despite multiple votes, stars, and so on.

I then asked at http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/138678/can-we-please... and the immediate response was that I got downvoted into oblivion, the question got deleted by clearly senior members of the community (it since has become undeleted, but there is no question what the "wise elders" think should have happened), and I got a lesson in what they really do and do not want to see on their site.

I understand what they are aiming for, and clearly what I find fun is simply not a fit for what they want on their site. The site that they'd like me to go to instead is http://http://cs.stackexchange.com/. I looked. It is practically dead in comparison. What little does appear there seems strongly geared towards computer science students. Given that I'm self-taught in CS, I doubt I'll stay there.

So, goodbye Stack Overflow. I wonder how many other people you don't see there any more.

I used to be a daily visitor to SO and was active in the early days when Jeff and Joel were active and I felt part of the community. After recently seeing moderators rampantly closing questions as if to say 'I consider your question unproductive or unintelligent by my standards', I rarely visit.

Apparently Code Golf is considered a valid question while questions lacking extreme detail that may help people are not.....

This is not true in my experience. Several times in the past month, I've googled for some problem or other and found a StackExchange question with my exact problem and several useful solutions, which had been closed because a moderator deemed it insignificant or overly broad. I understand the need for community standards in a site like this, but if your standards are getting in the way of the actual questions people want to ask, you need to change the standards, not crack down on legitimate use.

There is a small but vocal population of users who will use any excuse to close questions they already know the answer to, regardless of how clearly-written or novel they are. That's... kinda insane, but in a community-moderated system there's a bit of a learning curve for everyone, including those moderating. If you see something that strikes you as wholly inappropriate (e.g., a good question closed for a bs reason, not a bad question closed for the wrong reason), don't hesitate to bring it up on meta for review: http://meta.stackoverflow.com

A closed question only needs 5 votes to reopen, if I remember correctly. So if there are massive amounts of people who wants a question reopened it should be possible.

Not disputing some people are overzealously closing qestions, and this problem should be addressed - just saying it is just as easy to vote against closing.

Unfortunately, over the last couple of years consensus, policies, and/or something else has changed. The questions that I find interesting to answer (hard ones, and related to my area of expertise which is desktop development, 3D graphics, SIMD, CAD/CAM and a few others) are now either too broad, or unclear what’s asking. A few times the close voters closed the question even before I’m able to write an answer.

I’m probably too old and too lazy to make my voice heard. Apparently, web site owners now want SO to specialize on web development, and on deadly boring questions about it, like “how do I format date and time in PHP”, where an answer can be found within 2 minutes of using a search engine. SO is not my personal web site. If that’s what owners want, so be it.