Presumably SO wants to maximize its readership. What I've seen is that they allow any programming question, even of trivial nature, as long as it's objective not subjective. I like that and think it's a good way to maximize readership for objective stuff, because I often google for trivial things. For example, Powershell if/else/elseif syntax, if I haven't used Powershell in a while. I just found the syntax on SO within 10 seconds, with an example I can copy/paste/modify. I bet a lot of other developers use SO like that too, and I bet it's largely the reason people put trivial questions on there. My motivation is efficiency. Being efficient can be construed as lazy I guess!
They also outright get rid of questions that people provide good and helpful answers to. I once asked a question about a specific ML technique in regards to implementing in a specific c++ API. Higher ups said that the question was far too broad and against the guidelines, despite receiving at least 5 good answers to my questions before they got to it. They effectively shut up good conversation for the sake of a rule book they probably didn't write.
The moderators on SO will say it "isn't a good fit for the software". They have no data to back this claim, but will go to great lengths to rationalize it as fundamental to the software rather than a strong shared opinion of the moderators. It is a religious thing like tabs vs spaces. There was an initial kick in one direction and the moderators came down with a strong prejudicial meme against these kinds of questions.
That question is clearly not a programming question and, therefore, not suitable for a programming q&a forum. I think the moderators got it right on this occasion. You could argue that SO should be for all kinds of questions, or all kinds of questions that are anything to do with computers, but the founders chose to handle that with other sites in the Stack Exchange network.
'The moderators are also awful.' +1
the more interesting questions about beautiful code, attitude to coding etc are closed. If it's not "set X to Y", they close it.
I mostly hit this locked question thing with recommendations like 'what graph database should I use'. I've found that for simpler straight up programming questions, there is much less locked questions.
To go off topic a bit here - all these SO articles that are not pinpointed programming questions are always closed or locked. You can no longer ask these kind of open ended, leading to a debate kind of questions on SO anymore. The questions have to be very focused and narrow so that someone can answer it to get points. Its really disappointing but that is just the way the community took it in - pedantic.
Yeah, unfortunately, these days SO is relatively good for shallow questions but mostly terrible for niche questions when you're already at an advanced level on the topic. Often enough you get several inquiries about your use case from people at or maybe even below your level who can't really answer the niche question, you waste time explaining irrelevant details and fending off skepticism, and end up leaving without an answer.
Their original objective was to be the place to ask/answer programming to related questions, but I do agree - the sheer scale has devolved them into simply optimizing search for said questions instead of focusing on maintaining quality.
They ask a question with some weird requirements, people ask why those requirements are in place as it makes it hard to solve, the asker explains why. Everything is good.
The problem is that topic nazis will jump all over you (i.e. close your question as off topic) if you dare ask a question that might be server administration based rather than a programming question.
> We prefer questions that can be answered, not just discussed.
And to me (and this is of course just my interpretation), but that means that questions that can only yield subjective answers aren't really meant to be asked there.
Additionally, the FAQ[1] goes into even more detail that I think supports both my and SE's stance; the question ITT is, to me, clearly more under the "and it is not about..." section of the FAQ than it is under the top section.
They even plug another of their sites, The Workplace[2], as being a better fit for "general workplace issues, office politics, résumé help".
Point being, the question the OP asked here has absolutely nothing to do with programming, and thus doesn't have any place on a site that deals exclusively with programming.
I used to believe that it's because some of the questions are not objective.
However, after seeing some very good discussions closed, I really just think that the admins get off on it. It's even worse at programmers.stackexchange.com
It's a bad policy, and it leads to a lot of frustration by a lot of people.
Yup, sorry. That's what I meant. If you aren't tech savvy or very careful, you breeze right by it because it's often proceeded by questions that have to remain checked.
It's weird that they're closing Documentation, because my experience is that SO doesn't actually want to be a Q&A site, it wants to be a crowdsourced documentation site disguised as a Q&A site for some reason. They'll close legitimate questions because they're not broadly applicable, which isn't really how Q&A works.
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