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The ones that really get my gripe are the ones that are flagged for being off topic.. Off what topic? This is a place where technical questions are asked and answered and this is a technical question that needs answering - Why is it closed?

Exactly. Double frustration if it was the first return from google.

That's the only way visit SO. It's double frustration all the time.

I don't necessarily agree with the logic, but SO's "topic" is software development. Many questions that are technical but not regarding software are closed for being off topic. Some/many are migrated to sibling stackexchange sites. Some questions are closed because they require opinion-based answers ("What's the best ...?", e.g.).

> Some questions are closed because they require opinion-based answers ("What's the best ...?", e.g.).

The problem with this is that there are opinions and preferences and biases (and so on) hiding all throughout even the most (seemingly) objective questions and answers. The SO folks think they're making a more meaningful distinction here than they actually are.

Not to mention "what's the best <X> library" can frequently be answered in an objective fashion, if the answers give a breakdown of why.

Things like "lib A requires excessive boilerplate compared to lib B, see example", or "lib A can't be installed under the following platforms", etc. What should be voted down on those types of questions isn't the question, but poor answers.

It's really frustrating, because getting the opinion of experts who have tried a bunch of alternatives, and know the pros and cons that matter, is exactly why I go to SO frequently.

What's kind of interesting is a lot of the target SO questions are implicitly opinion-based. For any "How do you do X" there might be multiple ways to do it so the question is actually "what's the best way to do X" which is up for anyone to interpret "best". And this tends to work out nicely, you'll often see multiple answers where the top upvoted one is not the selected one, or some answers build off of other ones and describe why they think it needed updating. This kind of nuance and seeing multiple, competing answers is often pretty helpful while you're learning.

Plus some of the best, most interesting questions on there are "community wikis" which often tell you they should have been flagged as opinion based but are preserved for historical significance.

Because of that I really don't see the point in being so dogmatic about closing opinion based questions. Even something like "emacs or vim" I can imaging being a useful question, with a highly upvoted, thought provoking answer arguing each side.

"how to do X" has an objective answer: "here's how". Whether it is "the best" is subjective. That is why multiple answers are allowed on Stack Overflow (instead of a single article as on Wikipedia modulo different languages).

The accepted tick on the answer says that "here's how" might have worked for the question author.

The most upvoted/popular answer works as a rule (there are exceptions). Popularity contest is not the best way to get the truth on a technical subject but it works more often than not (you can read the answer in the chronological order if you like).

The historical significance thing is particularly annoying. It's an explicit statement of "We want this type of content, but the system of rules that we created and can change any time we like does not allow this type of content, and what do you mean, 'that seems like something we should do something about'?"

What's stopping them setting up an opinions.stackoverflow then if they've already got sibling sites? Somewhere to contain all of the opinion-based questions.

They do have some. For example the Software Recommendations Stack Exchange:

http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com

I have flagged many questions for being off topic. You could say I'm part of the "problem" but from my standpoint, someone will ask a question that can be answered so many ways that the scope is too broad. Many times the person asking doesn't know enough to understand just how broad the question they've asked is. That's why I also leave a comment telling them _why_ I just voted to close.

This is, unfortunately, an unsolvable problem. They're asking the question precisely because they don't understand what they're asking enough to get a meaningful answer.

"How do I convert a JSON object to CSV?" is a common broad question I see all the time. There is no standard conversion because they are completely different data structures.

And yet, answers with demonstrations of the many ways to do so are extremely useful! Sometimes I think the side of this debate you land on is something of a personality test: do you seek order above all else or do you embrace and try to grapple with chaos?

Such a question is best addressed in a personalized way, starting from what capabilities the asker has and what they are trying to accomplish. Offering multiple viable technical solutions to a person who asks such a question is quite likely to leave them confused and adrift as most of the answers are not comprehended.

So, you're absolutely correct. Demonstrations of the many ways to do so are extremely useful to many people! It is, however, highly likely that few - if any - will be useful to the person asking the question.

You're very right - this is a personality test. Do you try to jump directly to trying to answer an apparently-simple question, or do you cautiously consider if the simple question hides complex depths (deeply nested structures, arrays of variable length, etc.) that make a simple and straightforward answer difficult?

Maybe some questions are just not "too broad" but simply broad, and that one may wish to have a number of possible solutions to a problem and pick the one that fits one's case best ("one" being possibly someone else in the future that has a not precisely similar but close enough problem that the set of proposed solutions can help in finding the right path).

So maybe, just maybe a slightly broad question with a couple answers may be better that an theoretically ideal set of a thousand (question, answer) tuples each trying to fit a very restricted case. Unfortunately some mods seem hell-bent on promoting the latter, possibly in hope of writing bots that solve-by-Google (see stacksort[0]).

[0]: https://gkoberger.github.io/stacksort/

My personal experience with such questions is that very often, the process of engaging in dialogue to determine what kind of answer(s) the asker actually wants is difficult and time-consuming. This typically complicated by askers who don't actually show up to the dialogue, leaving people who want to be helpful with no way to figure out what specific answers are helpful. There tends to be no adequate way to helpfully answer such questions, so people try to filter them out as poor uses of time.

The scenario you describe is somewhat different, in which the asker is well aware they have a broad question. Such people are advised to make clear that they know full well it is a broad question and are seeking broad comment on multiple viable approaches.

> Maybe some questions are just not "too broad" but simply broad, and that one may wish to have a number of possible solutions to a problem and pick the one that fits one's case best

I think there are two kinds of "broad":

1. There are multiple ways to solve a specific problem with a specific expected outcome. "How do I sort an array?", for example, is a broad question in that it can be solved in many ways, but you can definitively say whether any given solution is correct or not.

2. The problem is not specific, and there is no clear way to determine whether any given answer is actually a "solution". For example, a single question with only the text, "How do you write a game?"

Most "broad" questions fall on some spectrum between these two, but the closer a question is to the latter category, the less likely it is to generate any sort of helpful feedback. The community does sometimes label the former as "too broad", but 95% of the time the given close reasons are correct, and when they are wrong the site provides documentation on how to get your question re-opened.

It's hard to maintain a proper balance between moderating the inundation of terrible questions and avoiding the false-negative closing of legitimate questions.

I'd love to see the SO community's answers to "How do you write a game?".

I think this is an interesting and common response to the policies. As if the "Too Broad" close policy is the only thing stopping volunteer contributors from writing a 10 page thesis "How To Write A Video Game" for every questioner that asks for it.

Isn't this alleviated somewhat by marking duplicates? If nobody ever writes any good answers on the original question, oh well! It's just annoying when nobody can write a good answer to a broad question.

But hey, it's their site, and I'm just some rando on the internet - they get to make whatever policies they want.

My emphasis was less on the replication of effort, which duplicate tagging definitely resolves, and more on the idea that broad open-ended questions raise the bar for a well-qualified high-quality answer far above and beyond that needed for a simple and concise question of limited scope.

Allowing such questions effectively lowers the percentage of questions that get good answers, thereby training users NOT to expect an answer to a posted question, and leading to decreased engagement.

On the other hand, by disallowing such questions, the questions that do get asked are more likely to be answered, and this encourages repeat visits and increased engagement.

Hey, by the way, in case you happen to come back and see this after the fact: I've found your perspectives in this thread compelling, and while I'm not completely convinced, I'll definitely be incorporating your arguments into my thinking in the future.

Just thought I'd let you know you haven't been shouting into the wind!

> You could say I'm part of the "problem"

And I do! With lots of swearing! :)

The only time I'm on SO is from a Google search result. They should at least make the danged site noindex itself for that page if it's the question has been closed. You wouldn't believe the amount of times I've been searching for a solution and found a SO link and thought I had the answer coming my way only to see the thing was closed before anyone could answer the question.

In all honesty, I don't give a rats why a question was closed. It was either closed and is now useless or open and has answers.

The solution is to make the closed question not appear in Google search results. If the same question keeps appearing the solution is to let someone answer it.

> The solution is to make the closed question not appear in Google search results. If the same question keeps appearing the solution is to let someone answer it.

This is a great idea. Have you considered discussing it on the Meta site?

The solution would definitely have to be more nuanced - sometimes "closed" questions have useful answers on them so you wouldn't want to remove those from Google. But removing "closed" questions that provide no value would probably be an improvement.

Well that's the other side of the problematic coin. The majority of my experience with SO is closed questions.

I generally consider myself a dumbass and not smart enough to figure out the rules to avoid getting topics closed, so I stick to reddit and HN (and it took years of lurking here before I started posting too!)

The thing is: many times the question is harder than the answer. If only we could phrase the question right, then the answer is actually the easy part.

This has been a big part of my experience.

I think the last 3 times I've gone to SO to write a question I spend an hour finding the right code samples, explaining what the problem is and why I need to solve it. Why I've chosen this route and after all that has been put down on the page I see what the real issue is and solve it before its even submitted.

It's almost become another tool to use, "How would I structure this problem if I needed help from the community?" It forces you to think through the problem into the route cause, almost like debugging your thoughts and removing the bloat

Yes, sir, you're definitely part of the problem. No other way to put it :)

Leaving a comment is more than enough. Question/answers that are ridiculous and "don't contribute" tend to disappear into the bowels of the internet anyway. There's no reason to force it away when it will disappear naturally.

> This is a place where technical questions are asked and answered

I think this is a great reflection of one of the largest problems that Stack Overflow has to solve, and that is user education. The definition of what is on topic for Stack Overflow is much more specific than just being "technical", but most users don't even know that.

This results in many new questions being closed. The community is constantly trying to reword these "closed" messages to be as friendly and helpful as possible, but to the newcomer it just feels like rejection.

In many ways, Stack Overflow has solved all it's "technology" problems, and now is left with a lot of psychology and communication problems. The site could definitely use a professional communications specialist.

(FWIW, for those curious, "on topic" is defined here: http://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic)

It may be true that most users don't know how narrowly the topic is defined, but it's also true that many users do know, and simply think it is defined far too narrowly. Sometimes, if you just can't seem to communicate some policy concept to your target audience, it's a problem with the policy, not the communication.

> Sometimes, if you just can't seem to communicate some policy concept to your target audience, it's a problem with the policy, not the communication.

I agree 100%. If you were to claim that the "on topic" policy for Stack Overflow is too narrow, I would respectfully disagree.

Yep, I think it's too narrow. I'm more than happy to agree to disagree! I'm curious though, since you're certain this is the correct policy, why do you think it has been so hard to communicate?

Probably because the general internet population is conditioned to a "one place fits all" approach. Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc all are places where any content of any kind is welcome.

I personally think the Stack Exchange network is effective because it creates communities that specialize rather than a single generalized community. But new arriving users have a preconceived conception that all content is welcome.

I think a lot of that could be alleviated by binding together the "Stack Exchange Network" into a more cohesive single site though. Kind of how each subreddit can have its own rules, culture, and community, but it's still very clearly part of Reddit TM.

It would be neat if there was a single entry point into the Stack Exchange Network where you could post a question, with a dropdown for selecting which "network" you think is most appropriate.

They do appear to slowly be increasing this sort of cross-syndication between network sites, but it definitely has room for improvement.

The duplicate thread thing is the most common annoyance I have with it. Feels like the people moderating are not fully understanding what they're reading/not reading the whole thing.

That's certainly possible in many cases. But it's so terribly common for duplicates to show up on SO that many folks have itchy trigger fingers. :/

> and find that the other question is completely unrelated.

Did you take advantage of this opportunity to comment or flag the answer for moderation? If a question has been inappropriately marked as duplicate, that's something that the community should be aware of, and SO has methods for doing so.

> Not only can I not find the answer from SO at this point, but if I find the answer on my own I can't even help others.

If you want to helps others; post an answer, a comment (if it is a minor correction to an existing answer).

If you can't post an answer or if the question is not the exact duplicate; ask a new question:

- describe your specific problem

- link to the duplicate (the back link is created automatically but you can also add a comment under the duplicate question explicitly if you'd like)

- describe how it is different, how exactly existing answers have failed for you (what behaviour did you expect; what did you get instead, step by step)

If you follow https://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve then your question will be better than most questions already (and even if it might be closed as a duplicate; it would attract additional attention—if the question is the exact duplicate you could also create a bounty: it is unlikely to help with difficult questions but it would also attract some attention).

Just add code highlighting if your edit falls short. It's like 20 bytes.

> I didn't want to make random changes elsewhere just to make the minimum needed to fix it, so I let it be.

Instead of just adding "I fixed a small code bug but SO has a minimum edit length, so here it is" to the end of the answer?

s/newpoint/new point()/g may not be obvious to the next person.

It really depends on what language you are asking about. Stackoverflow has subcommunities.

Some niche frameworks have great helpful communities

While the general Javascript community there hates questions that aren't formatted a very particular way