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Comment by j_baker | Hacker News Reader

And this question was closed once. That's one of my biggest annoyances of stackoverflow. Some people are too quick to close any question that doesn't meet their strict definition of a question should be.

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Yes, deletionists. When a promising online community producing a body of work seems to be running into scope creep, it seems a subculture of deletionists will emerge to knock the project back into scope despite any promise that may exist in the prospect of expanding or changing the scope instead of restricting the project. To some degree this makes the project more maintainable, but it also limits the project's chances of running in a more promising direction than originally hoped.

A key part of that problem is that you can't vote against closure. Only after a question has accrued sufficient votes to close it can you start voting to open it again; it's a ratcheting flip-flop.

But it appears Jeff is oddly against this issue:

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/915/can-we-have-the-...

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/125/how-about-a-vote...

Heavily outvoted by the community, he persists in obduracy.

I'm not sure I like the present system or proposed solution. You'd then have four ways to vote:

    * Vote question up
    * Vote question down
    * Vote to close
    * Vote not to close

Why not simply close based on downvotes? Or remove downvotes and close algorithmically based on "flags", like we have on HN.

The ratcheting flip-flop is the best-case scenario for when a question is popular enough for some people to stick around and keep it open. Most of the time, closure is a death warrant for a question. I've seen some real "diamonds in the rough" closed because of this.

Interesting. I kept seeing some topics opened, closed, only to be reopened again. I thought the admins couldn't make up their minds.

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