Prompted a fascinating answer. 'closed as too broad' -- modern Stack overflow in a nutshell.
Maybe there could/should be a 'broad' SE site alongside every 'normal' one? The 'too broad' questions include most of the interesting ones to read. The ones that are 'intellectually interesting'.[0] It's a shame. I love how you can ask anything on HN without being shut down like that. It's so unfriendly, hurtful even. (At worst on here, no-one answers - no harm done.) Why they can't just let 'too broad' questions go for a day or two to see what responses come in, and delete the page if it sux, I don't know. The mods get points for closing things, I guess. Often they don't understand the question, it seems.
[0] e.g. https://mathoverflow.net/questions/43690/whats-a-mathematici...
Well, bizarrely the close notice on that says "This question is unlikely to help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet." Which seems absurd. (Although sure, the question doesn't help people, the answers do though.)
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/tagg...
But the too-broad questions aren't usually very interesting. Most of them are just pure crap. If you have enough SO karma, try https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/?filter-closereason=t... — what I see just now is someone who wants help with his java/spring thing and isn't very detailed about it, someone who's "been trying to learn how delegation" works, someone who "would like to know how can i mock diffrent user request behavior pattern" and those aren't unusual. The intellectually interesting questions are unusual in the "too broad" morass.
If people are to moderate SO, the rules have to be simple and quick to apply. Of course people don't have to do that, but I fear that without moderation, the interesting questions would get no answers because they would be completely flooded by questions like those three. So the open-ended, intellectially interesting questions lose either way.
So the answer is, There Is No Alternative? There's no possible way things could be different in that respect?
This summer I waited on a lot of six- and even twelve-minute batch jobs, and I spent some of those on the SO moderation queue (I'm one of the 3000-karma users, not an elected moderator). It didn't take much more than six minutes to learn that picking the interesting questions out of the flood of manure is a terrible chore.
It would be nice if the intellectually interesting questions could be left alive. But I don't think it's humanly achievable. People will post their job interview quizzes and first-year CS exercises and say, oh, mentally stimulating and please do leave open.
I don't think you could've done a better job than linking that moderation queue of "toobroad" to make your point. It was a never-ending channel of straight shit. Ranging from "here's a copy and paste of all my unformatted code that won't work, whatever that means" to "how do i use python on windows".
Everything looks easy to someone that has no stake in the solution. We get so used to being end-users that we take everything for granted, as if our experience is the natural ordering of the universe, rather than the result of all the work that goes on behind the scenes.
Read enough posts from HNers condemning Stack Overflow and you'd think they believe Reddit/HN's "new" queue is the ultimate browsing experience.
FWIW, it's not moderators closing a question (I rarely see that). You "only" need 3000 points to vote to close a question. Users with a gold badge on a tag the question has can single-handendly close a question.
Users get no incentive for closing questions.
Also, those 3000 points also give you the possibility to vote for reopening a question. And there's a queue where users can see questions that are being voted on for reopening.
I agree I'd like such a site. I don't think any Stack Exchanged based site will ever be such a site. I think TPTB believe it's nearly impossible to run such a site and not have it turn into crap because of the large number of people asking bad questions of the "How do I make a website like facebook" or "How do I make a game like GTA5"
I have over 10k points there, so this is said (mostly) in jest. There is a lot of crap being pumped into SO all the time. This kind of defensive closing of an interesting but off-topicy question is the only real tool people have over there. If they had let this question go unclosed, it could encourage other less-interesting open-ended questions and before you know it we'd be seeing "best kind of Pizza topping for programmers?" questions.
Also interesting how this disconnect is still going on after so many years, mostly unaddressed - despite the many essays Jeff Atwood writes about true purpose of SO, people still want to use it differently.
And those questions can in most cases be answered by the docs anyway. The times I've used SO is when the problem can't be answered by the docs, my own experience or that of the team, but then I've received either no answer or a series of non-answers (that should have been comments instead, but a lot of people can't comment).
I also see quite a bit of overt reputation farming there. Like vague questions that receive an improbably precise answer that immediately gets selected. Like "how do u process payments?" (the orthography is usually bad) immediately followed by very specific instructions from a very specific payment processor not mentioned in the question, probably taken straight from its documentation. And I rarely see "closed as too broad" on those, probably because of the quick turn-around.
so never then?
But I said the same thing about creating a bare metal example one day hehe
It's probably not wrong of the stackoverflow users to have closed the question according to established rules, I just don't think this is necessarily the right way to run the site.