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Comment by ykevinator | Hacker News Reader

I was excited then annoyed. I hate the SO moderators. It makes no difference to them how many people seek the answer, if they deem it off topic all those people are out of luck.

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As the original asker of the question, I agree. This question was from 12 years ago, back when Stackoverflow was a lot more fun. I asked the question because while I knew a few neat little things, I knew other people also knew cool things that I didn't know, and I wanted to find out what they might be.

I don't get that exclusionist attitude either. If they think its subjective, why not just tag it accordingly, or move it into some sub-forum instead of outright killing the discussion.

Because they'd have to exclude it from search because it'd affect the results

People might like it or not, but SO is a tool that provides fast access to answers on technical questions because people want to solve their problems(and learn), it's QA.

If you want to discuss stuff then there are forums, reddits, discords or even HN.

How many times have I googled a question only to arrive at a closed SO question- too many times. It's truly annoying. Plainly people do want to discuss things on SO.

it's not meant to be a discussion forum, it's more a database of questions and answers ideally written to Wikipedia type quality. It gets a lot of hate for its quite strong moderation, however, it's ended up one of the best resources to find answers to programming questions, so they are doing something right.

Actually you can regard "closed" questions as a way to find the best questions.

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