My point was that I'd appreciate, at the very least, a StackExchange site for this type of question.
As communities grow they learn and change the scope and that's what has happened here.
The current list questions that are open are under close scrutiny by a few community members. For example http://stackoverflow.com/questions/194812/list-of-freely-ava... is cleaned regularly for duplicates, arranged by language and alphabetically sorted.
A site like the one you would wish for would be highly popular but no user would ever want to clean it up, instead they will add another duplicate answer that may have been mentioned 1-2 years earlier.
The 'culture' on the other hands, on Hacker News and Reddit are more suited.
Taking culture into account, I think good homes for information are.
Transient, subjective: forum Transient, objective: heavily moderated forum. Not perfect fit though. Permanent, subjective: ??? There are some sites for this, but, I think they work pretty suboptimally. How do you keep the idiots out? Permanent, objective: A 'pedia.
It's like someone read Clay Shirky as Atkin's diet.
"The single right answer is what SO was designed to help us find" is precisely the community norm that I find less desirable. It wasn't there at the start, it is there now. That community norm was a product decision by Jeff (and possibly Joel). It has since been taken to extremes due to the self re-enforcing feedback loop of the community. It's treated as a sort of born-again revealed wisdom by the group.
One could claim this limitation is the required tradeoff to attract the group that manages the site. That might be true ... but I don't blame the software.
Did the software close Alan Kay's question as not constructive or was it a pair of moderators?
What does non-constructive say:
"This question is not a good fit to our Q&A format. We expect answers to generally involve facts, references, or specific expertise; this question will likely solicit opinion, debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. " Except answers to Kay's question do involve facts, reference, and specific expertise, as well as opinion, and debate. Is the question really non-constructive ... or is was it actually closed as a side effect of the community norm?
The community norm is an over the top version of Godwin's law that opinion is a slippery slope to group death. It makes for a more focused product. The creators read this: http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html Then cut the baby in half and kept the profitable half.
I'm claiming part of what they threw away makes SO less pleasant for me to use as a contributor. I actually don't like that I contributed to something that treats debate and opinion as anathema.