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Comment by tikhonj | Hacker News Reader

For some reason, people really like complaining about questions like this being closed.

I think this misses the mark for two reasons. One is simply that these sort of questions aren't really the point of SO, but I guess people disagree.

A bigger one is that closing is no big deal. People can still read the question and vote on answers! The only thing you can't do is add new answers. And given that there's already a perfectly good answer along with a bunch of other posts, more answers would just be adding to the noise.

Seems like a win-win to me, but others somehow construe this as the downfall of StackOverflow.

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The question doesn't appear to be closed, just protected.

Why is a Question asking about syntax of whitespace in bash not suitable for stack overflow?

There's a worse problem on English stack exchange where people will say that your question has been answered even though none of the words you used are in any of their suggestions. This not only hurts searchability of questions and answers, but fails to recognise that many people using the site have English as a second language.

Leaving it open is no big deal either. Or would that be the downfall of SO?

With no or lax moderation, there's always the danger of becoming Reddit.

People come to StackOverflow because it has a good signal-to-noise ratio. Maintaining this ratio, and the reputation of the site as a resource rather than a discussion board is important.

I personally jump to StackOverflow results on Google pages because they almost always solve my problem exactly. If the results start being polluted by a bunch of less relevant discussions--which, being popular, are likely to rank well--I would probably stop using SO results as much.

On top of this, just leaving a question like this open hurts the question itself as well. There is no reason to want 100 different answers all pointing out the missing space in different words! That way lies madness and Quora--where many answers to popular "survey" questions only get read because of the follow feature and a Facebook-esque machine-learning-based feed.

This question, in fact seems, to have been flagged as getting posted on Reddit (or maybe getting significant traffic from them?). I'm seeing this above the answers:

"Welcome, Redditors! We're looking for answers that provide serious, practical solutions to the problem stated. If you'd prefer to post a joke or launch a tangential discussion, please do so on the corresponding Reddit thread."

The person asking the question is asking why the whitespace is syntactically relevant in bash.

Why is that not a suitable question?

There are valid reasons that the question was closed. Those reasons are known and expected to be enforced.

I'm not really one of those who criticizes SO that much. They can do what they want on their own website.

I'm just perplexed by the trend over all, especially with Wikipedia, for people to act like the internet is a library and shelf space is running out. Why would a site owner limit their user's contributions in any way except to conform to the law, and prevent trolling, spam, etc? Who knows how much value the next answer might have provided readers if they hadn't closed it down?

It's not that anyone believes "shelf space is running out." It's signal to noise -- or, to be less judgmental, "findability." Sure, SO or Wikipedia have the storage capacity for people to post anything they wanted anywhere on the site, but that would make much more work for users to find the content they need -- they'd have to trawl through a much bigger mass of semi-relevant or irrelevant stuff.

This is not to say SO or Wikipedia has the balance right; but it's a sensible reason to "limit their users' contributions."

While space is not running out and SO could keep everything this is SO's advantage. They don't. they reject the chaff because it is clutter. you go to SO links because you know your odds are good that if a question is answered there one scroll wheel away is the real answer. Not 10 pages of forum away. Letting everything stay is like adding pages to forum posts. all noise.

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