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Comment by iconjack | Hacker News Reader

A classic mathoverflow moderator debacle. Good question, marked community wiki, with good answers including the top-ranked one from Bill Thurston, an accomplished and beloved mathematician who died just a couple of years ago. Despite the amount of work put into the answers and the number of upvotes, the question is closed. Comments on the top answer deleted, even though other comments refer to them, leaving new visitors to the question momentarily confused. Luckily [closed] doesn't mean [deleted]. I guess the best place to post these kinds of questions is Quora? There seems to be quite a few high-caliber posters there now, including many from mathoverflow. I really like mathoverflow, it's just my personal opinion that the mods are too anal (read: conservative) about enforcing the narrow scope of the site.

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I don't get it.

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.

How is that even remotely true? This is probably the most widely applicable question on the site?

That's the generic label on the post, the real reason is usually it's "off topic".

The bigger problem is that moderators close questions that re ask 5 year old questions, irrespective of how much programming has changed. They built mechanisms to deal with this but the karma limits to use them are so high that no new user can so stack exchange are now suffering from the same kind of reverse feedback mechanism Wikipedia has.

New user arrives, asks simple question/fixes a typo, mods shut question down as dupe/bot reverts edit, user comments saying old question isn't accurate anymore because language X has change in way Y and he wants an answer for how it works in language X now/user fixes it again, mods don't care having moved on to other posts/bot reverts it again, user leaves in disgust.

It's unfortunate and very difficult, but it's worse for stack exchange because they want the selective pressure against "bad" questions but the community are currently suffocating the churn required to keep the questions relevant to current.

By design, Quora I suppose does seem like a better place to post a question like this. But I really don't think Quora's community is anywhere near the caliber of that of Mathoverflow. I guess I haven't been active on MO in a few years so maybe things have changed, but when I last actively read it the site was frequented by quite a few very illustrious names and countless young prodigies and miscellaneous professors.

Sadly this seems to be the state of the higher level discussions on the various Stack Overflow sites that get shared through Y Combinator. Fundamental questions are closed off because they're out of scope of the site they're asked on.

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