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Comment by endgame | Hacker News Reader

When it was young you could find veteran wizards who answered all sorts of obscure things because it was fun. The last straw for me was seeing a perfectly valid question about video memory in DOS get drive-by closed by some mod.

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Instead of the overzealous closing, why doesn't SO create a "Stack Overflow Opinions" Stack Exchange site where they move the offending questions?

I was one of the early mods on programmers.stackexchange.com that was kinda-sorta aimed at being just that. Some participants wanted explicitly that, where offending questions would be automatically moved to P.SE. Others wanted "anything that'd be off-topic on SO" as the key criteria for P.SE. A lot of the early questions there were pulled directly from previously-closed questions on StackOverflow. Over time, though, P.SE drifted away from that model due largely to pressure from the SO/SE leadership. It was made clear that free-form discussion was not what the StackExchange platform was for- it was for answerable questions.

And I can understand that. There exist a lot of places on the web to discuss technology (e.g., the one we’re commenting on now). Forums, IRC, blogs, and social media site have been around for a long time. They all sucked as a place to get answers. SO/SE built a better solution, and part of that was a strong anti-discussion bias. It worked, and there is now a great place on the internet to get answers instead of the endless morass of vBulletin sites. I can understand them not wanting to mess with a successful formula.

Oh boy, P.SE had some seriously bad birthing pains. Speaking as a former diamond mod on Stack Overflow, I got spanked a few times by a particular former and overbearing P.SE mod for migrating what seemed like perfectly on-topic questions that were clearly not great for SO.

Eventually I gave up and to this day yet I am still unclear what is considered on/off-topic on P.SE.

Back in April there was some discussion on meta.P.SE about updating the help center ( http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6590/ ) which resulted in some changes ( http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6604/ ). There's also a post trying to explain the spirit behind all of the reasons and interpretations (and history of those interpretations) the site has of the different close reasons ( http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6483/ ). If there is still confusion about what is and isn't on topic, asking another meta question or stopping into P.SE's chat room would likely meet with a good reception.

There once was a site named "crap overflow" doing smth like that, I think (or may be smth different, not sure), pity it got closed long ago.

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