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Comment by Bamafan | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. In fact, there was a HN thread a while back about this very topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4494016

It's unbelievably annoying when this happens. I have a number of bookmarks to incredibly insightful posts, whose usefulness has been corroborated by literally hundreds of people...all closed because they are deemed "off-topic" or some such by an admin.

My theory is that SO was essentially "done" years ago. But people are still on staff and needed something to do. Thus, unrelenting navel gazing ensued.

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I think the thing missing in this is all the low-quality questions that end up getting closed due to lack of solvability. One of the objectives of SO's rules is to avoid flame wars and ambiguous answers.

Imagine the question : "What is the best templating engine to use for Django?" This question doesn't have an answer, because it's so dependent on use case (even that statement is controversial). So if it's on SO and not closed, you'll get a bunch of answers that are contradictory, and people flaming in the comments.

I think the main objective for the SO team is to have people land on the site and _have their answer right there_. By removing possibilities of these off-topic questions, you're less likely to land on answers that help your specific thing.

End result is "when I land on SO I get an answer every time" instead of "when I land on SO sometimes I get a flame war". For branding, at least, I think it works in their favor to close those questions

What actually happens is there's a bunch of decent answers, and then it gets closed, which somehow kind of leads to the best of both worlds, but leaves a bitter taste in a bunch of people's mouths -"that was really useful why close it" answers.

e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/257712/best-web-applicati...

or less seriously:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/184618/what-is-the-best-c...

One of the problems is however carefully you craft your question somebody who should never been admin will find a way to flag it. Ask about a list of common ways/libraries/etc and boom - ban! Don't need to ask which is best (which could plausibly start a flamewar), just asking a smart question is enough. (And yes, I agree that people karma-farming is annoying, but could they please use community wiki or something instead of closing good questions with interesting questions?)

Also, smart, general questions are not the only questions to be closed: I got one closed on networking because the problem was between two company networks, not inside. There is an obvious reason for a rule about company networks and that is to keep hone networking out, not because we need another subsection for WANs, no?

Most SO moderators are unpaid volunteers. Not that this stops the effect, though, much the same is visible on the English Wikipedia as well.

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