A discussion about closed (and potentially useful) posts on Stack Overflow

Have perceptions or rules around closing questions for shifted over time? Looking back on your experience with Stack Overflow, do you feel the boundaries of what’s allowed have changed, perhaps gotten stricter or more lenient? What might have driven those shifts (e.g. community needs, site goals, moderation tools)? Share your thoughts or an example that stands out.

Beating the dead horse yet again: yes there used to be a stricter requirement that the poster had a minimum of knowledge about the technology they are asking about. Originally SO was a site for enthusiast or professional programmers. A programmer being a person who knows at least the basics of at least one programming language.

There has been a shift to allow unregistered users at day 1 of their programming studies to post their "hello world" questions, in order to maximize site traffic. If you tell them "the answer is actually mentioned on page 1 of your programming book" you are being rude and should be slapped in the face with a welcome wagon. Whereas it is apparently not rude to repeatedly ask unpaid volunteers inane questions that anyone, programmer or not, can answer with a minimum of research. The definition of rude has definitely shifted from "impolite, disrespectful, judgmental" etc to "person who tries to steal our site traffic".

Overall I feel that the community has always been pushing for quality and the company has always been pushing for quantity. One blatant (dead horse) example is when we tried to Delete the list of random books? This was repeatedly closed and deleted by moderators and even SO staff. And then from somewhere within the company there suddenly came a scream: "Noooo they are trying to delete the click bait post with a million views!" And there you go - post undeleted and locked. It is still sitting there, serving all our philosophical and life advise needs... All that is missing is a post about which cute cat pictures that are most important to programmers and maybe also one about programmer porn, to maximize the amount of clicks.

This quantity over quality policy has finally backfired severely due to chat bots being to answer all them "hello world" questions - this is actually something AI is good at. And so panic and layoffs within the company, as the day 1 programmer students consisting of some 80% of the site traffic left. Quantity turned out to be a sand castle.

But perhaps (a completely overhauled) Discussions + chat could lure those kind of users back. Having one single site to cover every type of programming concern (within reason) has its appeal. Lessons learned from Q&A is that quantity over quality isn't a sustainable business model in the long run and so Discussions and chat need to be held to relatively high quality standards too. Discussions is nowhere near quality, it is not even near a MVP. "It is popular so it must be good" No! Haven't you learnt anything? Cute cat pictures are also popular. For now, anyway, maybe it's dog pictures tomorrow.

As mentioned many times before, the Q&A format here on meta is entirely unsuitable for discussions. 50 guys having monologues in parallel where detailed responses in comments are discouraged is not very productive. So why not have it as a goal to migrate the whole discussion part of meta to Discussions? In that case, when such a migration is at all possible, then we can probably say that Discussions have reached MVP.

The first thing I want to highlight - because I'm not sure from the OP text that it's been properly understood - is that being "on topic" is not sufficient for a question to pass muster.

Likewise, if you’re a curator, voting-to-close or flagging content, you’ve certainly come across people posting “off-topic” questions, and maybe even wrestled with gray-area questions that seem valuable yet don’t quite belong.

No, not really. Figuring out the appropriate breadth of scope for a question (especially for common, introductory-level topics) is far more stressful. It's also sometimes difficult to figure out whether the OP just wrote some non-working code, made a simple error in logical reasoning, and failed to attempt proper debugging; or whether there's an actual underlying conceptual issue that prevented that debugging effort.

Is the “off-topic” content list posted above complete? Does it match what you flag or see closed as off-topic? What examples are missing? Are any not what you think of as “off-topic”?

It's simply wrong. The problem with exploratory questions generally is that they need more focus, not anything to do with topicality.

Specifically regarding comparison questions: these could be fine if the OP provides a single, objective metric for comparison — but then one wonders why OP doesn't just try it and see which option performs better on that metric. But when people ask about alternatives like this, I think what they're usually really trying to figure out is a process for choosing between the alternatives - a heuristic for making the decision based on personal needs, without baking the assumption of those needs into the question. And, with appropriate care, I think this sort of question can already perfectly well fit within policy. The problems occur because people want someone else to decide for them what factors are most important, or how fast / memory-efficient etc. will be sufficient in a given context, etc.

Broadly, and notwithstanding flaggable content like spam, we can classify the reasons we close questions in three categories:

1. There isn't a new question that actually benefits from being asked:

   • Duplicates
   • Not reproducible or caused by a typo

2. There's a problem with how the question is asked, or with how much is asked:

   • Needs details or clarity
   • Needs more focus
   • Needs debugging details
   • Not written in English

3. There's a problem with what is being asked (off topic):

   • Opinion-based
   • Not about programming
   • Seeking recommendations
   • Belongs on another network site

We already have these definitions and we don't need to rehash that.

What characteristics make it incompatible with the site’s goals?

I think this follows pretty naturally from what the goals are. We care about topicality because a) putting things in the right place makes them easier to find; b) the "fixing broken windows" effect.

Which examples spark debate, or are tricky to call off-topic or on-topic?

Historically, there's been quite a bit of argument over where the line is between "shell scripting" (i.e. actually writing a program using Bash, Powershell etc.) and just operating the computer at a terminal.

do you feel the boundaries of what’s considered on or off-topic have changed, perhaps gotten stricter or more lenient?

No; what changes is the amount of resources available for enforcement vs. the volume of new questions, and the importance placed on that enforcement. The actual rules being enforced have changed quite little over the last 10 years or so. But now, instead of just grumbling about the constant torrent of low-quality questions, there's a greater understanding of what we're trying to accomplish (have always been trying to accomplish!), what the policy is, and how the policy aims towards the goals.

There is a feature for "Exploratory or open-ended" posts, but Stack Overflow ignored it very shortly after implementing it, left it in a terrible feature lacking state, and then very recently fooled hundreds of users into posting comments in there, and continue to do so... Why not focus on fixing that issue if you are concerned about off-topic content on the site? That area of the site could have been an excellent area, but now it's an utter mess...

That portion of the site reminds me of the current state of Birmingham. Perhaps you could clean it up and get some much needed functionality and guidance in there?

The examples you have chosen do not represent adequately what we consider off-topic questions. Questions are usually considered off-topic when they are not about programming, e.g. what should I feed my cat or why isn't my WiFi connecting.

Homework questions are generally on-topic but poorly received and may be closed for lack of clarity or focus.

API questions and theoretical questions are fine if they are to do with programming.

There are certain grey areas such as CLI/shell questions, Docker, Kubernates, Apache. This isn't the worst place to ask such a question, but technically most of them have nothing to do with programming.

There are also questions which seem like they should be on-topic but aren't, e.g. Azure pricing or Google store support. We just can't provide a definite answer to them. These are truly unfit.

Then there are questions that are either typos or are about a code error without the steps/details necessary to reproduce the error. They are off-topic because answering them is unlikely to help anyone else.

Many historical locks have been applied to questions about Linux commands. While the topic is not programming related, it is used so often by programmers that keeping them here is useful. We'd rather that they are asked on more appropriate sites.

I want to focus on an area I feel has created a grey area for some; Collectives.

Collectives designed to group certain tags, so that experts in that technology, and users using it, can find a range of content in it. It has is own leader boards, articles, and can have experts and recommended answers defined. I don't think any of these are bad ideas, and if managed correctly, do add a small benefit.

What is confusing is the focus of some of those Collectives; AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure immediately spring to mind here. When I think of these technologies I don't think Programming and Software Development, and I suspect many others don't either. All 3 are solutions for hosting something in the cloud, but what that is is many things, and writing code in a tiny portion of that.

The creation of these collectives, and the wealth of fundamentally off-topic tags that they contain, however, pushing unknowing users into a sense of confidence that a question about "How do I create a VM in Azure?" Is on topic; there's an azure tag, and a azure-virtual-machine tag, and there's an entire portion of the site about Azure, it must be on-topic, right? Wrong.

In truth, when using the site for the tags I participate in, if I see a question that is part of one of those collectives it is, in fact, not on-topic but about Administration, and very likely should be asked on Super User or Server Fault, and sometimes DBA. That the collective exists, and that such questions get answers, however, turns things grey. When the topic about administration falls inside the collective these questions are less likely to be closed and more likely to be answered, but when it doesn't fall in the collective, then it's likely to be closed (or hopefully migrated if it's a good question).

This is confusing; we shouldn't be treating on-topicness differently because, previously, a company paid for their tags to be promoted in a collective. The other collectives, in my opinion, don't suffer this problem as they weren't sponsored, so their topics are far more focused and community driven. The sponsors ones were initially driven my a company, not the community, who had no idea how Stack Overflow worked.

I don't have a problem with the AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure existing, but I do think that they are flawed right now and detrimental to the focus of topics Stack Overflow('s community) want. That they exist should not change what is on-topic within them, but not outside of them; that is confusing for members new and old. Though it would likely be (a lot) of work (from the community), I feel that a recretion of them, from the ground up, would be beneficial for them. That can, from Stack Overflow's side, has a discussion for what should be included. If we have tags (and there are lot of them in those collectives), that could result in easily off-topic questions (or just fundamentally are), perhaps we could help direct users to an appropriate site in the community before they post something off-topic for Stack Overflow.

As Dalija Prasnikar reminded me, there is also the (probably) much bigger problem of the CI/CD collective. The biggest problem with this collective is that we actually have an entire community for these questions: DevOps:"[A site] for software engineers working on automated testing, continuous delivery, service integration and monitoring, and building SDLC infrastructure" Many questions asked in the CI/CD community aren't actually good questions for Stack Overflow, as they aren't actually about programming or software development, but about, well the things listed in DevOps's description; Monitoring your deployed application, for example, isn't a programming issue. Neither is automated testing, etc. Creating this collective, again, suggests that these topics are allowed on Stack Overflow, however, they aren't, and drives content away from a site that is specifically designed for such questions.

Like mentioned before, each site has their own experts. Yes, there can be (and is), is overlap in both what is on-topic on different sites, and who their experts are, but when you have a site in the community that deals explicitly with the content that a Stack Overflow Collective is aimed at, and that Collective has off-topic areas on Stack Overflow, the Collective makes no sense. This would be a great time to instead treat these posts as a "Did you know about DevOps? A place to ask about ." Help users find out about other communities; don't drive them to post on Stack Overflow, only to have their off-topic question closed, and they UX poor.

Have perceptions or rules around closing questions for shifted over time? Looking back on your experience with Stack Overflow, do you feel the boundaries of what’s allowed have changed, perhaps gotten stricter or more lenient?

Yes, they've absolutely changed. I wouldn't say they've shifted, though. Rather, they've become harder to pin down.

Fifteen or sixteen years ago, I understood what was and wasn't on-topic. Over time, there were some adjustments (and even flip-flops on whether or not find-my-bug questions belong here). But the changes were usually communicated. Overall application of the rules seemed rather consistent. Today, however, I have almost no clue as to what somebody's going to consider on-topic or off.

As the volume grew, so did the pressure to close bad questions grew. In response, SO reduced the number of votes needed to close a question. I believe that contributed greatly to the inconsistency.

The list of reasons available when voting to close a question has been reduced and become less specific over the years. There are times I vote to close a question, knowing exactly which radio button I would have used in the past, and am presented with a non-orthogonal list of vague, generalities to choose from.

We also don't seem to care about communicating an accurate close reason. Suppose a question gets three close votes: one says it's off-topic, one says it's a duplicate, and a third says it lacks focus. It's possible all of those are true. (But if it's off-topic and lacks focus the arguably the duplicate question should have been closed as well.) Let's suppose only one of those close reasons is correct. If it's not actually a duplicate, but the box at the top of the question says it is, that doesn't help the person get their question answered, it doesn't help them understand how they could have written a better question, and it doesn't help anyone else who encounters it reinforce or correct their understanding of what's in scope and what isn't.

Back when I tried to do my part going through the review queues, I discovered that there was no incentive to correct the close reasons. If a bad question was closed, the reviewer was suppose to agree with the decision, even if the justification was factually incorrect. (This was one of two reasons why I gave up on the review queues).

It's immensely frustrating to find a great question, spend 20 minutes composing a solid answer, only to have the answer rejected because the question was closed as off-topic by an overworked moderator or hi-rep contributor during that 20 minutes.

On the other hand, you can commonly find a minutes-old question that's absolutely 100% unambiguously off-topic, only to find that it has already garnered three to five mediocre answers (including one that's been accepted) because rep-hunters would rather spend 30 seconds writing a half-assed answer than vote to close it. Fifteen years ago, that happened far less.

I haven't seen any attempts to help re-align the collective understanding of what's on- and off-topic. All of the changes I've seen over the years seem to blur the reasons and reduce the feedback.

Most of my Stack Overflow focus has been in the container space, especially docker and kubernetes. There's a range of questions here. These range from clearly on-topic questions:

I'm developing a Kubernetes operator in Go using the Kubernetes SDK, and ...

I'm building an application in Visual Studio Code, and want to use its devcontainers feature so my colleagues and I use consistent tools...

To clearly off-topic ones:

I'm deploying a Kubernetes cluster on bare-metal machines, and...

I'm trying to configure the Docker macvlan driver to give my containers individual network-accessible IP addresses, and...

In between these, there is still a big container-oriented gray area. Let's take the Kubernetes API: a Go program using the Kubernetes API is on-topic; questions about implementing configuration-driven logic in a Helm chart with loops and conditionals are on-topic; so is the core API itself on-topic, or does it become "not programming" because you're writing YAML? Or are Docker Compose questions on-topic if you're packaging your own application, but off-topic if you're running somebody else's?

I've felt like the community has gotten stricter here in maybe the past two years. Of the 5 highest-scored docker questions, two are closed as off-topic. Older questions about "how do I install Docker" tend to have gotten through; newer questions about "how do I install Docker Desktop" without a clear programming focus tend to be closed. Questions around basic Docker container setup could be programming-related or not (and I've definitely answered enough of them) but it seems like they garner close votes much sooner than they used to.

To pick a specific example, From inside of a Docker container, how do I connect to the localhost of the machine? is the canonical question for connecting from a container program to a non-container database on the same machine. It has a score over 3,500, and at the same time it was closed as "off topic" in April of 2022. I use it as a dupehammer target fairly regularly. Of the various personae who could use Docker, a developer seems fairly likely to have this specific setup (an ordinary user would run an all-in-one Compose file; a system administrator would frequently target an external database). But it's not "a programming tool" or "a programming problem" by the current standards.

One thing I think would be beneficial here would be clearer direction on what should happen to these container-oriented questions. "Installing Kubernetes" seems like it belongs on Server Fault, many CI-oriented questions make sense on DevOps.SE, maybe "running Jupyter Lab" is right on Super User. There's not a lot of guideposts in Stack Overflow suggesting that somewhere else might be better to ask. The volunteer-moderator tools have limited options for migrating questions, and text that discourages suggesting migration to an unfamiliar site.

There's occasional mentions of tag-tips. It'd also help some to warn that, for example, kubeadm questions (about installing Kubernetes clusters) are almost always off-topic.

Have perceptions or rules around closing questions for shifted over time? Looking back on your experience with Stack Overflow, do you feel the boundaries of what’s allowed have changed, perhaps gotten stricter or more lenient? What might have driven those shifts (e.g. community needs, site goals, moderation tools)? Share your thoughts or an example that stands out.

Lundin has already written an excellent answer to this:

Beating the dead horse yet again: yes there used to be a stricter requirement that the poster had a minimum of knowledge about the technology they are asking about. Originally SO was a site for enthusiast or professional programmers. A programmer being a person who knows at least the basics of at least one programming language.

but I feel the need to chime in to explain exactly why the strict requirement existed (and should have been allowed to continue to exist)/why a minimum of knowledge is necessary, which is understanding.

In short, the problem is that if you don't understand the problem space sufficiently, you can neither ask a question sufficient to make others understand that problem, nor can you adequately evaluate whether answer(s) provided to you actually solve said problem.

The only way, then, to establish that mutual understanding is (a) for a potential answerer to correspond with the asker to tease out exactly what is being asked (b) correspond with the asker to help them understand the solution. But this approach is completely orthogonal to Stack Overflow's Q&A model.

As such, the requirement that some degree of subject matter understanding is necessary was never about gatekeeping or any other similar nonsense; that requirement existed to ensure that this QA site could operate as a QA site, and should never have been removed.

It would help if we used less derogatory terms than "subjective" and "opinion-based". I've very often seen deep probing questions closed with these labels, which is a great shame as they can often yield important insights. A question, for example, about the merits of different ways of organizing Java unit tests, is likely to attract a range of answers based on different people's project experience, and dismissing these answers as subjective or opinion-based seems entirely wrong to me.

We actually encourage people to ask shallow questions rather than deep questions. We reward people for asking "why is my bubble-sort code running slowly" as opposed to "how should I go about choosing the best sorting algorithm for this particular problem". That can't be right. We should do more to encourage thoughtfulness and awareness of the full range of the engineering decision-making process.

The fact that a question doesn't have a simple objective tick-the-box right-or-wrong answer doesn't make it "a matter of opinion" as if all opinions are equally valid. There is good engineering and bad engineering, there are designs that are a good fit to the requirements and designs that are a bad fit. It's not all about debugging the code. Just because design and process questions aren't black-and-white doesn't mean we shouldn't be talking about them.

(And while I'm about it, reading other answers here and the reaction to them, questions like this deserve more subtle feedback than anonymous upvotes and downvotes. If people disagree, we need to know why.)

Not really a 'SO' specific thing but a lot of the seemly strict rules were created cause those things weren't working. I'm from a very different background, so if anything seems off or dosen't fit the SO paradigm - feel feel to correct me

Subjective or opinion-based – Asking for personal preferences, experiences, or perspectives rather than strictly objective information.

SO's model isn't against subjective questions as a whole - just that a good subjective question is hard. And ideally, We'd like reasonably scoped answerable questions. There's a lot of good explainations there but I think the 'core' take away here is

If we can avoid conversations that are -- and this is the really tricky part -- too subjective, we can maintain the ideals of great Q&A in the face of completely subjective topics. We can avoid falling into the predictable destructive patterns of random discussion, debate, and opinion that turn a site from a learning experience into a glorified cheap-thrills gossip rag.

I'll leave it as a exercise to the reader to consider how this relates to meta. For SO however, the ideal workflow is a reasonably scoped question, found by an expert (or someone who's a good enough in the field at least) and answered to their satisfaction and useful to others with a similar enough problem. The model doesn't lend itself to a choose your own adventure answer type of question where everyone has a preferred answer

These might be questions that are closely related to an existing canonical question but are not different enough to stand alone as new, independent questions (e.g. a minor variation on a well-covered topic).

To me - the important part is showing you did your work - linking the existing canonical question,explaining you tried the answers there and showing where its different. This is helpful in 2 ways - it puts the person who asks the question in the position of having tried, and documented ways the canonical question/answer pair failed, and saves an answerer the work

Programming-related – Topics that don’t meet the criteria for a programming question.

Its before my time and SO only, but its worth looking back and considering the "Programming on a boat" question - apparently the last remnants of it is here - and there's MSE (ex-mso?) question about it here

The MCVE requirement exists cause its needed to answer a question - It is what you need to help solve others problems for example

These might be questions on topics related to programming (e.g. asking about a specific API problem) but not directly about solving a specific programming problem.

Another person's not going to be able to see what you're working with, or even the API in question. The goal should be to give someone without the access you the best tools you can to answer your question. It is also good practice for self documentation

These might be questions that explore general concepts or theoretical knowledge related to the field but do not address a specific, actionable problem (e.g. asking about a programming paradigm without applying it to a real-world scenario).

I'm not a dev, but one of the 'old' revisions of the help section comes to mind - a question that needs a entire book to explain's too broad. You can (on the right site) ask a question explaining a specific concept. I don't know software development or coding well enough to know if this applies to SO, so I'd defer to the locals to what sort of questions would or wouldn't work in this domain.

These might also be questions that seek to compare two or more items (e.g. looking for pros and cons of X and Y).

To me, these sound acceptable and on-topic. But I also know that not everybody believes that.

Comparing things is done extremely often by programmers. For example: "Do I use an array or a list?" there is no generic answer to this, as it depends on circumstances. But "What are the pros and cons of arrays and lists?" is as close as you can get to one. Describing two items in a comparable manner allows one to choose what they want based on their situation.

However, I know people close vote these kinds of questions. This may be a grey area.

This post reminded me of my perception that several community and staff members are pursuing a solution that meets the diverse needs of all programmers.

While this is an interesting topic to discuss, from a pragmatic standpoint, the company cannot effectively lead this initiative. The needs and perceptions of what is useful, along with the business model that should support it, cannot be readily agreed upon. I think that over the more than 15 years of Stack Overflow's life, enough cases support this.

Here are some of the divides I see:

• Desperate help seekers Vs people with moderation privileges
• Beginners Vs advanced programmers
• Programmers with a computer science background Vs those with only programming experience
• Local developers Vs remote developers
• Full developers Vs scripters/low-code users/developers
• Stockholders Vs stakeholders

Building on the idea of the UX team taking steps back, what if they get back to what inspired having the Area 51 site for handling new site proposals?

Recap: In 2010, Area51 was launched as part of Stack Exchange 2.0. Its purpose was to handle new site proposals. The site proposals have several stages,

1. Design
2. Commit
3. Beta
   1. Private Beta
   2. Public Beta
4. Launch

Over the years, Area51's workings evolved to require proposal creators to create a new site proposal only if there is already a community eager to support such a proposal.

Here is my proposal for a new content type: Stack Overflow proposals for changes. As with new site proposals, proposals for changes should ensure that a large enough group is eager to participate in change design and beta testing. This might be similar to feature-request, but they use the Q/A model. I'm talking about a content type with a specific model to support something similar to the Area51 leading site but with a well-designed "companion" to handle the Meta discussions.

Don't forget the tag wikis.

To recap, tags are used to group questions. The community creates them and might have a short description and extended content called the tag wiki. The purpose of tag wikis is to explain how the tag is used, but some have gone far beyond that, e.g., python

The rules for tag wikis are that they should include guidelines about how to use the tag, but some include suggestions about how to ask a question in a particular matter, e.g., a specific programming language. Some include lists of frequently asked and canonical questions.

While reading the tag wikis is not compulsory, it's fair to say that several closed questions would not have been closed if the OP had read the tag wiki.

Also, some helpful content has a better home in tag wikis than posted as questions and answers. Other helpful content has a better home in alternative content types, like chat transcripts, discussions, articles and bulletins, but that is something to explore in other answers.

Useful stuff about tags in SO

FAQS

• When is it appropriate to create a tag, and how does it work?
• How do I write a good tag wiki? Is it okay to use/copy content published elsewhere?

Example Meta Questions about Tag Tikis

• Improve Tag Wiki visibility
• Should tag wikis get more exposure?
• Could we have a [google-apps-script-faq] tag similar to [c++-faq] and [r-faq]? (Disclosure: I created this question.)

The Stack Overflow Q/A model is not only about what is on-topic and is kept open but also about what has been referred to a couple of years ago as the "reputation system". Ref. The Stack Exchange reputation system: What's working? What's not?

To recap, new users can post questions and answers on the leading site, but they should get privileges based on their "reputation" score to participate in the chat system, upvote, comment, etc. Appointed and elected moderators have additional privileges, and Community Managers and Staff have extra privileges.

Users with a reputation score of 1, usually referred to as new users, can post questions on Meta if they first post a question on the leading site and include a link to that question.

Part of the tension about what questions should be closed / allowed is due to the reputation / privileges system. This should not be forgotten in discussions like this.

From EmmaBee's comment

Do you see the tension is due to new users simply having privileges and you think they should not? Or is the tension about users with the privileges not having clarity on how to wield their newly earned powers, because the rules and norms are not made explicit to newbies? Something else?

New users' privileges are minimal, so the tension related to their privileges is that they can do very few things.

There is also a tension about users with privileges not using them correctly, either because they are learning or for any other reason.

In short, there are many sources of tensions... It would be great if the system were better at handling them.

What’s in the grey area? Which examples spark debate, or are tricky to call on-topic or should-be-closed? What makes them tough to categorize? Share an example you’ve seen and what made it complicated to judge.

I think the "opinion-based" closures, and closures for "already been answered" are often grey areas. I've seen a couple "opinion-based" questions closed which were at least partly answerable objectively. Probably out of fear of a sparked debate? I find debate is usually very informative myself...if that helps get to a solution, why not allow some?

I've also seen a few closed "already been answered here" questions with a link to an answer that was often outdated, and/or incorrect and/or did not actually answer the question asked.

In general I feel that mods are too quick to close questions for those two reasons in particular.

My feeling is that there are good reasons why we close these questions and these posts are potentially much less useful than one thinks. But instead of closing we could opt to move them somewhere else if only the site would have these "somewhere else" areas. Like chat or discussions, articles. However even there, curation tooling will be needed. I heard that for example discussions is lacking that and nobody should go there for example.

My main categories would be if they are closely related to knowledge generation or rather loosely.

Truly adding content-wise:

• Some things we close as requires more focus or opinion-based. There could be a place for larger scale content (like tutorials as articles for example) and there could be a place for opinions (like pros/cons or best practices in say discussions).

Not adding anything to the knowledge-library:

• Someone working through a vague-problem (discussions, staging ground?)

• Just wanting to chat a bit about programming (go to chat)

And then there are things you mentioned as not exactly fitting like programming-related. I didn't understand this part. What is wrong about asking about a specific API problem or asking about a programming paradigm without applying it to a real-world scenario? Isn't this also part of programming and ontopic here (or elsewhere on computer science or software engineering SE? Maybe I'm just missing the right examples there and it's covered by requires more focus or opinion-based above?

To answer the questions:

Yes, you are spot on with most of the examples. The rejection criteria are kind of optimal by now. Things that are currently rejected would really not be a good fit for Q&A. They might though be a good fit for larger content (articles) or more conversational content (discussions). You just need to properly support these content types, which was never done. There isn't really a grey area (except maybe for opinion-based, the decision about that might be opinion-based), it's all very clear. How much value these other things might have, I don't know. I guess people visit for example Reddit because they see some value in it. My perception about closing is that the boundaries have gotten stricter, and that is a very good thing because it lifts quality. But I really wish we could handle the situation more gracefully and instead of closing simply move some content to different areas and let it remain open.

And finally: Q&A has its advantages and disadvantages. It's not the perfect solution for everything. That's why there exist many different places (Wikipedia, Reddit, Google, ChatGPT, Kaggle, ...) on the Internet. Currently there is a bit of a crisis regarding the number of new Q&A here, but it's not clear if we are better at something else than all the existing places for that.

And finally, finally: sometimes I feel there is too much bureaucracy going on on SE. I would prefer if the was less of it and the workings of the system were kept as simple as possible without compromising quality standards too much, but also on the side of simplicity. If possible, don't make things more complicated. Make them better and simpler.

I want to preface this by saying that I don't intend to share an opinion here about whether SO should support more question types, but a negative experience I had. You're looking for experiences and specific examples, and I have one.

I asked a question a long time ago that basically came down to "What debugging tips do you have for me to help diagnose this issue?", which is an open-ended question. I thought it might be allowed because it was impossible to make a MVCE for this issue because I had no idea what piece of code was causing the issue. I was looking for leads in a situation where an exact solution provided by a stranger was impossible. It ended up that SO was no help at all, and I had to figure it out myself, because other users refused this question as being out of scope for SO. My co-workers are never so strict about what types of help they offer, so why does SO need to be? Was I supposed to post the entire million lines of source code of my project? No one would read that. So do I ask it somewhere else? There's nowhere else I know where I can ask such a question. So am I to just not ask the question? Apparently so. Getting help felt disallowed, which was very frustrating at the time.

IF open-ended questions are to be allowed on SO, though, they ought to be in a clearly-distinct category, so that responders can know what type of questions they're getting into before they start reading, IMO.

There are legitimate technical questions regarding things like program design and coding style. Contrary to popular belief, for established technologies this is not subjective at all. Good program design is pretty universal across all languages and there are many established best practices with a overwhelming consensus behind them.

For example - "code should be divided in small autonomous units that only concern themselves with their designated task and not with unrelated parts". This is true in any programming language and has been that way since the 1960s - it is not subjective.

And yet specific and narrow design questions are closed as "subjective". Frankly: this is a rotten site culture problem on SO. A lot of design or coding style questions are not subjective and thinking otherwise originates from the similarly rotten belief that "programming is art" - it is not, it is a craft or even an engineering discipline. In engineering, nothing can be allowed to stay subjective.

Furthermore, program design is an important topic, perhaps the most important topic of all of programming. Because with bad or non-existing design, all programs ultimately fail. Dismissing the most important questions the professional programmers might ever have, while keeping completely uninteresting 'missing semicolon' syntax questions, is rotten site culture.

Another example: the style question "What space width should I indent my code with" is perfectly answerable for any given programming language and it is not subjective. For the majority of languages, the answer is "You can do either 2 spaces or 4 spaces" and that is the only correct answer. ("But I like 8 spaces!" Tough luck, this is engineering, fall in line.) But if the question is "should I indent by 2 or 4 spaces" then yeah it is suddenly subjective because there are two industry de facto standards and no consensus over which is better.

So there was never a need to categorically close all questions like this as "primarily opinion-based". They could be evaluated as such on case-to-case basis, since there is all manner of different categorizes of supposedly "subjective/exploratory questions":

• "What space width should I indent my code with in language x" - perfectly answerable and on-topic on Q&A. Or if we for some reason insist on keeping our rotten site culture, migrate to softwareengineering.stackexchange.com (...another site with similar rotten culture...).
• "What space width should I indent my code with" (no language stated) - too broad, close.
• "Should I indent by 2 or 4 spaces?" - primarily opinion-based, close.
• "Should I indent code?" - too broad and open-ended, close. (Yes, there are stupid questions...)
• "How do you like to indent your code?" - too chatty/asking for opinions. Suitable for Discussions or chat but not Q&A.
• "What coding style is best?" - too broad and open-ended, close. Anything about "best" without defining best should be closed, not suitable anywhere.
• "What coding styles exist and are commonly used in language x?" - too broad for Q&A ("list question") but perhaps suitable for Discussions.
• "What coding style was used in project x?" If the code was never public - close since it isn't answerable. Or otherwise it might be a better fit for retrocomputing.stackexchange.com or Discussions/chat.

And so on, I can keep making examples and there's no universal truth for how to deal with these. Treat them individually.

I asked a question around a year ago about whether or not Deno's implementation of dynamic import() was conformant with ECMA-262. The question was eventually closed, then deleted.

There was a bunch of comments between myself and another SO user. Nobody formally answered the question on SO. I eventually got the answer in a QuickJS NG discussion Is Deno's implementation of dynamic import() ECMA-262 and test262 conformant? #629. The answer is ECMA-262 essentially allows the host implementation to do whatever it wants

Very simple question: Is Deno's implementation of dynamic import(), that throws when raw string specifier is used to dynamically import() a script created and written to the underlying file system within the running script ECMA-262 and test262 conformant?

Yes. ECMA-262 doesn't demand anything from implementers. I can't link directly to the right clauses for some reason1 but it's 13.3.10 Import Calls and then 16.2.1.8 HostLoadImportedModule:

The actual process performed is host-defined [..]

It's arguably a quality-of-implementation issue but not a spec conformance issue.

1 the closest I can link to is https://tc39.es/ecma262/#sec-ecmascript-language-scripts-and-modules

So, was that question appropriate for SO? Was the closure and deletion of that question appropriate?

People want the idea of a democracy, that is, majority rule. So, no matter what the reasoning is of individual users, if N users vote to close, that's it, democracy in action.

That does not mean the majority is correct. Doesn't really matter. Democracy in action doesn't require truth or correctness, just a majority. So that's your model.

While I have voted to close questions as duplicate in the past, I don't think I will ever do that again. Somebody in the wild has a question, and they want an answer. That's enough for me. But I'm just an individual. If a group of individuals decide otherwise, based on the direct democracy model, they can, and do, vote to close, for whatever reasons they might have. That's what you folks want, direct democracy.

Of course, SE as a corporate entity is decidely not a democracy. It's a for-profit corporation. So, whatever owndership and management decide they want to do, they do it, irrespective of what the majority of users "vote" for.

So there's some contradictions here that have to be navigated, or at least understood, in order to not get into the thinking that SE Web sites are a true democracy. It's kind of like an oligarchy, with a sprinkle of democracy in some cases, over-rulable by the ruling oligarchy.

A prime example of that contradiction is here on Meta SO there's a link on the side panel that says

Policy: Generative AI (e.g., ChatGPT) is banned

and there's now OverflowAI which advertises

AI features to supercharge your workflows.

So, you can see the contradiction re "Artificial Intelligence" prima facie, without getting in to what is "Generative AI" versus non-"Gnerative AI". Because I could just just dismiss the whole "AI" thing as a marketing racket entirely, as in my individual opinion there is no such thing as "articificial intelligence" whatsoever. A human is always in control, and the "AI" label is just slapped on the sell stuff to dullards who don't know any better. The real AI is Allen Iverson.

Beating the grass to make the snakes show themselves we see "questions" posted by SE management like this Our partnership with Google and commitment to socially responsible AI, which objectively, is not a question at all, rather an announcement that SE has decided to "partner" with Google to deliver "socially responsible AI", which to me, makes absolutely no sense, in addition to clearly, again, being yet another contradiction in SE policies. The "question" makes no sense because it's not a question. Further the post makes no sense because a computer program is not a human, and can't be "social" or "responsible". The computer program just does what the human operator tells it to do. That's it.

So there's contrdictions, direct democracy, oligarchy, corporate interests which are out to accrue monetary profit of some kind, closure of question zealots, and users who don't participate in the voting to close questions process.

I have never cast a single "down" vote for any post, question, or answer on any platform on the Interwebs, ever. That's some years now, in various different platforms.

SO and more broadly, SE users, should probably understand that SE is a for-profit corporation, and at any given time management can decide to post a "question" that is not really a question, and unilaterally declare their announcement a question, and simultaneously ignore the majority who vote that what management wants to do on the platform is not a good idea.

It's kind of like understanding the United States was not formed as a direct democracy, rather a representative republic, by a hand fule of pirates, rapists, pedophiles, ganagsters. And no matter how much people have national pride, that won't change the historic facts about how and why the U.S. Government was formed, and by whom, and for what purposes.

Same with SO. Don't get all dewy-eyed and self-righteous about the purity of questions and answers on SE and SO, and the value of a question being an objective question, or being a question at all. Keep in mind that "question" made by SE staff over on Meta SE - that is not a question at all. That's your standard, as set by SE management. When SE decides to make an "announcement", they don't even bother formalizing a question. And when SE management doesn't like the negative feedback from the People, they abandon and pretense of votes mattering.