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smithkl42 | 1 month ago
I was an active contributor on SO in the early days - it was fun to help folks out, and it was often the only way to get help when I needed it myself.
For me, it stopped being a place I wanted to visit when they made the decision to close any question that they didn't deem a perfect fit for their vision of SO. There was certainly some value to that around the edges, but the policy ended up being enforced so strictly that many interesting topics their audience would have found valuable were declared out-of-bounds. Questions I wanted answers to - and that were getting good answers! - would get closed, and so would interesting questions that I wanted to try to answer.
I tried a couple times to push back gently, and got piled on each time.
It stopped being fun, so I stopped going there. Shrug.
smithkl42|1 month ago
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/77855606/should-we-enabl...
That's an interesting question! It's a question that real programmers might want to have answers to! And I had a very specific answer, based on real-world experience and data. But the question got closed as being off-topic.
Shrug. They get to make the site they want. It doesn't mean it's the site folks want to visit.
zahlman|1 month ago
The question as written is still opinion-based (try instead something like "what negative consequences could occur from..."; the point is that the site should not be trying to weigh pros and cons for you, but just stating what they are, so that people can make their own decisions).
This sort of thing gets marked off topic because it pertains to the matter of hosting the program, rather than creating it. See also https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425628, https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/276579, https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/271279 etc.