I often ask a question on Google, get taken to a Stack Exchange site, and find that yes, they have my question, but some moderator closed it before it got answered. SE got my traffic, but I didn't get my answer. Isn't that broken?
There is an ongoing religious war among avid SO users (don't know about the rest of SE) about what kinds of questions should be allowed.
Roughly, there are two camps. Those who say that any well-formed, non-dup question of interest should be let in and those who think it's a stop of last-resort after checking all conceivable documentation and scouring the internet.
I believe the latter viewpoint is pretty run-of-the-mill developer machismo, and it makes me chuckle every time the first google hit directs me to a SO post with 1000 upvotes that has been closed as "off-topic".
It seems self-evident to me that in the year 2015, the internet has allowed me to make more valuable use of my time quickly searching for answers rather than scouring documentation. Docs have a time and a place, but are not needed for quick dips into the myriad techs you need to use to write a typical app these days.
We simply touch too many different code platforms to RTFM/RTFD on everything.
Just today I have probably worked with at least 20 code libraries with their own documentation, and most of those libraries will be replaced within 3 years from now.
I think reading the documentation for everything that a webdev works with now could be a full time job in itself.
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.
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.
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?
"Those who say that any well-formed, non-dup question of interest should be let in and those who think it's a stop of last-resort after checking all conceivable documentation and scouring the internet."
This is wrong in multiple dimensions and [edit: the next sentence which i didn't quote is] flamebait.
One camp believes in following these guidelines to a fault. The other camp thinks some of the rules are counterproductive to SO's principles.
This reminds me of the unhelpful SO answers where they state the answer to a question is already stated as part of a spec and won't be answered with a link to the spec. My preferred answer to these questions will quote applicable parts of the spec along with reference numbers and a link.
I don't understand why I have to click another link to go to another site that doesn't have the same context and awareness of where I just came from.
And may no longer even EXIST ... seriously love when working with old libraries and all i have is some dump copy on github of a long dead source code littered with comments about see the web page for the docs... the docs dont come from the comments, and lo and behold, the stack overflow post ... slaps you in the face with yet another link.
I agree that it's not the most nuanced picture, but it correctly captures the ongoing debate on meta about this very question -- a debate whose very existence suggests that these guidelines aren't cut and dry at all.
For example, where is the guideline that answers this without ambiguity?
This viewpoint only makes sense if you subscribe to the (very silly) ideas that there are a limited number of internet points available and that they matter. Why does it matter to you which people are being rewarded for what?
It matters because people respond to incentives. If what you want to see encouraged is good answers to novel questions, you need a system that rewards that over copy-pasting from documentation.
What do you think happens when the two are rewarded equally, but the latter can be done much more frequently per unit of time?
I don't think what the site developers (or most users, for that matter) want to see is good answers to novel questions. I think they want to is good answers to all questions.
If I can find the answer I am after more quickly by searching and finding a hit on SO than I would by grepping documentation, how is that not providing value?
Now balance it against the more important questions that are unanswered or even unasked because SO becomes a place where there's no point to that. It's not as simple as that.
I get your argument, but it sounds like a weak version of the claim that there is a strict ordering of priorities in the world and that only the top priority should ever be worked on.
Heck, even if the site was only for "novel" questions, according to your logic, only the most important unanswered question should be visible, until it is answered. Otherwise people might be incentivized to answer the second most important question instead.
I still don't see what one has to do with the other(s). Besides, go browse through SO's unanswered questions; this is the state of things today! Simple questions, the most common variety, get answers in minutes. The complex and/or specialized questions which cannot easily be answered by a large portion of the userbase tend to languish.
Indeed. The result is that SO is a lot less useful than it used to be. I have repeatedly found myself chasing an obscure error message only to dead-end on SO and be forced to backtrack.
While I've experienced something similar too, I think it may have more to do with the fact that tech has diversified in the absolute sense. An obsecure question about your processor was easily answered in the past because everyone had tinkered with it. Today a question about a bolted-on feature in <insert tool of the year> might not receive an answer because so little experts on SO use it.(?) I've got no clue if this explains it, but it makes more sense to me than the idea that SO's attention/incentive span is so short that users are only spending time on 5-minutes-typing questions.
I've had that happen repeatedly as well, both now and "back in the day". I have no idea if a higher or lower proportion of the tougher questions are being answered now than they "used to be", but my sense is that it is about the same. The tougher questions are just tougher to answer; that hasn't changed through time. What I do know for sure is that a much higher proportion of easy questions can be answered by searching google and following one of the first few SO links, which is valuable.
Some people find difficult problems more rewarding to solve. Given that internet points are meaningless, someone interested in learning a language better could spend their time regurgitating documentation (and hopefully learning along the way). Eventually, one of those regurgitated responses gets picked up by Google and becomes the top answer, and nobody even needs to go to the SE forums to ask.
I don't think they're mutually exclusive - there are multiple reward structures for multiple types of players. Both should be encouraged.
Right now, there's one reward structure. People who value and respond to that reward structure act rationally within it. This means that regurgitation gets rewarded over good answers to novel questions.
Fair point on the question of why it matters. On the question of what should be encouraged, I think "good answers to novel questions" is only one of many possibilities. In my opinion, what should be encouraged is simply "people quickly and easily finding good answers to their questions", and I think copy-pasting (or linking to) the relevant section from documentation serves that goal just fine, and that voting is a good system for indicating what answers are useful, regardless of the form they take.
My key point is that not all questions are created equal.
Further, there's the question of how much effort the questioner should be expected to put in. In a great many technical question fora, the experience is that many noobs make no attempt to search out answers.
Isn't the incentive to answer those kinds of questions mostly intrinsic? I mean, the interesting questions and answers are more likely to be given exactly because they are so. The extrinsic reward is then complementarily useful for the opposite questions: the ones that are not very interesting but important nonetheless, such as the case of a reference to a cryptic documentation.
Maybe the difference of opinion largely comes down to whether you think the second sentence of your comment "sounds right". It seems false to me, but it must seem true to you, since you wrote it. I would be very interested in seeing an analysis of data relating a measure of how many "non-novel" answers are being given to how many difficult questions are being answered.
I think this would be an excellent solution. Combine it with some semantic similarity analysis, and the vast majority of newbie questions could be replaced with "Here's a link to a pre-written answer that almost certainly addresses what you want".
They already do that analysis and show similar questions while you're asking a question. You can say "well they should do it better" (and I'm sure they try), but the whole beauty of the Q&A model is combining the strengths of computers and humans. Computers are better at organizing and storing tons of information, but humans are much better at figuring out what other humans are really asking.
I could see an argument that the people more equipped to answer more technical questions may leave if they have to wade through a bunch of questions that could be answered in the docs. If those sorts of answers "take over" then you'll have to wade through them to find more novel questions to post answers to.
Rewarded with what; internet points? How about rewarding the far larger portion of its userbase, i.e., the sector that doesn't care about upvotes, with information? Yes, I am in the former camp if I have to chose one. SO has become far too heavy handed an "noob hostile". I have been around since the beginning and am in the top 0.16% of users and I can't stand how stringently some adhere to the formal and informal guidelines.
Ultimately, the site depends utterly on the internet points people. Without them there is only noobs asking questions, and they leave without people answering.
That's a fair point. It's not my motivation for being active, but I assume it is for most, and it is an effective carrot. I would just like the balance to be tipped a little back in the direction of the consumers of the site.
I'm not suggesting we leave obviously terrible questions open, it's the borderline posts that get me. Interesting questions which may not have a black and white answer, but would still encourage discussion/opinions which would be useful to people down the road. I know "it's not a discussion site", but sometimes there are gray areas and it's useful to have the opinions of experts on the pros and cons of certain approaches/technologies/whatever.
That gets into sticky moderation issues. My experience moderating support fora is that no matter how or where you draw the line, there's always a grey area. The line has to be drawn somewhere, and there's always going to be something that seems like a reasonable except that gets cut.
I suspect that SOs answer to your need is "Go use a different site". At some point, that becomes a reasonable answer.
It is a reasonable answer, but the reason many people don't find the "go use a different site" answer satisfying is that sites on the internet have network effects that make switching untenable, so it makes more sense to stay and debate the point. Which is also reasonable.
True, but the guidelines could be changed. Every close-happy user loves to link back to the guidelines. If they were a bit more lenient these users would have less leverage. It is a people issue though, I can't think of a technical solution which will solve it 100% of the time.
Changing the guidelines doesn't so much fix things as change where the lines are. You'll still see just as much "close-happy" behavior, just in different subjects.
I'm tired of seeing stack overflow used as a place people go in lieu of actually reading documentation. However, I sympathize with the other point of view… Sometimes people just need something clearly explained to them and they can take it from there.
SO never quite the original vision right. (A strange thing to say about an incredibly successful site, but...)
The problem is that you can't boil down development to very focussed questions with very focussed answers.
A lot of answers are experience and opinion - and if someone experienced is giving an opinion that's usually useful in itself, dammit, even if someone else with experience disagrees.
'Is React better than Angular?' may seem pointlessly open, but if you get answers from two camps who both know what they're talking about, it's possible to learn a lot from both.
As a side note, the closed questions are not deleted from the web site because Stack Exchange takes a conservative approach when it comes to deletion. Nevertheless some questions do get deleted. The Help Center[1] and Meta[2] have more details on this.
> Questions that are extremely off topic, or of very low quality, may be removed at the discretion of the community and moderators.
In my experience, this is completely false, it should be reworded as "Questions that moderators like to remove on a whim".
The fact that a moderator (or group of moderators) don't find a question valuable doesn't mean that it is not valuable for the rest of the world, and this applies specifically with questions about recommendations.
You've also got people closing questions who don't know the language. Am I the best person to vote on say Clojure questions? I'd say not, but on SO that frequently happens. When the languages go to people, the conference speakers and book authors are ignored by someone who has never written a line of code in that language something is wrong.
Also in the rapidly changing JS world they don't reference the version consistently. Code that worked fine on version 1 doesn't work six months later on version 1.1, if I knew the version it would save a lot of time.
Can they not give the macho developers some kind of button that spends some of their points to put a badge on the questions they like, elevating them to "true SO" status? Thats how these things are supposed to work I believe.
I always upvote on closed questions that I find useful. This happens more often than it should, imo.
What I would think would be better is for questions that receive a lot of upvotes after they are closed, that the people who flagged the question have reduced capability to flag down questions in the future.
SO had always allowed and encouraged beginner questions, actually. These days the same question would likely be closed as a duplicate, because the question, presumably along with a good answer already exists.
So that's an example of a good question, actually. And an answer "read the docs" would be down-voted as unhelpful and quickly disappear.
This is pretty much my experience. The site is read-only for a lot of people. I think I was rejected the other day because I didn't have the 50 reputation to comment on a reply that had other comments on an older question. They need to lessen restrictions that got too strict out of fear of the site becoming worthless. Right now the scales aren't balanced.
Comments on SE are meant to be temporary( in their value, not duration ). If you had to raise an important issue about something, you should have instead asked a question about it, where you could leave a link to the problematic answer/question and explain the problem. In fact that is the usual procedure in case of conflicts. There is no restriction on that. If your point is valid, the community does the rest.
And yet frequently asking a new question seeking clarification on an old questions topic matter, due to some relevant restriction, or even simply 'this no longer applies to V2 of lib$foo' is met with cries of "duplicate" and buried. Stack Overflow is suffering from the Wikipedia Moderation Problem ... which a few of my friends now refer to as "using a mod_assholes reverse proxy"
Most comments should end up as an edit to the question or answer, clarifying some point, at which point they can be removed. The Question and Answer are the important things on Stack Overflow, not the communication that went into creating and tuning them.
The remaining comments are just fluff, such as "thanks", which can more appropriately (for the site) be expressed as an upvote or accept. Or they're asking a new question, in which case the parent's comment applies.
Interesting how this is the case, because that was one of the key goals of the site when they were first building it.
I listened to Joel and Jeff talk about it in their early podcasts when they were first building the site. To be the definitive answer for a question requires that the answer be able to change and evolve over time as new information becomes available.
This has not been my experience when searching for programming questions. The threads I see closed is when I search for "what is the best ...", and while I find them very useful to read, I understand why SE do not like them.
Sometimes, I also see threads closed as homework questions, but those tend to have several duplicates which do have the answer in them, so it has so far not bothered me.
This type of thing was addressed by Yahoo! Answers in Taiwan which has a very strict scoring system for their mainline Q&A product. Basically they setup a separate section that was for discussions type questions called "chat" and provided no points on that side of the site. It was also not nearly as controversial to just move a question over there rather than closing it.
> and while I find them very useful to read, I understand why SE do not like them.
This is exactly what I don't understand. If a question is borderline, but obviously useful, why not err on the side of allowing it to stand?
>Sometimes, I also see threads closed as homework questions, but those tend to have several duplicates which do have the answer in them, so it has so far not bothered me.
This doesn't happen anymore. The "Homework" tag was removed and is no longer a valid reason to close a question. That doesn't mean these questions don't get closed using other rationals of course.
I can expand why I think SE do not like "what is best ..." questions.
1: There is no definitive answer to it. At best there is best practice, and at worst there is flame wars. If Moderators tried to distinguish what topic could become flame wars, you tend to end up with very biased moderation.
2: Recommendations are much more time-sensitive than purely technical questions. The best framework in 2005 might be abandon in 2015, which can mislead readers. As a reader, I know this and always check the post date, but from a UI perspective, this key component is not obvious in SO.
3: Flame wars are destructive, and SE has historically tried to avoid them. Questions like "should I pick GPL or BSD?", "Emacs or VI?", and "Python or ruby?" tend to be cut down before they cause problem in the SE community. I wish sometimes that HN would follow suit and do the same.
I think it depends. "What is the best image processing library?" should be closed. However, if that person goes on to detail what exactly they are trying to do and what constraints they are working with, it may not be so open-ended anymore. And this is only an example of one type of question which is routinely closed. There are others.
Yeah I feel that they are overzealous in closing useful (to me) questions, but its hard to know what the site would be like if they let discussions go--perhaps it would make it a lot more difficult to find the answer you're looking for.
Because so many questions I've found useful were closed, it has had a chilling effect on my desire to ask questions there. I used to ask questions regularly at the beginning.
But now, I feel like my question is probably going to be flagged, so why bother.
The moderation is ridiculous. Useful questions get closed all the time for nebulous "fit" reasons. My opinion is if the community thinks it's a valuable question by voting it up, it should stay.
I have found some useful information in the "dup" questions. It's a bit weird to discover that a useful answer is "closed as duplicate" but whatever, as long as I keep finding solutions to my problems, I'll keep going back.
Post a technical question about how to make your single page application crawlable, if it includes the word "SEO", there are great chances it will be closed.
"how can you get the most SEO results out of a one page website"
"Is there any way to dynamic generate content without affecting search engine indexing and ranking"
"Is there anything I can do to make google crawl my website"
"Is it safe to pre-load 4 website into one page without search engines interpreting it as misleading"
If you are a programmer who do not work at google, it is impossible to answer. If a co-worker gave me any of those questions, I would answer it by giving them the link to google's recommendation page about SEO, while warning that google is a private company that do not disclose their methods in indexing website. I can guess and speculate how they think or what their intention are, but any advice would only reflect how I think it works today, and google may at any time change how they index websites.
And I consider Google+SO the best programming tool ever created.
wrt Closed Questions, simple heuristic - if the page has lots of visits, lots of upvotes and is high in google for common searches do not close the topic. Clearly there exists a market for this question for many people, even if it boggles super-users' sensibilities.
For your information, the Google specification [1] is implemented in google, bing, msnbot, yandex, pinterest and mail.ru bots. Making the solution compatible with the other bots is a matter of adding 2 lines in the server configuration.
I know that Webmasters SE is supposedly the right place to ask questions about crawling issues and Ajax, but in fact you will find more questions on SO (see links below) because this is mainly related to technical issues with JavaScript.
Maybe I'm just off-base, but I'd consider all of those off-topic for SO. It's not a programming or programming tools question, it's a "how does Googlebot work?" question.
The knowledge would certainly be useful to many people, but it is outside of SO's scope as it is defined.
Don't you think that implementing the Google crawling scheme [1] (i.e. returning a snapshot of an Ajax application) is a programming or programming tools question?
Sometimes that's just as bad. Often the questions I see that are closed as "duplicates" are not actually duplicates, just closely related. The answer to one is not always the answer to another.
I don't have an SO example on hand, but consider this Sci-Fi StackExchange question:
The question is "Why does Sauron need the Ring to control Middle-Earth?" The correct answer is that he doesn't; he can control Middle-Earth without it, his victory is inevitable, but needs it to remove the only possible method his enemies have of overcoming him. After being correctly answered, the question was flagged as a duplicate of "What was the point of Sauron making the One Ring?" which is a very different question and comes with different answers.
This is, in my experience, extremely common across the StackExchange network. In that example, the "duplicate" question was answered before being closed, but that's not always the case.
Very often when searching (with google) for subjective things you'll find a closed stackoverflow link high up in the results. I know stackoverflow isn't appropiate for those questions but i still keep going to those results. I understand their position, it's just annoying. This is an example of something i found today: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4674609/looking-for-a-ric...
When searching for the best tool for the job, I often get pointed to SE and the questions are closed as "not constructive". I seem to recall, however, that they opened a separate site for such discussions?
best tool for the job is off topic on Stack Overflow.
They did open Software Recommendations Stack Exchange.
Closed answers get deleted in some regular interval. If they for some weird reason aren't, you could consider flagging them, there is always a response to that.
"Best tool for the job" doesn't sound like something that should be on SO. Far too subjective and likely to result in stupid opinionated arguments that go nowhere.
Except those are the hard questions in software engineering. "How do I draw a triangle with OpenGL?" is an RTFM question. "How do I decide between R and Python?[1]" is a much more challenging, but much more important, question.
I've said it before: SO is useful for the first 5 years of a software engineer's life. After that, it's occasionally useful when you need to pick up a new technology. The questions that are hard, for real senior software engineers, are rarely found on SE sites. Programmers.SE was supposed to fix it, but it hasn't worked, because of the same moderation.
This is a moderation problem, but the solution chosen was the easy solution: just don't allow hard questions because hard questions beget arguments. Instead, requiring people to have civil discourse, perhaps even requiring that people show they can have civil discourse before allowing them to participate, is much, much more difficult.
I'm not sure SE could survive the second type of moderation. But by not having it, it certainly makes it usefulness to somebody like me, with many years of experience learning and using various technologies, near zero.
>> "SO is useful for the first 5 years of a software engineer's life. After that, it's occasionally useful when you need to pick up a new technology."
That's what I find in my use and I don't think that's a problem. I think the harder to answer questions should be on their own Stack Exchange system. Moderation on that system would have different rules. I think if you keep it separate the second type of moderation you describe could work, however mixing the two types of moderation with Stack Overflow would lead to more problems imo.
Although the question was framed badly it could have simply been edited to be more clear about what it was asking and what the answers are answering. It was helpful to me and I'm sure it's been helpful to others as well.
So, edit it then! Even if you don't have an account, there'll be an "improve this question" link right below the question that'll let anyone submit improvements. They'll be reviewed, and, if approved, will immediately submit the question itself to a "reopen review" - if the edits are able to resolve whatever problems existed, it doesn't have to stay closed.
It's easy to assume that every reader is able to look past a poorly-written, half-implicit question and suss out the underlying need - but that's not the case. If you're able to understand a question and it's clear that others are not, don't hesitate to share your insights - they can make the difference between a question being downvoted and deleted and one that goes on to help many others.
More often, I find a question that is closed and frozen in time that does have answers, because the answerers were faster than the moderators. For instance, "Where can I download Spring?" The top Google result is a StackOverflow page that is closed as off-topic.
The question is off-topic, but as you can see it was still answered. Still, to solve that problem, a new site was opened per request of users: Software Recommendations Stack Exchange
The problem with the new site is that it boasts a tiny fraction of the SO user count. It's just harder to get good answers on a site with so few active users. The same is true for programmers.stackexchange, where code review type questions end up.
> I often [find] a question on [...] Stack Exchange [but] some moderator [has] closed it before it got answered.
How often is often in practice, though? This is a common objection, and I see it mentioned a lot by disgruntled commenters here. This is just another form of observational bias, and in reality the situaion described is pretty rare...
There are many times that SO and SE sites have been useful to me, both is finding answers to existing questions, asking questions that are then answered, and also providing answers myself. I agree that it can be infuriating to see a question that you want answered on the site, but it has been closed as 'off topic' or 'irrelevant' or the classic 'not suitable for a question-and-answer format site.' However, this has not happened to me much in the several years I have used the site(s) so I have to assume one of the following is true:
a. I only ask/search for the 'right' kinds of questions?
b. Closed questions are not that common?
Due to the annoyance factor, I think that b. is what is happening, and people just weight those occurrences much higher in their subconcious. That means they will recall them more readily, thus giving the false impression that it happens a lot.
This is actually a very common observational bias, which people should be more aware of.
The availability heuristic is the idea that if something can be readily recalled, it must be important, or at least more important than alternatives which are not as readily recalled. The easier it is to recall the consequences of something the greater those consequences are often perceived to be, and similarly the greater the consequences the easier somehing is to recall. This means strong negative associations with closed answers make those easy to remember, and people incorrectly estimate the frequency of this situation to be much greater than it actually is.
It's hard to even research certain topics these days without google leading to a useless stackoverflow page. Yes, most questions have been 'answered'... But years ago and those aren't the ones Google leads to.
The overall quality of stack overflow has decreased dramatically over the past few years. These days, when I go there mostly I have the chance to help someone from India do his or her job and tell people to stop using obsolete database interfaces and leaving their code wide-open to SQL injection. It's not very rewarding, educational, useful or entertaining.
I sometimes feel as if there could be a thread titled 'SO pivots into airplanes' and the top comment would be about whether flight attendants would call some questions off topic.
That pissed me off so many times that once the mods actucally got into an argument over whether my question should be allowed, that was the last time i ever posted or answered a question on SE. That being said that site is super helpful, i just wish they could make the moderators more tolerable. You would be surprised how many times a question is closed yet will have so many upvotes and answers.
Interestingly i have noticed that Quora has some nice thoughtful answers to tech questions, especially questions that have no shot in hell of being answered on SE.
Having read over 5000( yes really ) questions and searched over 100 with Google, that didn't happen once.
Just to clarify, SE doesn't always have the question, but it always has the answer.
It must be related to the specific field you are searching for; older ones are usually complete. I wouldn't be surprised if a more casual programming field has a larger ratio of closed answers.
It seems to happen with certain areas of interest more than others. I would say I encounter them in as much as 30% of my searches, which are web development related.
While I understand the intentions of the moderators, they seem to assess the value of a question for people at the moderator's own skill level than at the people who might be asking the question or seeking an answer to a particular question.
The silver lining for me is that at least they don't delete the questions and answers they mod down. I've found a lot of useful stuff in questions that the mods didn't like.
Thank you for your response, I will comment per paragraph:
SE has good rules which keep questions relevant. I would say that if the question is closed and there are no existing duplicates, then the question itself doesn't have much value. ( There are of course outliers. )
There is a misunderstanding here, moderators on SE don't actually close most of the questions, normal users with privileges to do that, do so by voting. So such a question doesn't have value because users decided so, not moderators.
The last paragraph shares the misconception with the previous one. Users vote on and close question. Inf fact moderators are so rare on SE, that they only do critical things that should not be trusted to users, which do the rest.
I think the point is these often are upvoted questions[1] with thought out answers. In fairness, I would argue the question I just referenced doesn't "belong" on SO as it's pretty clearly based in opinion. But if I Google "simple django rich text editor" and this is the first result, I would argue it does bring value to SO by bringing me onto the site.
Having strict moderation standards is SO's business. I may or may not agree, but it seems to work for them.
Leaving closed questions, particularly those without answers, on their site sucking up google juice and deceptively appearing in my search results is scummy. If they don't want it on their site, they should ask google not to crawl it. And that goes squared when the question doesn't have an answer.
>> moderators on SE don't actually close most of the questions, normal users with privileges to do that, do so by voting.
To a person _arriving at SO from Google_, "moderator" and "normal users with privileges" are basically the same thing, even though they may be technically different. And, those "normal users with privileges" tend to be overly aggressive when flagging questions as "off topic" or "opinion-based".
As stated, this happens almost entirely with (a) questions that could be considered opinion-based (up to discussion whether these belong on SO, SO's stance is they do not); (b) specific long-tail questions that may have very precise or specific answers.
Googling 100 things (which is not a lot) is not likely to return more than 1 or 2 of these at most. It's rare that I hit this but I've seen it a dozen or so times at least. Most of the time it's a question that has been heavily upvoted with a heavily upvoted (and accepted) answer.
Happens to me constantly. The best questions for me are always like how best to make money in an Android app, which StackOverflow hates because there isn't any clear answer, just many people who have tried many ad networks, free and pro apps, etc.. The only questions they seem to allow are trivial things I know from reading documentation anyway.
