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 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.