Q: How do I do X extremely specific thing that I need because I have an unusual case that needs this specific thing.
A (top voted): Why would you want to do X? You shouldn't do that. I clearly know more about your problem than you do because I assume everyone on here is a college student and not a developer working with a large mostly static codebase. You should do Y instead. It is much better.
> "A client has asked me to build and install a custom shelving system. I'm at the point where I need to nail it, but I'm not sure what to use to pound the nails in. Should I use an old shoe or a glass bottle?" >...[potential answers] >b) There is something fundamentally wrong with the way you are building; you need to use real tools.
The answerer is often telling the person, what you are trying to do sounds like a really bad/inefficient/ineffective/whatever solution. The common way to solve this is Y because of reasons A, B, and C. Are you doing something where those reasons are not a concern?
[1] https://weblogs.asp.net/alex_papadimoulis/408925 [2] http://thedailywtf.com
Stack Overflow’s approach appears to be all answers are acceptable. This isn’t just for the person who asked the question but everyone else too.
If a person is not providing good answers and people are down voting those poor answers, there is an automatic answer ban in place... but that requires people to down vote poor answers.
For example, pretty much any question about C string handling has many possible answers, e.g., [1] admits that comparing two strings is "rather broad" and the various answers there recommend looping over each index and comparing chars with ==, sscanf, strncmp, regexes, and PEGs. Opinions galore!
But if you want to know the difference between AWS EC2 and EB [2], even though there's one pretty clear answer, somehow the admins unanimously find the question to be "primarily opinion-based".
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16013031 [2]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25956193
My hunch is that due to the desire for longevity of content, there's a large unspoken bias in favor of questions about simple programs, and against questions about remote services (which are more likely to disappear or change, even though that's not likely to happen with major AWS services), and that the question closure explanations like "primarily opinion-based" are just a smokescreen.