Some neat questions are too broad.

But the too-broad questions aren't usually very interesting. Most of them are just pure crap. If you have enough SO karma, try https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/?filter-closereason=t... — what I see just now is someone who wants help with his java/spring thing and isn't very detailed about it, someone who's "been trying to learn how delegation" works, someone who "would like to know how can i mock diffrent user request behavior pattern" and those aren't unusual. The intellectually interesting questions are unusual in the "too broad" morass.

If people are to moderate SO, the rules have to be simple and quick to apply. Of course people don't have to do that, but I fear that without moderation, the interesting questions would get no answers because they would be completely flooded by questions like those three. So the open-ended, intellectially interesting questions lose either way.

Well, yeah, I assume most non-broad questions are pure crap too. But they don't close all of the non-broad questions. (Or even a lot of the awful ones - I have tried to answer a few horrifyingly badly written Qs on math SE, that no-one else dared to go near, which weren't closed for months, for some reason) So I can't see how that was so relevant to talk about that.

So the answer is, There Is No Alternative? There's no possible way things could be different in that respect?

The close reasons ("too broad" and the others) are good descriptions of the typical bad questions. Anything which doesn't fit into any of the dozen-odd close reasons is not typically a bad question.

This summer I waited on a lot of six- and even twelve-minute batch jobs, and I spent some of those on the SO moderation queue (I'm one of the 3000-karma users, not an elected moderator). It didn't take much more than six minutes to learn that picking the interesting questions out of the flood of manure is a terrible chore.

It would be nice if the intellectually interesting questions could be left alive. But I don't think it's humanly achievable. People will post their job interview quizzes and first-year CS exercises and say, oh, mentally stimulating and please do leave open.

Also, what made this interesting wasn't the question but that the question won the lottery of someone contributing substantial time to craft a great answer.

I don't think you could've done a better job than linking that moderation queue of "toobroad" to make your point. It was a never-ending channel of straight shit. Ranging from "here's a copy and paste of all my unformatted code that won't work, whatever that means" to "how do i use python on windows".

Everything looks easy to someone that has no stake in the solution. We get so used to being end-users that we take everything for granted, as if our experience is the natural ordering of the universe, rather than the result of all the work that goes on behind the scenes.

Read enough posts from HNers condemning Stack Overflow and you'd think they believe Reddit/HN's "new" queue is the ultimate browsing experience.

> The mods get points for closing things, I guess. Often they don't understand the question, it seems

FWIW, it's not moderators closing a question (I rarely see that). You "only" need 3000 points to vote to close a question. Users with a gold badge on a tag the question has can single-handendly close a question.

Users get no incentive for closing questions.

Also, those 3000 points also give you the possibility to vote for reopening a question. And there's a queue where users can see questions that are being voted on for reopening.

One quasi-workaround for broader questions is to use the Software Engineering SE site. It's not a panacea (and in my opinion shouldn't be necessary), but questions like the OP should theoretically be better-received there.

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/tagg...

Thanks, will try that.

I think maybe there is a common misunderstanding that Stack Overflow is a forum for discussing software dev. It's not, it's a programming Q and A site and it specifically spells out what that means. Questions have to be fairly specific either to a programming language, tool (make/git), library, or help figuring out a bug. Open discussion of broad CS topics is not what it's trying to be.

I agree I'd like such a site. I don't think any Stack Exchanged based site will ever be such a site. I think TPTB believe it's nearly impossible to run such a site and not have it turn into crap because of the large number of people asking bad questions of the "How do I make a website like facebook" or "How do I make a game like GTA5"

Sure, thanks. I don't only mean 'open discussion of broad topics', but some of the most valuable pages to me have been 'What are the best books/favourite books in field X', and the SE format is great for that - with the best books upvoted to the top of page... but even they're closed. (As being opinion-based.) Again, are there really no questions that are non-broad yet total crap? All the answers here have been like "But broad questions are mostly crap so that would be impossible" .. Ah yes, you said "turn to crap" - often I feel the problem is not with a particular question, but with what is predicted to happen if questions of that type were allowed, a kind of 'slippery slope' argument. Has that actually ever been tried, or it is an untested suspicion it will turn to crap?

I agree with you "best books" can be good questions. They could also maybe lead to farming points so you want your book or library to appear at the top of the list you hire the mechanical turk to upvote your project to the top? I can certainly see "best of ABC" turning into a shouting match if people passionately disagree why one sucks and the other doesn't so I can accept the idea that "best books on X" are often more problematic then they seem at first glance. "best stack to clone FB functionality". "best game engine". etc... both seem like they'd turn to crap. In fact you can already see this on stackshare.io where for most products it's basically a popularity contest not a merit contest. "best text editor"