Literally the first one in my moderation queue[1]. Perfectly valid question with almost enough votes to get closed...

[1] https://imgur.com/a/pnTLwcU

For what it's worth, I read the question without reading the flagging reason and could predict the flagging reason with high confidence.

The question looks like an "I'm out of my wits please debug my application" question which isn't atomic or precise enough to fit the SO format. I would have liked the person asking the question to provide a complete minimal failing example to even begin working on an answer.

Aren't all questions on SO of this type? With that reasoning you could close the whole SO. If you really debug hard enough and for a long time, you wouldn't ever need to ask on SO.

Not a moderator but have ~8k rep on SO and have spent some time on mod queues in the distant past.

Most questions on SO these days (that are not "do my homework for me please") are garbage like this. Signal to noise ratio is horrendous. Gin, Next.js, whatever are pure noise, the actual problem is glossed over in a vague sentence: "my browser is getting the setcookie header correctly, it doesn't say it's blocked at all but my browser isn't setting the cookie". You could try to talk the submitter into providing the complete HTTP request, which could take a very long back and forth, but after a thousand questions like this, you probably decide it's not worth the effort to salvage the question; or like me, you decide it's not worth participating in the site at all.

No. The purpose of the site is serving as a general knowledge base, not debugging random code that's only going to be useful to one person.

i second that sentiment. i also find the way the "question" is put somewhat confusing and technically it's not even a question as it doesn't contain a question.

This kind of thinking is exactly why I stopped asking questions on SO a long time ago.

Because once you can construct the perfect question, you can most certainly answer it yourself. It should be OK for questions to be somewhat vague, to contain "noise" and non-related stuff (because how on earth should the person asking the question know if something is relevent if they don't know the solution already?).

And I think in most cases a "complete minimal failing example" is way overkill. If someone in the future runs into the same problem, they have code already, and if there is already a solution accepted, then all that is needed is the description of the problem case and the solution (and in the best case, a root cause analysis, but that is an optional extra).

Some mods seem to think that SO is the next Encyclopedia Britannica, and each question is an article in it. This was not true in the beginning, and I don't feel like this is the right direction. But who cares about what I think.

> Because once you can construct the perfect question, you can most certainly answer it yourself.

Not if what you're lacking is declarative knowledge, which is what the site tries to elicit, to a first approximation anyway.

You should reduce the question to the point where you can say "between substeps 1.3.5 and 1.3.6 there seems to be a proposition I don't know. What is it?"

If you can't reduce the problem to a missing proposition, there are better resources to turn to for help with debugging it step-by-step until you have isolated a problem. I've had success with mentoring and IRC.

… as a result of two votes to close from members of the community, which is not an example of “shut down by a mod” (GP) or how “Stack Overflow has been absolutely destroyed by the moderators” (GGP). Closing questions isn’t really a primary purpose of elected moderators to begin with, because it doesn’t need more privileges than the rep-based privilege system already grants.

Meanwhile, the spam/abuse deletion, removal of illegitimate votes, conflict resolution, and so on that having mods is actually valuable for happen behind the scenes.

I understand that you're a SO moderator and feel the need to defend the site, but I'm not the only one levying this criticism. I'd suggest looking inwardly to see if you can change the culture of the moderation, and not lashing out towards me.

Is pointing out that you’re not supporting your point with the correct evidence lashing out? For what it’s worth, I don’t feel the need to defend the site, and think it does a pretty terrible job of delivering useful questions and correct answers most of the time – just for pretty much the opposite reasons.

So rather than address the fact that you were wrong, you chose to change your argument entirely, attack the person's character and then lash out at them?

You have access to the moderator queue and have been according to your history a person with relatively influential ability. Why don't you work towards changing the culture yourself?

I can see that one being pushed back, there's a lot of context for sure but the direct question is not surfaced visibly enough.

""" I have this working no problem locally , but in production with different domains, my browser is getting the setcookie header correctly, it doesn't say it is blocked at all but the browser isn't setting the cookie. """

I know there's a question in there somewhere but it feels pretty much like a run on sentence and the clarity is lacking. There's something that could be wrapped up in that final paragraph that I think could make the question more direct.