I have no problem with SO mods closing topics (the quality of new posts has really gone down as SO gains popularity), but I do have a huge problem with them permanently deleting closed topics after some time.

Some of the most popular posts on SO with thousands of hits a day linked to from all over the web have been permanently removed with no official archived location. They're throwing away years and years of community posts and comments, with some very valuable info and data in there. It's really sad.

The biggest thing I loath about SO is when they close threads because the question has been asked before and then link to a thread that nobody has replied to 3+ years.

SO is becoming less and less useful as time goes on because they actually stop questions that need to be re-answered from being re-answered.

In the early 2000s I joined the WELL. It didn't last long. Nobody was having any interesting discussions there. Conversation that went much beyond trite pleasantries was invariably choked off by tut-tutting oldsters telling everyone that everything had been said before.

Over the course of the 2000s, I've had a chance to watch several online communities that I was deeply involved in grow old and die through the same process. I've decided that it's just part of the natural life cycle of an online community for it to die at the hands of its most devoted followers through this sort of intellectual smothering.

So it's maybe not tragic that it should happen to Stack Overflow. It's just sad that it started happening so soon.

We could call this phenomenon the Wikipedia effect.

Actually, that's a reverse problem to Wikipedia. Wikipedia article quality increases hugely, then as people fiddle with the article the quality rapidly decreases. Then it increases again... ad infinitum. Sort of like a sine wave.

I don't know. I think one of their biggest problem is to handle "gravity": how good content flows and bad content sink. Wikipedia handle this better. They, at SO, have to have some gravity.

To be fair, the quality posts have already been asked. What else left is there to ask?

The original question was from March 2009. Deleting that three years later is bad internet citizenship -- it's removing internet history for no good reason.

Fair enough, if it was a new question asked today, no question, delete it, as it's clearly off-topic now, according to the rules they've clarified and developed over the years. But when these types of questions were asked originally they were on topic at the time. Deleting them retrospectively is poor form.

I'm also of the opinion that these questions in general offer far more value (and are far more interesting to read) than the hundreds of "how do I iterate MySQL results/display them on my page/use a PHP function in javascript" that get posted every day.

I'm really struggling to see what benefit there is to deleting these things.

I agree, the best questions taps in multiple domains and are more subject to be off-topic everywhere.

Yes, I completely agree.

I tend to feel a large loss of community from deleting items like this.

When you have a question that is upvoted and answered a lot, and then the mods come in and close or even worse delete the question, it's just them flexing their muscles. There should be a way for the community to couter vote the mods if you have at least X amount of points yourself. If mods get overruled so many times they should lose their mod rights. We need some kind of "checks and balances" to keep the mods "honest."

It is very sad. Perfectly reasonable questions getting shut down, looks very hostile to newbies, not at all the environment that I thought it was supposed to be.

I don't understand what happened. I'd like to believe there was some good reason that sparked this excessive moderation and it just went overboard. But it looks like a clique of insiders going on a power trip.

Whatever happened, I hope it changes.