Stackexchanges have policies set by their commununity on each corresponding meta site.

Mods don't really set policy they enforce it, and most "Is this kind of question ontopic here?" style scope-adjusment can be done on meta.

I understand the "meta is murder" argument, and it's a tough and deadly problem. But I don't think splitting the meta into a separate site is the answer. You end up with a very strange self selection problem, where the "meta" community isn't very representative of the community at all.

Heh, the good old "high-quality content" argument... Any links to the almost-always-crap content you consider high quality? Don't get me wrong, it could actually be high quality, it's just that it rarely is... Links or it didn't happen.

Your reply here comes across as kind of dickish. One of the points of the comment you're replying to is that the mods seem to have radically different standards than the audience. And worse, that they're high-handed about it. So your you-probably-don't-know-what-quality-is reply is just demonstrating the problem.

However, here's one that bugged me:

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/18120/what-is...

I thought it was a great question and set of answers. I only know it's gone because I linked it from my personal website as I was proud of my answer. Eventually somebody contacted me to say, "Hey, your site is broken." So not only did some jackass delete a popular set of questions and answers, they did it without warning and with no apparent way to recover the lost work.

That was my "Fuck you, I'm done," moment for Stack Overflow.

Example? Haven't noticed this..

It's kind of hard to provide examples because the question disappears once this happens. There's a link to an example in this thread.

Here's a recent one:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4138086

The other extreme seems to be a situation like reddit's r/programming, which says (on every page) "If there is no code in your link, it probably doesn't belong here", yet usually half the posts violate it, i.e., you have guidelines but they're pretty universally ignored.

Which is better? I don't know. I personally haven't used either one in a while, because they don't seem to work well if you're not using a mainstream programming language. Google still wins for me here, since the right answer is very frequently on some random person's blog.

>Which is better?

False dichotomy. How about having moderation that operates off of a flexible (and public, and non subjective) set of rules?

/r/programming sucks because of the lack of moderation. Stack* sucks because of heavy handed moderation.

Agreed. Most of my SO questions get moved (not sure why, they seem on target) and then never get answered.

Amen. This is avsolutely right on the money.