Do they? The reality is that SO and SE sites are optimized as a business, not so much as a community: short, common and quickly answerable questions generate much bigger traffic from search engines, and hence more ad revenue. I can imagine Joel and Jeff realized this very early on, and thus set themselves in a mission to encourage the questions that generated the most traffic and punish the ones that fall in the opposite end of the spectrum. It's really a pity, but SE is not a non-profit organization.
I'm still hoping someday someone will come up with an alternative that gathers the people and the quality of SO where lengthy and thoughtful discussions are welcome. Some argue that's Reddit, but I'm not entirely convinced.
These answers are outliers, special snowflakes among a sea of crud that fills the programming PHPBB boards out there. Joel and Jeff were trying to solve the bigger problem - having a decent Q&A system -, and that can only be done by looking at the average case and not the exceptions.
The thing is that, unlike in other places, people can upvote/downvote stuff on SO/SE sites, and just like crappy questions and answers are quickly buried by the community the same could happen to subpar discussions, so I don't really think that's a valid excuse.
The SE community works very hard to keep things on topic. The questions that come up on Hacker News are very interesting, but often times fit the definitions of being off-topic or not constructive. I don't think their closure has had any effect on the frequency of those really interesting off-topic questions.
Also, imagine if SE allowed these types of questions. The community would be overrun by flame wars and turn more into a discussion board, not a place to get answers.
On the other hand, I don't think closing questions has a strong enough effect to discourage people from asking off-topic or otherwise poor questions (see the Programmers.SE board for an example). It's been going through Eternal September for a couple of years now. (I'm not going to give an example of, what is in my opinion, the best moderated SE board since I don't want it to get any exposure and suffer the same fate)
So in closing, there's rhyme and reason to SE closing questions, and I don't think it hurts the site.
I get what you are saying, but what if my problem is I'm having a hard time understanding vim fundamentals?
Perhaps "the problem" is subjective to begin with because it is relative to each of us.
Some problems have subjective answers. They're still real problems. They still have real questions, and more than one answer can exist.
oh- and in the interim, it will receive attention from but 1% of the qualified posters SO has.
Not if you choose the right venue. Now that I read the question, you're right that it'd probably be blocked on any SE site because it's a poor fit for their Q&A format, but SE is not the only programming community online.
oh- and in the interim, it will receive attention from but 1% of the qualified posters SO has.
So? Should I start posting the results of the UEFA Champions League here just because there are many interesting posters here?
I still think to some degree SE shoots themselves in the foot with the strict enforcement of their rules every time this occurs.