The only mark of a good StackExchange question

Posted: May 15th, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Nerdery, Philosophising | Tags: , , | No Comments »

How do I know a StackExchange Q&A is worth reading? It’s been closed.

StackExchange, particularly the incredibly popular stack overflow, is an incredibly resource. However it’s rapidly being ruined by overly zealous moderators who believe themselves to be the arbiters of what goes where. Almost every good answer that I find on stackexchange (that’s not a very small subset of issues with specific programming languages), is marked as closed. The entire StackExchange network is devolving into a ridiculous set of arbitrary restrictions no user can possibly understand. Programmers.SE was intended to be the more general extension of StackOverflow, but now it seems very narrowly defined and arbitrary, such that it has nothing to do with programmers and is, instead, about Computer Science algorithm design? Oh, but also some business development issues. But definitely NOT career issues. And, obviously, definitely not technology issues.

It’s come to the point where I consider posting on a stackexchange site, but assume my question will be closed and simply decide not to ask it instead. How are these overly zealous, and generally rude and dismissive, moderators helping the world?

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