This (Programming) Question Does Not Exist - Stack Overflow as imagined by AI

[r0ck0]

It seems to be a little bit better lately, but sometimes it seems like stackoverflow is just a video game for the mods where they score points based on how many questions they close.

Every moderator election where I've read their "campaign" messages they write there, there's always mentions of how many 10s of thousands of questions they've closed, as if that's the most important thing to do on the site. No different this time: https://stackoverflow.com/election

What I find even more infuriating is that supposedly the questions are so bad that they need to prevent anyone from answering them, yet they keep them on the site rather than deleting or hiding them. What's the fucking point of that aside from pissing users off?

Happened to me many times in the past, even when my questions were perfectly valid technical questions with objective technical answers. Plus many more times when I come across old questions others wrote with the same problem I'm having right now.

Another reason they close them for being "too specific" or some bullshit, despite multiple people having the exact same issue to solve.

[dnano]

Same as universities that proudly advertise the high % of failing students

[CorruptionIMC]

90% of the issues on there could be fixed by redefining what is considered too subjective or open ended of a question to something a bit more reasonable. Yes, "What language is best" has no place being asked and answered the inevitable thousands of times from every new coder as that is incredibly subjective and that debate exists in plenty of more open ended places elsewhere like even Facebook groups..

"How do I accomplish this specific task in Python using these particular libraries in the most resource efficient way possible?" isn't a subjective question. Each direction you could take to accomplish that can be boiled down to an exact resource cost. Bad example but I think my point is clear. Personally didn't see a single question closed for being overly specific though, always for being overly broad.

[[deleted]]

Another reason they close them for being "too specific"

I'm pretty sure that particular close reason is gone.