[kjxsnht43]

I couldn't agree less. First off, they're not going out of business, just letting 20% go and one would assume refocusing. I think the site is set up to get good answers and not just the first upvotes as answers stick around and users can vote answers up or down as they see fit. The first answers on older questions tend to be very long and in-depth and give a lot of good information about the pros and cons of the approach they discuss. (If you want something really in-depth, check out https://codereview.stackexchange.com/.) The ones that get closed as opinion based are almost entirely asking for software recommendations or the like. I've rarely seen an objectively answerable question closed as being opinion-based.

[codeflo]

For many of the supposedly "opinion-based" questions, reasonable people will at least agree on the relevant trade-offs, even if they come to different conclusions overall. Thus, when a question asks about "pros and cons of technology X", expert insight into the trade-offs involved could be really useful to help evaluate your own specific situation. But that kind of more nuanced question doesn't really fit the simple "one correct answer" model that Stack Overflow seems to be going for and is thus very likely to be closed. IMHO, there should be a distinction between "it depends on the circumstances, and here's why" and "purely opinion based", and Stack Overflow would be more useful for me personally if the former were allowed.

Edit: Just to check if moderation policies have changed since I last looked, I did a quick search for questions containing the phrase "pros and cons". As unfortunately expected, practically all of the questions are closed: https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=pros+and+cons

[shagie]

While "it depends on the circumstances and here's why" is the ideal answer, such questions rarely get those answers.

On one of the sister sites to SO, there's a post about pros and cons on their meta - https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions... - such questions are often a moderation headache when you get the inevitable spam and the poor quality answers of "I can't believe anyone didn't mention XYZ".

Look at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15142/what-are-the-pros-... and start reading through and consider the one that starts out with "@Keith" responding to a different answer or "A SQL stored proc doesn't increase the performance of the query" being the entirety of the answer.

Such questions, when left open can get awful answers that are difficult to clean up.

Have you considered that there are sites with as laser like of a focus on pros and cons as SO maintains on Q&A? https://www.slant.co is one such site. https://www.slant.co/topics/607/~best-java-ides https://www.slant.co/topics/440/~best-nosql-databases-for-we... and so on.

[baldfat]

> Opinion based

I wish Stackoverflow would buy https://slant.co and just point people to that site for opinions.