[ktta]

>many of the more nuanced discussions were closed as "opinion based"

This is also something I don't like, but I wonder if they went on, if the website would become another place for flamewars - something that happens a LOT when you have low moderation.

[shagie]

The thing that separates SO from forums is the focus on quality answers. There are more than enough locked examples of the opinion bickering if one wants to see what happens.

They may be interesting to read. They may be popular. But most of the time by page 2 and even worse at page 5, it’s crap. And that crap requires an excessive amount of community moderation work to keep clean and try to avoid having more people add answers to the bottom of page 7 that are already stated 6 times on previous pages.

If the moderation tools are less powerful than the popularity keeping it there, there isn’t much reason to moderate.

And thus the culture by those who shovel crap daily to try to shut down opinion based questions early - so they don’t have to do more work later.

Every attempt I’ve seen at an opinion oriented SE alternative has failed to get sufficient expert answering. It’s not fun as a ${Lang} expert to have a newbie argue with you regularly about some feature or design choice.