[Bamafan]

"Take this question from Stackoverflow: Database development mistakes made by application developers [3], a question I spent some time answering and that people seemed to appreciate the answer to (based on comments and 1000+ upvotes). It is closed as "not constructive". This is hardly a unique phenomenon. We've all seen many interesting questions posted here that are now closed or locked and who knows how many have been deleted."

This is a rant that's needed and one that SO needs to open themselves to receiving. Their stance on this is just wrong.

I'd actually bookmarked several of your posts (among others) because they were so valuable. So it enrages me to no end to click those bookmarks and find that the entire discussion is simply gone.

To recap - a high quality contribution whose value was validated by dozens of individuals (or perhaps even more) was simply deleted.

The problem starts at the top. As you can see from Jeff Atwood's post below (codinghorror) , even the founders of Stack Overflow don't understand the value of their own platform to their customers. They had a preconceived notion of what StackOverflow Is and they are going to stick to it, users be damned.

I don't mean the bash them, but if nerds want to see a prime example of why they take orders from non-nerds (whom we like to think of as "less intelligent" than us), this is exhibit "A". And if you want to know why StackExchange will fail everywhere else, this is exhibit "A". No other group of users will put up with that crap.

[teh_klev]

"They had a preconceived notion of what StackOverflow Is and they are going to stick to it, users be damned."

Which is why the site is hugely successful. If you want discussion then do it here or on Reddit. I don't want the questions I ask about why something doesn't work in jQuery or C# or C++ or whatever drowned out by Ruby Vs Python posts or stuff like the question cletus mentioned above, or "what have I got in my pocket" mysteries.

The brilliance of Stack Overflow is how quickly one can get answers to "specific programming problems" because everyone on the site is focused on answering these types of questions, not participating in discussion and navel gazing.

[Bamafan]

"Which is why the site is hugely successful."

You and Jeff are confused about what makes stackoverflow.com successful.

The reason stackoverflow is successful is because it's a clone of another successful tech Q&A site (experts-exchange.com) minus the scummy answer cloaking plus some social voting.

That's it.

All this stuff about the "right kinds" of questions being "key to its success" is based on absolutely nothing. There is nothing to support that. The one thing we do know is that deleting high quality user-generated content pisses people off.

[ig1]

Look at Reddit vs HN, do you think the difference is down technology ?

On multi-sided market websites (marketplaces, forums, ugc sites, etc) community management is generally a far bigger differentiator than technology. Quora isn't better than Yahoo Answers because of it's technology, but because of it's community.

My guess is that SO wants to steer away from subjective questions which can lead to downward spiralling in quality (i.e. language/tool-chain wars) which can then have a knock-on effect on what type of behaviour users think is acceptable across the rest of the site (i.e broken window syndrome).