[luu]

I'd be curious to hear an explanation of when you should or shouldn't do this. It's interesting to see stackoverflow as an example of bowing to community wants, because stackoverflow seems like the ultimate example of not doing that. The most upvoted topics are closed for being the wrong kind of content, and most of the questions that were, historically, the mosted upvoted would now be closed before they could pick up steam.

I can't be the only person who notices this; pretty much HN post that features SO includes a litany of complaints about them. Even if the original post isn't a complaint, the top thread in the post will probably be a complaint, regardless of how relevant that is to the topic.

My point isn't that what SO is doing is wrong. It's that what they're doing seems to go against the wishes of the vast majority of the community. Jeff even links to a post of his that basically says "you shouldn't always listen to the community". So, when do you listen and when do you ignore? Advice that consists of "sometimes you should do X and sometimes you shouldn't" seems trivially true for pretty much any real-world X.

[nelsonweiss]

I don't think Mr. Atwood is suggesting that you bow to what the community wants, but rather that you implement systems to facilitate what they're already doing anyway.

That aside, and regardless of if SO is going about topic policing in the right way, I think this bit from a guest post[1] by Randy Farmer might hint at why they're doing what they do.

"As user-generated content grows, content moderation of some sort is always required: typically, either employees scan every submission or the site’s operators deploy a reputation system to identify bad content. Simply removing the bad content isn’t usually good enough-most sites depend on search engine traffic, on advertising revenue, or both. To get search traffic, external sites must link to the content, and that means the quality of the content has to be high enough to earn those links."

[1] http://www.communityguy.com/2010/04/01/guest-post-theres-a-w...

[sp332]

It's the most virally popular off-topic content that you need to moderate. Off-topic content that doesn't get attention doesn't do much damage, and popular content that is in line with what you want the site to be is good. But popular questions that threaten to absorb huge amounts of attention at your site, promote unproductive threads of conversation, and attract karma whores and trolls, those need to be closed.