[fusiongyro]

SO would suffer, because the kind of question you're talking about is intrinsically debatable. Those questions aren't bad or wrong, but they are inappropriate for the medium of SO, which is about technical questions with concrete answers. SO is not the be-all, end-all of knowledge, but it is pretty close to perfect for technical questions with right answers, and I think it would suffer greatly if it developed an HN or reddit-like clubhouse atmosphere.

[dionidium]

"SO would suffer, because the kind of question you're talking about is intrinsically debatable."

That's certainly a claim and it's a claim that the SO folks also make, but I still haven't seen a single piece of evidence that it's true.

[fusiongyro]

If it isn't obvious to you I doubt anybody will be able to "prove" it to your satisfaction. Besides, you can't create rules around impossible conditions like "close any question which will lead to endless debate" so instead you create rules around easily detected conditions like "close any question that isn't concrete."

I don't greatly love SO (though I like it more than I used to) but there are lots of alternatives that lack SO's irksome limitations (slant.co comes to mind). By now it is obvious that whether you like SO's formula or not, it clearly works.