[yalogin]

To go off topic a bit here - all these SO articles that are not pinpointed programming questions are always closed or locked. You can no longer ask these kind of open ended, leading to a debate kind of questions on SO anymore. The questions have to be very focused and narrow so that someone can answer it to get points. Its really disappointing but that is just the way the community took it in - pedantic.

[sp332]

On SO, mod points are granted by how many "points" you have. The idea is that if you have that many points, you got them by asking good questions, writing good answers, and generally being a good citizen on the site. But if you allow jokes or open-ended questions, then people get tons of points and mod powers even it they don't really contribute to the content of the site.

It would help if they allowed open-ended questions that are marked "community wiki" (which means the author doesn't get points for the post). But you'd still end up with a lot of off-topic content getting upvoted on the front page which would be annoying.

[teh_klev]

"It would help if they allowed open-ended questions that are marked "community wiki""

And then we'd have quora, which would not be Stack Overflow. The intention of the site from day one was to encourage specific answerable programming questions that do not involve endless open ended discussion.

I truly believe this narrow scope of acceptable question type is why the site is hugely popular.

I don't understand how people don't get this even after five and a half years.