[_hgt1]

Before I click, just a quick bet with myself this excellent question has been closed.

[edit] yep, locked. Thanks NullUserException! Now another quick bet with myself that someone will reply to this comment defending S.O.s repeated closure of interesting questions.

[insteadof]

No one's complaining about the lack of cat photos and memegenerator links on Hacker News, but here we are again decrying Stack Overflow trying to keep its signal to noise ratio high.

The historical lock is an appeasement for those who like to binge on candy all day long and not realise a site built on 90% candy is no place for quality.

You're laying bets all over the place. How about putting forth a cogent argument why these type of questions need to reside on Stack Overflow and not on reddit or Hacker News?

[m_myers]

Well put. There is actually a major difference between a joke thread here and a joke thread on Stack Overflow: on HN, it would be on the front page for a few hours or perhaps a day at most (less if the volume of comments triggered the anti-flamewar code). But on Stack Overflow, the joke thread was being bumped to the front page every day for months; any edit or new answer jumps it to the top again, even if that answer is a copy of six other answers.

[maggit]

I get incredible value out of Stack Overflow. Do you not?

Does the fact that this question is locked diminish its value or the value of Stack Overflow in any way?

Of course, Stack Overflow is not made for interesting questions. Notice that I am not defending this descision, I am merely stating it. You know this, which is why you were accurately able to predict that this question would be closed. Why is this interesting enough to warrant commenting that this is the case also today?

[Turing_Machine]

At least 4/5 of the times it comes up in a Google search (for the stuff I search for, at least), some idiot moderator has closed the question.

The message that sends to me is "Your question isn't worthy of our site. Go away."

So, yeah, it does make using the site less pleasant, and thus reduces its value to me.

[wpietri]

Ditto. I stopped contributing to Stack Overflow because of this.

It's a classic example of cart-before-the-horse product thinking. Users aren't there to follow your orders; they're people with actual needs that you're trying to serve. I get that they don't want the site to be overrun with goofy content, because that prevents you from serving other actual needs. But there are better solutions than tasking a large number of people with running around and jerkily stomping out anything that doesn't fit the owners' precise vision.

I think this is the exact mistake that Friendster made. And really, the same one Google Plus made. Neither of those products were built for the users; they were built to serve the owners' desires.

[Turing_Machine]

Yes, the same with Wikipedia. The site has largely been taken over by people who are there simply to "be moderators".

[Turing_Machine]

And I see we have plenty of 'em here, too.

[EarthLaunch]

I spend 12+ hours a day coding, across a variety of technologies that I'm only semi-familiar with. Stack Overflow saves my sanity on an hourly basis.

It seems like 9/10 of the useful questions are closed by mods, though the answer is usually there anyway. I'm not sure what to make of that, but the quality there is still high.

[libria]

Looks like I already won my bet that someone on HN was going to bitch and moan about closed questions again.

Surely you can make a good case for it on meta.stackoverflow.com?

[m_myers]

Huh. I was pretty sure this was one question everyone could understand was off-topic, but I guess I was wrong.

Interestingly, this HN submission is illustrating the original reason Jeff Atwood locked the post in 2009 - nobody can be bothered to even read the first page before posting their own joke.

[insteadof]

Of the 20+ pages already there, no one has yet posted the funny one from xkcd or Dilbert. No other site on the Internet can put these two sources together like Stack Overflow can.

[m_myers]

There's another whole thread devoted to cartoons: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/84556/whats-your-favorite...

Yes, it's locked too, and it too was deleted for a year or so before the current crop of moderators undeleted and locked it.

[Turing_Machine]

Why should I have to "make my case"? I'm the customer (or at least the user), right?

If they don't get those mods on a leash pretty soon, someone else will come along and drink their milkshake and I won't have to do anything.

[sp332]

If you want to participate on the website, you should actually participate. If you do nothing, then other people are going to run the site and you won't have any input.

[Turing_Machine]

Why would I want to "actually participate" when 4/5 of the stuff that interests me has already been nuked by a moderator?

[Piskvorrr]

What's your point, then? You are explicitly stating that you have interest mostly in passively receiving stuff that's out of the site's scope, not interested in actively participating, and not interested in changing the site orientation.

In other words, the site is not interesting to you, yet you choose to rant about it; very strange. Does the very existence of StackOverflow bother you?

(There are other sites on the Internet, y'know. It's not like SO is preventing you from visiting /r/ProgrammerJokes instead.)

[Turing_Machine]

I didn't "explicitly" say any of that. And I'm not "ranting", either.

Other than that, great point.

"Does the very existence of StackOverflow bother you?"

No, but the existence of abusive moderators does.

When I run across locked threads on SO, I'm not searching for "jokes". These are actual programming-related questions.

Please don't imply that I said things that I didn't. Thanks.

[teh_klev]

How about some examples? I was a diamond mod (Kev) for a while and the stuff we were closing either fell wildly outside the scope of the site, or was just spam/garbage.

If you're unhappy about a question being closed (the community can and does make mistakes) then bring it up on meta-SO. If the question was closed by mistake then more often than not it'll be re-opened if you explain why.

[yen223]

I wonder how long it takes before someone complains about StackOverflow closing subjective quest- never mind.

[DjangoReinhardt]

You won the first bet. Why not quit while you are ahead? ;)

Also, if you are betting with yourself, doesn't it mean that you lose when you win?