Why was "Why aren't young programmers interested in mainframes?" re-opened?

Question

Every day we get opinionated questions asked here. People seem to think that this is the place to ask them. New users point to the old open questions that have fallen through the cracks of time as reason that their question should be open too. Old Stack Overflow users continue to suggest reposting discussions on NotProgrammingRelated Programmers.SE. Consider this exchange on a Stack Overflow question:

This is not an appropriate question here because it is opinion-based. You might get help at Programmers. — Ed Cottrell (deleted)
@EdCottrell programmers has the same rules about opinion-based questions as SO. Please take a look at the help centre there before sending people our way. cheers. – MetaFight
@MetaFight my apologies. I see lots of these kinds of questions over there and didn't realize they weren't acceptable. – Ed Cottrell

We have been told in the past that when our site is full of crappy questions, our site sucks. Yes, the answers may be great - but the questions aren't. As said, fixing that is a painful process. It also means that we need to change the perception of what Programmers.SE is about. This means closing questions that are too broad, or primary opinion, or career advice from days of old.

Popularity of old questions does not mean that it is something that should be enshrined in a museum for all time. Well, that's what a historical lock is for.

This question exists because it has historical significance, but it is not considered a good, on-topic question for this site, so please do not use it as evidence that you can ask similar questions here. This question and its answers are frozen and cannot be changed.

(I will also point out that the new users who cite historical locked questions apparently don't read the text)

Programmers.SE one of the highest ratio of locked questions to questions of major sites (note also that the great contentious cleanup of SF hasn't been completely resolved). Digging into data.SE (feel free to refine the query - comparing it to search here, I do see discrepancies, however it is consistently applied to other sites):

Site | Questions  | Locked
P.SE |     37,017 |  744 (2.01%)
SO   | 10,258,635 | 2702 (0.02%)
Math |    496,668 |  638 (0.13%)
SU   |    284,455 |  764 (0.26%)
SF   |    205,689 | 4265 (2.07%)
AU   |    202,900 | 1233 (0.60%)
TeX  |     97,119 |  180 (0.18%)
U&L  |     74,315 |  220 (0.29%)

We are the most preservationist of the sites that are out there. We even tried moving some of our popular questions to the blog (it didn't work out well).

If you feel that it is necessary to reopen those closed questions of old popularity so that someone can add another answer and continue the discussion, then go right ahead. The site was down that road once before and we were told that this was something that wasn't sustainable.

In the meantime, the community that is here has defined our scope.

Programmers.SE is not Quora, or Reddit or any other site. We are a site to give practical answers to questions of software design and architecture. It says so right in our tour:

Ask about:
✔︎ software requirements
✔︎ software architecture and design
✔︎ algorithms and data structures
✔︎ development methodologies and processes
✔︎ software engineering management
✔︎ quality assurance and testing
✔︎ software licensing

Don't ask about...
𐄂 general workplace issues, career advice, job hunting, salary, or compensation
𐄂 implementation issues and coding tools
𐄂 what you should learn next
𐄂 what projects to do or books to read
𐄂 where to find libraries, tools, resources, or other product/service recommendations
𐄂 personal lifestyle or non-programming activities
𐄂 questions that are primarily opinion-based
𐄂 questions with too many possible answers or that would require an extremely long answer

As a Stack Exchange employee, reopening questions that are in direct conflict with what the site scope is about sends a confusing message to our users - both the ones asking questions and the ones closing them.

---

Yes, there are many wonderful blog posts in our old, off topic, too broad, and opinion answers. They may be worthwhile to try to preserve - as blog posts. It would be helpful to have people who are good editors to help us migrate these posts to a different medium and make posting blog posts something that is easier to do.

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Referring to the specific question of Why aren't young programmers interested in mainframes? when I started the close vote process on it wasn't its popularity - it was the tag junior-programmer that is littered with bad questions and itself being on the verge of a meta-tag. When looking through a tag, I tend to start at the oldest as those are the ones that have the most answers and the least fixable. This often means seeing some of the old popular ones before the newer less popular ones. However, the phrasing of:

Closing questions with great content years after the fact simply because they became popular seems like an inherently spiteful and self destructive way to make a point. You can certainly control your own scope, but when groups of users go out explicitly to hunt down the most-popular questions specifically because they are popular doesn't make the site any better.

is incorrect about my motives and needlessly antagonistic. It also suggests that you have a different vision of what types of questions should be asked on Programmers.SE. If this is the case, then please state it clearly. We've gone through this in the past and there is even a blog post that I am sure you are familiar with. In it, it states:

Thus, questions that are not answerable -- discussions, debates, opinions -- should be closed as subjective.

The question asked in the post Why aren't young programmers interested in mainframes? falls exactly into that category:

Why is this? What makes mainframes unattractive to young programmers?

It is not answerable. It is subjective and requires extended discussion. It would be something to ask on a discussion board. The explicit question presented in the post is a poll of personal experiences. It is entirely composed of opinions and personal anecdotes. It is not within the scope of the site today. With its 26 answers, it speaks exactly to the first part of the blog post:

Most forums and chat rooms have a scale problem. As in, they don't. The more people that join the discussion, the more noise each of those connections bring. So the forums get progressively noisier and noisier, and suddenly one day … you stop learning.

Because we believe so deeply in learning, we are willing to go to great lengths to suppress the discussion, debate, and opinions that -- while plenty entertaining -- cause most forums to inevitably break down.

^{Note: as of this writing, your blog entry has a broken link, the correct link is provided above}

These old, popular, and off topic / too broad / opinion polls are ones that new users often find when they first hit the site and seek to contribute. This is unfortunate because they are often not adding anything that isn't there in the previous twenty some-odd questions, lack good writing skills, and are unfamiliar with the scope of the site. All of this leads to a rather negative experience for new users (doubly so if they ask another question like it).

Allowing these old questions to remain open is in direct conflict with providing new users to the site a good experience - answering a good question or asking a good question.

Answer 1

Thus, questions that are not answerable -- discussions, debates, opinions -- should be closed as subjective.

By and large this is true, but do you ever stop long enough to consider if there is actually some pretty good content behind a long-standing question — content that didn't become a never-ending list of answers or break down into a needless, irresolute debate devoid of merit or reasonable explanation?

Not every question is one fact, one answer. The rare question I re-open is not full of never-ending nonsense continuing to attract low-quality answers for years to come. These are largely resolved threads with good content right there at the top.

When that rare exception occurs, and these mega-popular posts attract some great answers with a lot of voting which clearly drives the best answers to the top, it should be seen as something that adds to the site, and guarded jealously. It certainly brings in a lot of views, which is why I received these alarms in the first place — highly-upvoted, highly-popular content being closed suddenly, sometimes years after the fact. Popularity doesn't always equate to high-quality, but if it is good content, your priorities should be to see that it is curated properly… not closed and discarded.

The idea that there are hordes of people just waiting flood the site for want of a single precedent was one of those things we worried about before we had anything to back it up. But if you haven't noticed, Stack Exchange has moved on from a lot of those old adages foretelling of widespread doom in ways that simply never materialized in actual use. The "too localized" problem; the dreaded "shopping question"; not constructive; slap community wiki on posts with undeserved rep; don't ask us to recommend solutions… and every question must have exactly one absolutely factual answer.

If you want to hold on to those old ideals, at least use the historical lock — not with a condescending flag "to make Robert Cartaino feel better about the fate of this question with 50K views" — but because you understand what it is not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

A lot of sites manage to strike this balance, enforcing a vast multitude of objective, answerable questions while still curating those rare threads where broader participation has created something widely useful to the site. Look at Ask Different; look at Mathematics; these sites are about as well-run as they come. Yet more and more of them manage to curate those rare gems which motivate a community to put in the effort to keep this stuff relevant. And yet they manage to hold that line to keep it from getting out of control.

Answer 2

Something came up in the comments on Robert's answer that I'd like to address...

But why should it remain open? Curation of existing content for questions that are off topic, primarily opinion, or too broad is most easily done when the question is closed. -- MichaelT

Closure doesn't mean deletion, and I think many community participants confuse the two. All closure does it prevent new answers from being posted, and signal to the community that we really don't want these kinds of questions here. -- Robert Harvey

Similar sentiments were expressed in other comments and in chat. They're not entirely wrong, but I think they largely ignore the practical realities of how things work - both in terms of the software that drives these sites, and in terms of how this site operates using that software.

Closing as limbo

This - the notion that closing is a state wherein questions can remain until salvaged - has merit; indeed, the system itself reflects this usage by marking questions as "on hold" for the first few days after they're closed, a signal that they can and should be edited and reopened if they can be.

That said, most are not. Have a look at the closing statistics for the past 90 days here - in particular, the stats for questions closed as "Too Broad":

Close reason Closed % of total Edited % of closed Reopened % of closed Edited and Reopened % of edited
------------ ------ ---------- ------ ----------- -------- ----------- ------------------- -----------
too broad    603    19.03 %    56     9.29 %      6       1.00 %       3                   5.36 %

Only 1% of questions closed thusly are reopened; less than 10% are even edited, and of those barely 5% are reopened. In real numbers, we're talking about 3 questions where this ideal is actually realized; if you were wagering on the outcome of a question, this would not be where you'd want to put your money.

Closing as a permanent state which prevents only the addition of answers

Again, this isn't entirely wrong... The system does indeed block the addition of new answers to closed questions, and some closed questions do remain visible long after being closed... But ignores the other big change in status that closing implies, namely that the question is now eligible for deletion: privileged users may vote to delete it, and in some cases the system itself will remove such questions.

Here are some statistics on closed question outcomes for the past 90 days:

closed deleted reopened 
------ ------- -------- 
3169   2039    24       

Over 99% of closed questions stay closed. Over 64% are deleted relatively quickly. Now here are the same stats for questions closed in a 90-day period ending 1 year ago:

closed deleted reopened 
------ ------- -------- 
2837   2125    41      

The reopened % jumps to... less than 2%, while the deletion % rockets to over 74%.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, mind you: if most questions that are closed aren't worth saving, then you'd expect the reopen % to be low and hope the deletion % is high. But... You'd also be naive to believe that closing is not an immediate precursor to deletion; clearly it is just that for the majority of questions.

Why does this matter?

Remember the premise of this question was that certain questions shouldn't be reopened. Whether or not that's actually the case, it's bad news if the folks who are closing questions do so misinformed of what that actually means. If you're voting to close a question, you should be comfortable with that question being deleted - statistically, that is what will happen. If you'd be disappointed in that outcome, then you should probably choose a different plan of action.

Answer 3

I have recommended that this question be locked as "primarily opinion-based". In retrospect, it should be locked as duplicate. Do I need to provide an example?

I see no reason why there should be a double standard on this site for moderators and users with high reputation (ie. for questions that fit suit personal opinions). If someone were to ask "Why are all my posts being closed" it would be marked immediately as duplicate.

Look at this post Programmers tag line is misleading. Can we rephrase it? and see that it is down-voted 6 times whereas this post is up-voted eight times and closed as not-constructive. That is democracy for you. Where do you assert to yourselves such certainty of your own opinions? I think there is much merit to his post and less to yours. It should be one way or the other.

The post is also too long to read in its entirety and not clearly related to its title line. The post “Why aren't young programmers interested in mainframes?” is not the main subject of this question, just an ad for the author's opninion.

I don't feel that I can offer an opinion here, as it might be down-voted, thus affecting my reputation. But see what it is like to have your own post booted and condemned.

I agree with @Robert Cartaino, but look at the comments under his question? ex. "But why!!!???", with boldface and attitude - it is all opinion based.

Edit: I apologize for any real or apparent hatred against SO. I am not serious that this post should be closed, far from it. I'm just not clear why this post is open and all the others like it are closed. The opinions that you do not like should ALSO have their place on the SO meta.